Tab Benoit’s 2024 record I Hear Thunder was his first album in thirteen years. That long quietude from one of Louisiana’s most decorated blues voices ended when the record arrived on his Whiskey Bayou Records label, debuting at number one on the Billboard Blues Album Chart. The Soul of the Swamp Tour he is running behind it this fall is the sound of a musician who took his time and arrived exactly where he intended.
Benoit brings that tour to the Southern Tier on Friday, October 16, when he plays the Center for the Arts of Homer at 8 p.m. Ghalia Volt, who accompanies Benoit through this Midwest-to-Northeast stretch of the tour, opens the show.
About the Show
Benoit is a four-time Grammy nominee, a five-time Blues Music Award winner including B.B. King Entertainer of the Year twice, and an inductee in the Louisiana Music Hall of Fame. But if you want to understand him, the credentials are less useful than what happens in the room. He plays without a setlist, walks out with his ’72 Telecaster, and he and bassist Corey Duplechin and drummer Terence Higgins follow wherever the night leads. Critics have described the result as a wall of sound from just three musicians. His tone has been compared in print to something as thick as gumbo; his voice to Otis Redding.
I Hear Thunder, self-produced and featuring guitarist Anders Osborne throughout (with The Meters’ bassist George Porter Jr. on three tracks), earned Benoit his first Billboard Blues chart-topper in over three decades when it debuted in September 2024. In 2025, the album brought him four Blues Blast Music Awards, including Electric Guitarist of the Year and Blues Band. Benoit grew up in Houma, Louisiana, and has spent decades building a parallel life as an environmental advocate, founding Voice of the Wetlands and appearing in the IMAX documentary Hurricane on the Bayou.
Venue & Logistics
The Center for the Arts of Homer, the William & Ruth Whiting Theater on South Main Street in Homer, seats 400 and carries a strong reputation for outstanding acoustics. It is the kind of room that flatters Benoit’s playing: close enough that the Telecaster tone lands the way it was built to, nothing in the air to absorb the low end before it reaches you. His October 16 date in Homer falls between stops in Buffalo on October 15 and Kingston on October 17.
Tickets
No ticket price was available from sources at the time of publication. Buy tickets