The Ozark Arts Council and the Buffalo River Concert Association are pleased to present aperformance by blues artist Ray Bonneville at the Historic Lyric Theater on Friday, February 12, 2010 at 7:30pm. Tickets are $8 for OAC Members and $10 for non-members.

Bonneville is a distinctive artist, a man who cooks up a deep groove, blending a unique percussive electric guitar, a weathered voice, and soulful rack harmonica into image-provoking songs. He's been playing music throughout the world for the past 30 years. He calls himself "a roaming blues poet", inspired by the road and the many other places he's called home - New Orleans, Colorado, Arkansas, Alaska, Boston, Seattle, Paris (France), Montreal, and Austin (Texas).

"When I first heard good blues and country music, I was very young, but I felt a deep stirring excitement within, which told me right then what to do with my life," says Bonneville, remembering his introduction to roots music in the Boston area during the early 1960s. Over the next decade, Bonneville honed his sound up in the Northeast, Colorado, and Alaska, and then moved around between Seattle, New Orleans, and Paris, France in the 1980s. He recorded his first album, On The Main, in 1993, and now has six albums out.

Bonneville won a prestigious Juno Award, the Canadian equivalent of a Grammy, in 1999, for his third album, Gust of Wind. His next release, Rough Luck, and his fifth album, Roll It Down, were also nominated for the coveted award. In 2009, his song I am the Big Easy won the Song of the Year Award from the North American Folk Alliance, and was also number one on the folk and Americana radio airplay chart in 2009.