Colter Wall live at Crocks at NV in Thunder Bay, 11 July 2019

A profile in The Walleye, the Thunder Bay arts magazine, introduced Colter Wall to local readers before the show. It described a young man who grew up in Swift Current, Saskatchewan, among ranchers and prairie, and who was already being compared to Marty Robbins and Waylon Jennings. Thursday 11 July 2019 was the night to check that comparison against a live voice.

Crocks at NV was at 228 Red River Road. Doors were at 7:30 p.m., the event was 19+ with photo ID required, and tickets were $25 in advance plus a service fee. Loffredo & Associates presented the night with H.I.T Management, and no support act was named.

Where he had come from

By the summer of 2019, Wall was 24 and had three releases behind him: the EP Imaginary Appalachia in 2015, a self-titled album in 2017 and Songs of the Plains in 2018. Rolling Stone had named him among ten new country artists to know in 2016, and The Walleye added that he had opened for Lucinda Williams in Nashville that year.

His sound came from older records. Johnny Cash and Bob Dylan sit at the base of it, with Woody Guthrie and Townes Van Zandt further down, and the songs tend toward the short, spare and direct. A club floor without a seated hall’s hush is a hard place for writing like that, and a good test of it.

The road to Thursday

In March 2019 Wall played Milan, Munich, Berlin, Hamburg, Copenhagen and Oslo. April and May took him through the American South and Midwest, from Fredericksburg in Texas to Athens in Georgia and on to Cleveland, Buffalo, Asbury Park, St. Louis and Kansas City, with Colorado at the end of May.

Thunder Bay came after that run, and a schedule that also had him at Seattle and Boise in August, sharing dates with The Wood Brothers. Songs of the Plains, the record behind all of it, had been named one of 2018’s most essential albums by the site Saving Country Music.

Two nights after Sudbury

Wall’s Thunder Bay date followed the Sudbury show at The Coulson by two nights, on the same terms. The price, the door time and the presenters were identical. The Canadian run also took in London and Winnipeg, and a festival slot in Ottawa on 5 July was cancelled because of travel trouble, six days before this Thursday.

Nothing in the announcement for Thunder Bay mentions any of that. It is background to the show and not part of it.

At the door

Nineteen is the legal drinking age in Ontario, which is why a bar-format room draws the line there and asks for photo ID.

Tickets were sold by the promoter through TicketScene, and the shop accepted Visa, Visa Debit and MasterCard. Doors at 7:30 p.m. on a July Thursday made it an early evening start rather than a late-night one, a reading of the schedule and not a stated intent. The price was listed as advance, plus a service fee, with no other tier.

The room, that week

The next night, Friday 12 July, the same stage held Half Moon Run, with a ticket at C$32. Back to back, the two shows gave the room a week of very different sound: a country baritone on the Thursday, then a Montreal band on the Friday.

Twelve days before Wall, on 29 June, Monster Truck had played the room, and The Motorleague followed on 30 July. Between those two rock bookings, the Wall night was the country date.

A ticket at $25

Across the fourteen priced shows of 2019 in the record, tickets ran from C$10 to C$45. The $25 for Wall was just under the midpoint and a little over half of the most expensive show. It matched the price in Sudbury, so Thunder Bay paid no premium or discount for the extra distance.

Wall released Western Swing & Waltzes and Other Punchy Songs in August 2020, and in March 2026 he announced an indefinite hiatus from live performance. That makes a small-room Thursday in 2019 harder to come by now.