A warm blanket on a cool night, an old pair of jeans – falling apart but better fitting than any pair you’ve ever bought. This is the feeling of comfort that embraces you taking in Calgary blues veteran Tim Williams. A virtuoso guitar player, a locked in the pocket groove maker, Calgary’s professor of the blues.

Born and raised in Southern California, cutting his teeth on first-generation blues artists as they enjoyed a late-era revival in the ’60s, Williams recorded his first album in 1968. A true troubadour, he played with Hawaiian groups, Mariachi bands and folk acts and worked as a session musician on a range of stringed instruments. He moved north in 1970, landing in Vancouver. He took a break from music for a time to work as a horse wrangler, but soon returned to writing, recording, producing and touring in endless cycles, devoted to his passion. He settled in Southern Alberta in the early ’80s and hasn’t looked back. Over the years the many musical influences in his life have seeped into his music, and his latest, Hearts & High Walls, veers into Tex Mex territory. But when Williams pulls out that steel-bodied guitar, slips the slide onto his pinky finger and starts to work the strings, you know you’ve gone all the way home.

–Sean Myers