A conversation in music, poetry, and living tradition.
Blak N Blues
Blak & Blues is a collaborative performance project between Glenn Loughrey and musician Fiona Boyes.
Bringing together Wiradjuri storytelling, poetry, and Blues music, the work creates a conversation between Aboriginal cultural expression and African-American traditions.
Through spoken word and music, the project explores histories of dispossession, resilience, and cultural connection.
Our story
Blak N Blues is a meeting place.
Created by Wiradjuri elder, artist and poet Uncle Glenn Loughrey and internationally recognised blues guitarist Fiona Boyes, it brings together two enduring oral traditions — First Nations storytelling and the deep Blues.
We stand in different lineages shaped by dispossession, resistance, faith, survival and song. One grounded in the living intelligence of Country. One carried through the Mississippi Delta, Chicago back rooms, and global stages. Both born from communities pushed to the margins. Both sustained by elders. Both refusing silence.
Blak N Blues is not a conventional concert.
It is not a lecture.
It is not protest theatre.
It is a yarning circle with guitars.
Through poetry, finger-picked blues, conversation and silence, we speak of placelessness and belonging, circular time and the Everywhen, broken promises and enduring continuity. We name histories that are often softened or avoided. We sit inside the tension between faith and failure, power and accountability, history and now.
The Blues understands injustice carried in the body.
Blak thought understands sovereignty carried in Country.
In this meeting, music becomes dialogue. Poetry becomes witness. Tradition becomes living, not archived.
We do not offer easy resolution.
We offer presence.
We offer truth told without spectacle.
Blak N Blues invites audiences to listen beyond comfort — to recognise that story is political because it is lived, and that relationship requires responsibility.
This is not performance for applause.
It is encounter.
It is shared ground, however uneasy.
A Joint Statement
We created Blak N Blues to sit in the space between traditions — not to collapse them into one another, but to let them speak.
We believe music and story can hold difficult truths without shouting, and that dialogue is stronger than division.
We honour the elders who shaped our respective traditions and the communities who continue to carry them.
Blak N Blues is our commitment to keeping that conversation alive — honest, grounded, and accountable to the histories we inherit and the futures we help shape.
— Uncle Glenn Loughrey & Fiona Boyes
When Delta Blues meets the Everywhen.
Songs of survival. Stories of sovereignty.
Two One Line Hooks