North Bay’s Lynn Blunt landed one of the most coveted gigs in Canadian folk music: a spot in Via Rail’s Artist on Board program, which places musicians on trains travelling east and west to both coasts. She departs Toronto May 3rd, performing her way to Vancouver over four and a half days.
“Thousands of people apply for this,” she says. “You have to really be ready for it. There is no “reliable” WI-FI on board. So if you think that you have enough songs that you know off by heart, think again. You play three 45-minute sets a day and you don’t know if you’ll have the same people for the 4 and 1/2 days that it takes to go across Canada. So you want to make sure you’ve got lots of music.”
The program’s contracts vary by artist, but Blunt counts herself among the lucky ones. “Not only do they pay for my berth, my meals, and my travel across Canada — they also cover my husband.” She laughs. “He’s not a musician and he didn’t want to do any painting on board. So there’s no artwork for him.”
After Vancouver, she and her husband are heading to Victoria to visit family before flying home. She was offered a return-trip gig on the train, she said, but it wasn’t until June and this was too long to stay with family. They will be celebrating 40 years married September 13, 2026, and this is the perfect trip to help them celebrate it.
The Via Rail gig comes at a fitting moment — Blunt has just released her third album, *Come into the Kitchen*, a project rooted in warm childhood memories of Northern Ontario kitchen parties.
“Growing up, we always had kitchen parties,” she says. “My dad was from the Netherlands. My mother was French Canadian. And I think it was just their way of being social with family and friends. Got to remember, at one time there wasn’t any TV, and radio was usually your entertainment unless you had family members or friends that played instruments. In rural Northern Ontario, you basically got one channel on the television when it did come out. Kitchen Parties were a very inexpensive way for people to gather, maybe bring food together, have some musical entertainment.”
Two songs stand out for Blunt as particular favourites on the record. The first is “Peach Pear Apple Chardonnay,” born out of a late-night bonfire and a batch of homemade wine. “I used to make peach pear apple chardonnay. It was about 14%. Everybody loved it. So it just came to mind. I wrote the song and it’s kind of catchy — reminds you of the 30s and 40s if you remember the Andrew Sisters.”
The second is more personal. “Dancing with Daddy” is a waltz written in the shadow of grief. “When I was getting married, my dad had died the year previous. So I never got that daddy-daughter dance,” Blunt says quietly. “He just knew — he knew with Steven that he was the one. And he had even told me that, and we didn’t realize how sick he was. So we ended up getting married and he wasn’t there.” She pauses. “The story follows a young girl learning to dance, standing on her father’s feet, to dancing with young men at weddings and house parties and finally to an adult, and her dad watching her transition and find, “the one”. I just think it’s a beautiful song on the album.”
The album also features “Out at Sea,” a song in the spirit of Great Big Sea that Blunt performed for Alan Doyle himself, during a 2023 songwriting workshop in St. John’s, Newfoundland — a story she tells with characteristic boldness. When the workshop leader, Murray Foster, told participants not to bring guitars and not to play for Doyle, Blunt brought her tablet instead.
“When he came down the stairs, I said, ‘Alan Doyle, my name is Lynn Blunt. I am from North Bay, Ontario, and I have three songs in Great Big Sea style.’ And he says, ‘Well, now I’ve got to hear them.'” She ended up playing the song on Doyle’s own guitar, with his pick. “Allan looked over at Murray Foster and said, ‘Murray, that’s a Great Big Sea song.'” She offered Doyle her business card. He never bought it. “So it’s on my album.”
The Business of Music in North Bay
Currently, *Come Into the Kitchen* is available as a CD — sold at Michelle’s Frame Maker Gallery in downtown North Bay, alongside Blunt’s other two albums, her artwork, and her hand-painted greeting cards. A formal digital rollout is in the works, with four singles and four music videos planned through a partnership with Creative Industries Ontario North, beginning as early as June with the hope of launching this fall.
Behind the creative work lies an enormous amount of unglamorous effort. Last year, Blunt delivered 86 performances while working full-time and recording an album. “It meant days started at 5:00 a.m. and sometimes midnight your days ended.” She has written five grant applications without receiving one. She shrugs it off. “Can’t take it personally. Lots of people apply. You can’t give up if this is truly your passion.”
But Blunt is candid about the structural challenges facing musicians in North Bay — and she doesn’t mince words about what needs to change.
“North Bay has over 250 musicians and there are only five spots that regularly hire,” she says. “So it means that you’re not necessarily going to be able to stay in town to play if you are a gigging musician who is doing this as a living and not just as a hobby.”
The pay disparity between North Bay and surrounding markets has become impossible to ignore. Playing recently in Sudbury and at a hospital fundraiser in Blind River, Blunt found herself welcomed — and better compensated. In Sudbury, she’s been embraced by the Sudbury Performance Group, run by Mark Mannisto, which organizes 50/50 draws and bingos at venues to supplement musicians’ fees, along with money from grants he applies for and is awarded from time to time.
“I’m never shy to say what I get paid,” Blunt says, “especially when I’m going to Sudbury or a new place. Because I think if we all stay on the same page, then you can’t undercut or say, ‘Well, I’ll give you drinks and a meal to play.’ That’s what jams and open mics are for. But if you’re trying to do this as a living and you’re paying studio musicians for albums, I think you really have to come up with a standard.”
She’s already reached out to Holly Cunningham at Creative Industries North Bay with a proposal: model something after the Sudbury Performance Group.
“If all you can afford to pay somebody to come out and play is $150, then we’re willing to work with you — sell the 50/50s,” she says. “People can go out and work the bingos just like they do for the sports teams. And then that money could go even for Dreamcoat Fantasy Theatre — you know, that could help with that as well. There’s just other ways that I think, if we all group ourselves together and maybe have a big conversation about how we can improve the arts in North Bay, we can come up with some solutions. And some of us are really willing to put ourselves out there and help to make this happen. I know I am.”
She acknowledges the economics aren’t simple. North Bay is smaller than Sudbury, the wages lower, the audiences thinner. “I totally understand that, and I don’t want that to be a diss against the local venues,” she says. “It’s just reality. But that’s why — if we could do a model similar to the Sudbury Performance Group — we can help the venues and support them.”
## Chickadee and the Rule
Blunt’s guitar — Chickadee — is as much a part of her story as the songs themselves. Built by luthier Bridget Charland out of New Liskeard, it’s a handcrafted instrument with inlay work and a chickadee carved near the headstock. Blunt has severe arthritis and carpal tunnel syndrome, and needed something smaller and easier to play. The guitar came into her life through her producer, Peter Cliche, on the last day of recording *Come Into the Kitchen*.
“I said, ‘Peter, you know the rule: if the guitar is truly supposed to be mine, there will be a song in it,'” Blunt recalls. She brought it home, played it that night, and a song came. “I called up Peter and said, ‘Okay, Peter, I’ll buy this guitar.’ It’s the best feeling guitar that I have ever played.”
This summer, Blunt will perform at the Bay Block Party in August, playing the Moose in downtown North Bay on the Friday night. She hints at other announcements still to come. In the meantime, she can be found at northbay.spaces.ca, on Facebook under *Lynn Blunt Singer*, and at lynnbluntsinger.wix.com. Two albums are available on streaming platforms right now and the third album will be there by end of the year.
Lynn Blunt is doing exactly what she always set out to do — writing songs, cutting albums, and carrying her music to anyone who will listen, even if that means performing three 45-minute sets a day aboard a transcontinental train.
“I’ve wanted to do this since I was four years old,” Blunt says. “I’ve done things from then till now to try and get better at singing and writing. And guitar came in in 2016, and that’s what kind of helped everything move along really quickly.”
She closed out the interview the way she’s always made her case — by singing. A few bars of what sounded like a kitchen-party invitation, her voice carrying easy and clear, the handmade guitar warm beneath her fingers.
Editorial Note: This story was created by having claude.ai turn a transcript of the interview into quotes and then create a draft. I chopped off the first several sentences to create a new lede and made adjustments, with Lynn Blunt proofing it and making minor corrections and adding clarity where needed.
