Australian blues artist Frank Sultana and RG Schaller perform country, folk and blues at The Carleton.
Frank Sultana and RG Schaller play The Carleton on Thursday, September 3, for a night of country, folk and blues. It's an odd pairing on paper — a Sydney bluesman from New South Wales and a singer-songwriter from Cape Breton — but that's exactly the point: they're bringing two very different traditions to the same stage.
Sultana is the one with the long CV. He's a veteran of the Australian scene, playing 100 to 150 shows a year and putting 16 studio recordings behind him, two of which he cut at Sun Studio in Memphis. In January 2023, he won the solo/duo section of the International Blues Challenge in Memphis, making him only the third artist from outside North America to do so in the competition's 43-year history. He's also picked up seven Sydney Blues Society awards, including Best Songwriter and Artist of the Year. His style looks back to 1950s American R&B and the pre-war Mississippi blues of Skip James, Son House and Blind Willie Johnson.
RG Schaller comes from a different place entirely. He's a singer and songwriter from a recovering ex-steel town in Eastern Canada who writes from a blue-collar point of view, armed with an acoustic guitar and true to the core of country and folk music. Where Sultana's roots are in the Delta and the R&B of the fifties, Schaller's are in the working-class songwriting of the East Coast.
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Together they'll cover country, folk and blues, so the set should pull from both their backgrounds. The show runs from 7:30 to 9:30 PM at The Carleton, and tickets are C$22.80, which is C$20 plus HST.
