At fifteen, Rory Block sat with Skip James and Mississippi John Hurt and learned to play the blues from the men who made it. That is not a press-release exaggeration — she was a teenager in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village, and those men were still alive and still teaching, and she found them. What came after, across more than five decades of recording and touring, was not so much a career as a sustained act of transmission.
About the Show
Block plays The Stationery Factory in Dalton on Saturday, August 29, with Amélie (a singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist based in Saratoga Springs, in the capital region) opening the night. The Blues Foundation has named Block the top female interpreter and authority on traditional country blues worldwide, and the company she keeps confirms it. She has developed a reputation as a strong, vibrant live performer, someone you hear differently in a room than on a record. Bonnie Raitt has called her an inspiration “since we started out years ago.” Greg Johnson, Robert Johnson’s grandson, has said that hearing Block play is like having his grandfather back in the room. The New York Times put it plainly: “Her playing is perfect, her singing otherworldly as she wrestles with ghosts, shadows and legends.”
She grew up in a Greenwich Village where Peter Rowan, John Sebastian, and Geoff Muldaur passed through her father’s sandal shop, and she started guitar at ten. By the time she signed to Rounder Records and released the highly acclaimed High Heeled Blues in 1981, she had already spent years in those formative apprenticeships, learning to channel music that comes from deep in the American past. What followed was a body of work built on holding that tradition true: 10 Blues Music Awards, two Hall of Fame inductions, and a 2026 Living Blues nomination for Female Blues Artist of the Year. A newly remastered Netflix documentary, Devil At The Crossroads, traces the lineage she has spent her life honoring. She uses a socket wrench as her slide.
Amélie draws from the folk and rock traditions of the ’60s and ’70s, along with blues and standards, and performs as part of the folk duo Question of the Century.
Venue & Logistics
The Stationery Factory occupies a converted industrial building in Dalton, Massachusetts, formerly the Crane & Co. stationery division, now home to multiple performance spaces, local businesses, and a restaurant. The MainStage features a 32-by-20-foot concert stage with professional sound and lighting. Doors open at 7 p.m.; the show starts at 8 p.m. The evening is all ages.
Tickets
Tickets are $25–$30. Get Tickets