Artist / Band

James Keelaghan

Origin Calgary, Alberta

Websites

keelaghan.com

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Biography

A few years ago i went to my high school reunion. I wasn’t feeling a lot of terror about it. I am successful musician. I have Juno awards and nominations, I felt, as an alumni, I had done my alma mater proud.

I bumped into someone I hadn’t seen since graduation. I knew that she was respected in her field, well travelled, successful. I asked what she had been doing since high school and she ran down the list of degrees and foreign postings and the like. She asked what I had been up to. I gave the condensed version. I was a writer and performer, I sang, played guitar. She nodded slowly up and down… “So, you are still doing what you were doing, when you were a teenager then?” Well, I guess, ya…sorta. I’m not playing as many stairwells now as I did back then, but it’s still pretty fun.

She made it sound like I was in a rut.
So just in case you think that all I do is play and sing…

Since 2011, I’ve been the Artistic director of the Summerfolk Music and Crafts Festival in Owen Sound, Ontario. The job has given me a new passion for programming . I have to book the artists and program 6 daytime and two nighttime stages. The walls of my office end up looking like this:

I was born in Calgary but have lived in Toronto, Winnipeg and now, a charming little town called Perth in Eastern Ontario. I’m trying to say at home more these days, as I have a couple of boys at home, aged 6 and 10. I want to spend as much time with them as I can before I become the enemy.

If you know my music, you know that I love history. I studied at the University of Calgary, though I never actually completed my degree. I concentrated on the history of science, under the tutelage of the dear, departed Dr. Margaret Osler and was influenced and inspired by Dr Shel Silverman - one of the great storytellers of our time.

While I read a lot of history on a lot of different topics, my areas of specialty remain science and World War One, especially the battle of the frontiers, 1st Marne and Verdun.

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