Summer Series: Jim Payne and Bev Kane

Jim Paye & Bev Kane

Newfoundland Tales with an Irish Twist

at the Benevolent Irish Society, 30 Harvey Rd.
The B.I.S. is wheelchair accessible

$15 cash at the door

Join Jim & Bev as they jig their way through fabulous tales from across the island. Bev’s stories hale from the Southern Shore and we all know Jim’s fine flavour of storytelling spans Newfoundland with a delightful Irish lilt. This promises to be an energetic and fun-filled evening of tales with two fine storytellers. Read more about them below!

ABOUT OUR TELLERS

From Notre Dame Bay, Newfoundland, JIM PAYNE is a leading performer, collector and producer of traditional Newfoundland music. One of the province’s most prolific songwriters, he is also a singer, storyteller, writer, actor, step dancer and traditional dance instructor. He has performed extensively on radio and television in Canada and abroad, and  toured throughout North America, the US, Europe, Japan and Australia.

An ECMA award winner, Jim owns and operates the largest traditional music record company in eastern Canada. SingSong Inc. has released 31 titles featuring traditional and contemporary music that reflects the Newfoundland experience, including recordings by legendary traditional musicians as well as contemporary folk and traditional artists. He is a veteran of Rising Tide Theatre’s annual REVUEs, one third of the musical comedy act, Wicked Altogether with Pete Soucy (Snook) and Fergus O’Byrne, and a member of the traditional music group, A Crowd of Bold Sharemen.

Jim is also an adventurer who has circumnavigated the island of Newfoundland more than 20 times, sailed through the Northwest Passage and back, and travelled widely throughout the Canadian and Scandinavian Arctic, including Greenland, Iceland and Svalbard. He has also crossed the Drake Passage between Tierra del Fuego and Antarctica several times to travel to the Antarctic Peninsula, South Georgia and the Falkland Islands.

In 2016, Jim was inducted into the Newfoundland and Labrador Arts Council’s Hall of Honour, and in 2017 was presented with the Stompin’ Tom Connors Award by the East Coast Music Association for a long history of contributions to the music industry. He was also a guest presenter at a symposium on the cultural connections between Newfoundland and England in Devon, England while touring the UK.

BEV KANE 

Beverley Kane was born in St. John’s but has lived longer down the “Irish Loop” than she has in the Big City. She met and married a fisherman from Renews who is steeped in the tradition of the place, and a little bit of it just may have rubbed off on her. When she moved to the area, she embraced her new found home and everything about it. House parties were a big part of getting to know her neighbors, and you might be sure that a story or two came out of these gatherings. A great lover of local songs and recitations, she became the unofficial collector and keeper of the lore. She has spent the past 30 odd years sharing these songs and stories in homes and on the local stages around the Shore (and sometimes further afield). Bev got her storytelling experience as an actor with the Southern Shore Folk Arts Council in Ferryland for a couple of seasons and “playing” in the Colony of Avalon’s 17th-century kitchen for quite a few years.   She is presently a Heritage Interpreter at the Provincial Historic Sites in St. John’s where she spends her time between sharing the stories of life in the 1800s at Commissariat House and recounting the history of Port wine in Newfoundland at the Newman Wine Vaults.