Concerts

Hop aboard Victor Wainwright and the Train in Saugus

The oft-honored blues singer and pianist will pull into Kowloon with his five-piece band on July 17.

Victor Wainwright (center) and The Train

By Blake Maddux

2 minutes to read

People can be forgiven for presuming that musician Victor Wainwright comes from the family that includes Loudon III, Sloan, Rufus, Martha, and Lucy.

But Victor did not come up among a family of acoustic guitar-based singer-songwriters from New York City. Rather, his father and grandfather were blues artists who sang and played piano, respectively, in Victor’s birthplace of Savannah, Georgia. The youngest of these three Wainwrights learned his instrument from the oldest of them.

People might also suspect that a pianist who works in blues and its many cognate genres (soul, honky-tonk, boogie, roots, etc.) would have arrived in Memphis because of that city’s rich musical history and endless opportunity.

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Wrong again!

“I came to Memphis as an air traffic controller,” Wainwright said in a 2020 chat with The Sound Café. “My family being a family of musicians, they actually knew how hard it was to make a living playing music. So they wanted me to have something else to fall back on….”

It wasn’t long, however, before Wainwright found himself answering the call of the musical siren.

Over the past 17 years, the 41-year-old has recorded as a solo artist (2005’s “Piana from Savannah”), a band member (on Southern Hospitality’s 2013 record, “Easy Livin’”), and as the leader of The WildRoots and — most recently — The Train.

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And what does he have to show for his efforts? Simply Blues Music Awards for Band of the Year (with The WildRoots), B.B. King Entertainer of the Year, and multiple — sometimes consecutive — Pinetop Perkins Piano Player of the Year honors.

And not that the GRAMMYs should be viewed as of definitively greater significance than any other honor, but the eponymous 2018 debut by Victor Wainwright and The Train received a Best Contemporary Blues Album nomination.

Wainwright and The Train were unable to perform as scheduled — and rescheduled — at Beverly’s 9 Wallis in support of 2020’s “Memphis Loud.” That venue has since closed, but its former owners, Peter and Vickie Van Ness of gimmeLIVE, recently announced a mess of outside shows at Kowloon on Route 1 in Saugus.

Among them is (you guessed it) Mr. Wainwright and his five-piece band on the afternoon of Sunday, July 17. (The sextet will also make a stop at Bull Run on July 29.)

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