Calgary is a city best known for its big skies, cowboy culture, and the annual outdoor spectacle known as the Stampede. It’s also a city of boom and bust, its economy built on the ever-shifting sands of world oil prices. Oil has not only brought people from all over the world to Calgary, diversifying its population over the last few decades, it’s also created one of the most vibrant independent music scenes in Canada. Musicians drawing on the traditions of country and folk music make their living in small venues, house concerts, and festivals, where Calgarians offer their unwavering support for the music that tells their stories.

Despite the economy’s uncertainty—demonstrated by one of the most debilitating recessions in recent history that began in 2014—this music still thrives, operating as both tonic and mouthpiece for the disenfranchised. Sonic Booms: Making Music in an Oil Town explores Calgary’s roots music scene, showing how oil, of all things, fueled the rise of one of North America’s most dynamic and resilient subcultures.

Author Bio

Gillian Turnbull, a born-and-raised Calgarian, holds a PhD in ethnomusicology and is the former editor of Canadian Folk Music magazine. An MFA graduate from the Creative Nonfiction program at the University of King’s College where she is now a mentor, she has written for The Walrus, The National Post, The Puritan, Hazlitt, No Depression, and Penguin Eggs. She teaches music at Ryerson University, co-founded the Wide Cut Weekend Roots Music Festival in Calgary, and has hosted radio shows in Edmonton and Toronto.