Tickets went on sale to the general public this past Thursday for the Tyrone-Snyder Public Library annual fundraising concert to be held Saturday night, April 21 at the Tyrone Area High School Auditorium.
Three ticket sale outlets have been established in downtown Tyrone to assist the public in securing tickets for this year’s concert. Tickets may be purchased at Bressler’s Food Mart and Sports, Kopp Drug and the Tyrone-Snyder Public Library all located in downtown Tyrone. Tickets may also be ordered through the mail by calling the library at a special number at 682-1017. All seats are reserved seating and are on a first come first serve basis. The cost of the tickets is $30 each. The doors will open at 6:30 p.m. the evening of the show. The show itself will start promptly at 7 p.m. All monies raised by the concert are used to assist in paying the mortgage on the new library building in downtown Tyrone. To date the five concerts held have raised over $46,000 towards this effort.
“We still have about one week left in our corporate sponsorship ticket and ad drive,” said concert chairman Chuck Banas. “We have had a really great response from our corporate sponsors this year and it has taken a bit longer than originally planned to contact them all. We had promised that the tickets would go on sale March 1 and we wanted to make sure that we fulfilled that promise,” said Banas. “The only other thing I will say regarding the ticket purchases would be to please not wait until the week before. As many will remember, we came within 125 seats of a sell out last year. People who waited until a week before the concert to purchase tickets found themselves in the very rear of the auditorium even though they would have liked to have been much closer. So this is your chance to get the best seats available now and not wait until the last minute,” added Banas.
Opening this year’s show will be the JiveBombers. This is a two-man group made up of Jerry Zolten from Warriors Mark, and Richard Sleigh from Philipsburg. The JiveBombers have been playing together as an acoustic duo since 1970. The JiveBombers play a range of blues, rock ‘n’ roll, swing and country. The name JiveBombers is a tribute to a 1950s R&B group that recorded under that name back in the day.
Jerry Zolten plays acoustic guitar and Richard Sleigh plays a guitar and harmonica. Both sing.
Richard is a full-time musician from Philipsburg with an international reputation for his harmonica-playing wizardry. Recent performances and workshops have taken him as far away as Texas and Germany. He has performed as an opener for Taj Mahal, Guy Davis and most recently Rory Bloch. When he is not performing solo or as a JiveBomber, he works on harmonicas, “souping” them up for amateurs and professionals worldwide who come to him for his unique skills at rebuilding, refurbishing and just plain improving the sound and the range of the harmonicas. He may “wow” you one minute with a Chicago blues and in the next bowl you over with an Irish reel.
Jerry Zolten is a professor at Penn State whose most popular course is on the roots of rock ‘n’ roll. He’s been performing on and off professionally since the 1960s, his first record release with his group Protozoa on the Buddah label in 1969. In the 1960s, he led the locally popular R&B group Code Blue. In earlier days, Jerry opened for Janis Joplin and on rhythm guitar backed for Bo Diddley. In recent years, he spearheaded the return to commercial performance of Grammy-winners, the Fairfield Four, best known for their appearance in the film “O Brother Where Art Thou.” Jerry produced that group’s only live CD, “Wreckin’ the House,” and another by their bass singer Isaac Freeman, “Beautiful Stars.” Jerry is also an author of a book on the rise of soul gospel music, “Great God Almighty! The Dixie Hummingbirds” and co-host with legendary cartoonist Robert Crumb of “Chippin the Blues”, a public radio program on blues history. His latest public radio programs, “Boppin with Pekar,” are co-hosted with Harvey Pekar from the film “American Splendor” to be aired locally this spring.
As to the music you will hear during the concert, you can expect to hear classic rock-a-billy covers of Hank Williams, Carl Perkins and others.
It sounds like the JiveBombers will get this year’s library concert off to a great start.
Next week, The Daily Herald will feature the second act of this year’s concert, country singer Sarah Wilson.
