Sedona’s free Red Dirt concert series will return to the Posse Grounds Pavilion every Friday from 5 p.m. to 7 p.m. in September.
May’s concert series averaged around 500 attendees for each event and the city of Sedona’s rental technician Jason Vargo is anticipating similar attendance for the fall lineup.
“It was definitely more well-attended this most recent spring than we’ve ever had before,” Vargo said. “There were promotional efforts made with this most recent series that were not made in the past and we look forward to having continued success at around that level. The facility itself has limitations as far as how many bodies can be there comfortably and responsibly.”
A single performer will headline each concert, with the exception of the Friday, Sept. 22 performance by Big Daddy D & the Dynamites, which will be opened by Jeanie Carroll.
“It’s one of the most well-loved community events that happen in Sedona and it’s one of the few opportunities for live music to be offered for free in such a beautiful location,” Vargo said.
The September concert lineup will feature:
Him & Me: Friday, Sept. 1
Sugar Moon: Friday, Sept. 8
Local Honey: Friday, Sept. 15
Big Daddy D & the Dynamites with opener Jeanie Carroll: Friday, Sept. 22
The Electric Harp Guitar Group: Friday, Sept. 29
Him & Me consists of son and father in-law duo Tobie Lavoie and Joel Casey, with special appearances by William Murphy on percussion and vocals and J.R. Robusto on piano, guitar, mandolin and vocals.
“Concertgoers can expect to have a lot of fun, because we play a lot of fun songs to make people dance and have a really good time singing along,” Lavoie said. “There will be some French songs that I bring from my heritage of French Canadian. It’s an acoustic band, so we play guitar, piano, accordion and a little bit of some percussion like conga. People say we have really good harmony, so [I] do harmony a lot with my father-in-law.”
A typical setlist for Him & Me might include covers of tunes by Simon & Garfunkel, the Beatles and Creedence Clearwater Revival, intermingled with French songs and folk music. Lavoie said that much of the fun of a concert is not knowing what song comes next.
Lavoie first met Casey’s daughter in Hawaii in 2004 and the couple married a few years later.
“I started … as a full-time musician in 2009 in Quebec, Canada,” Lavoie said. “ My wife and I moved there for 10 years. Then I played in retirement homes. I did a lot of personal, original songs [when] I was a teenager and growing up. I never really did any covers at that time. Then I lost my work in 2008 when the economy crashed at that time. So I started playing music in retirement homes. I learned all these 1920s, 1930s French songs.”
The couple eventually sold their home and purchased a recreational vehicle before heading to the West Coast of British Columbia, where Lavoie found work playing those early 20th-century French songs at farmers’ markets and gradually began to add English songs to his repertoire.
“We moved down in 2019 [to] Sedona,” Lavoie said. “We came out to be close to family. I started to play around here. Then [Casey], he told me, ‘I think that I could add something to your band.’ I’ve been solo for 10 years and thought it’d be great to have somebody playing with me to share the load … I really love my father-in-law. We have a good time, we laugh on the stage. It’s been about three years that we’ve played all over the Verde Valley.”
