Lance Canales & the Flood, which will headline The Cellar Door in Visalia on Saturday, June 14, are a roots-blues influenced Americana trio from the Central Valley, where Canales lived the life that so many songs have been written about since the birth of roots music – hard labor, one-room shacks and taunting ghosts whispering of a better life. The show is billed as a Woodie Guthrie Fest Tour Travel Fundraiser Show.
Canales’ guttural vocals combine a hard-edged storytelling approach beneath a stripped down, foot-stomping, acoustic instrumentation. The Flood are made up of stand up bassist David Quinday (whose mournful bowing can be found on tracks such as “Hummingbird Blues” on the band’s most recent album, Elixir) and multi-percussionist Zak Parrish.
Canales played solo for years until he began craving a fuller sound and energy to his music and enlisted “The Flood.” They’ve been together for five years.
Canales is passionate about the band’s release of the single “Plane Crash at Los Gatos: Deportee,” written by Woody Guthrie in 1948, and labeled by Saint Louis Magazine as a “gut-wrenchingly beautiful rendition.” The song has been covered by many musicians, but what makes this version so important is that it reveals the names of the Mexican nationals who were simply dubbed “deportees” in the original news article.
After first performing the song with the names at the 2012 Steinbeck Festival, Canales decided he wanted to do more for the “deportees” whom he discovered were buried in a mass, unmarked grave in Fresno, where the band now resides. In collaboration with Nora Guthrie and the Guthrie Foundation, the band has been performing to raise money for an historic memorial headstone for the “deportees.”
Tickets for the 8pm 21+ show are $7. For tickets or for more information, visit snvfoundation.org.