Canadian Folk Legend Valdy – Returns to the HAT!

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Canadian Folk Legend Valdy - Returns to the HAT! on Sep 11, 2026 in Sydney, NS. This is an all-day event with themes including event and highland arts theatre.
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Sydney & Area

Sep 11

from $40

About

Valdy, born Paul Valdemar Horsdal, has been part of the fabric of Canadian pop and folk music for half a century. He is well known for “Play Me a Rock ‘n’ Roll Song” but has also delighted audiences everywhere performing classics such as “Peter & Lou”, “Yes I Can”, “Renaissance”, “Sonny’s Dream” and many more.

One of Canada’s premier folk artists, Valdy had an improbable hit with a song about a decidedly hostile audience heckling a soft-spoken minstrel. The square-peg-in-a-round-hole story recounts Valdy’s bitter-sweet memory of finding himself, a relaxed and amiable storyteller, facing a rambunctious audience playing at the Aldergrove Rock Festival in 1968, where the rock-loving audience jeered his folk offerings.
Play Me a Rock and Roll Song’s success is attributable in part to several factors. It cleverly played into the hippy counter-culture movement, while embodying the tensions between rock and folk fans (which Bob Dylan discovered when he infamously used electric instruments at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival). A man with a thousand friends, from Newfoundland to Vancouver Island to Cape Breton Island to Texas to New Zealand, he’s a singer, guitarist and songwriter who catches the small but telling moments that make up life.
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Location & Contact

40 Bentinck St, Sydney, NS B1P 1G2, Canada, Sydney, Nova Scotia

All Dates

Sep 11 7:30 PM

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