Living Music With Holger

Living Music With Holger
Featuring Holger Petersen
Music Lover
February 19, 2014
Edmonton, Alberta, Canada

Holger has been fortunate to have spent most of his life surrounded by music, musicians and fellow music lovers. Discovering and delivering music to fans, radio listeners and readers is an ongoing and endlessly inspiring pursuit. He’s a music lover and record producer who continues to meet and work with new and established artists and many of his heros.

On Saturdays, Holger hosts Saturday Night Blues on CBC Radio.

He also hosts Natch’l Blues, Canada’s longest-running blues program, on CKUA on Saturdays.

For his record label, Stony Plain Records, see www.stonyplainrecords.com.

For more about Holger see his Wikipedia page at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holger_Petersen.

Holger can relate to Miguelito’s Little Green Car. Thanks to his dad, a retired master mechanic, his family has been car buffs. On sunny summer days he loves cruising in his two-seater Morgan. He’s only had the top up once in over 20 years!

His photo with Miguelito’s Little Green Car reminds him of how fortunate he is to spend a good part of his day surrounded by music. It’s there in his office that he keeps in touch with Stony Plain artists and coordinates their releases. It’s also where he does research, discovers new music and puts together his radio shows.

The first blues artist he spent time with was the Reverend Gary Davis. Holger says:

a few of us pitched in and brought him to Edmonton for several days in 1970. He played a concert and we recorded a show at CKUA. I took him out to a friend’s for dinner one night. I forgot to bring his false teeth so had to make a trip back to collect them. I still remember how odd it was being on a mission to hunt down this legend’s teeth.

Favorite quotes:

If you have more gratitude then expectations in your day, you’ll have a great day.

Ray Willie Hubbard (Texas singer/songwriter).

Record collecting is no mere hobby, no innocuous leisurely diversion; it is a feverish passion bordering upon dementia… driving those under its influence to irrational, compulsive, fanatical extremes…

Frank Doris, The Absolute Sound.

He is known as Canada’s “Ambassador of the Blues”.

He became a Member of the Order of Canada in 2003.

In 2009 he was voted Best Public Broadcaster by the Blues Foundation in Memphis, the first time the award was presented to someone outside the United States.

The yellow leather satchel sitting on the chair is hand-crafted and has been with him since the early 1970s. It was gift to help him cart around 12″ master audio tapes (a thing of the past) and vinyl albums when doing studio recordings and radio productions. It’s been refurbished a couple of times. Over 40 years later he still uses it every week to bring albums and CDs to play on his radio shows at CKUA and CBC.

He takes his Tim Horton’s with double milk.

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