Vina Moses in front of the Hank Snow Home Town Museum in Liverpool. The museum is planning a summer country music festival beginning Friday. (Rick Conrad)

If you’re a fan of country music, Liverpool will be the place to be this weekend as the Hank Snow Home Town Museum kicks off Summerfest on Friday evening.

More than 25 acts are scheduled for the two-day event at the Hank Snow Gazebo Park, including the Saltwater Cowboys, Autumn Carver, and Dave Burbine.

Friends of Hank Snow Society administrator and longtime QCCR volunteer Vina Moses says fans from near and far will get a chance to listen to some great music.

“We’re going to have a lot of great acts, some that are new to Liverpool, some that … everybody has asked for and they’re coming back,” she said in an interview.

“And we’ve got a great lineup for the whole entire weekend.”

The summer festival took root during the pandemic when the museum couldn’t hold its traditional Hank Snow tribute.

“So this is a really key fundraiser for us,” Moses says.

“Every fundraiser that we have continues to support the continuation of this museum.”

The museum gets more than 3,000 visitors a season who pay tribute to Canada’s first major country music star. Hank Snow was born in Brooklyn, Queens Co., and recorded more than 140 albums and had more than 85 singles on the Billboard country music charts. He’s the only Canadian in the Country Music Hall of Fame in Nashville.

The summer festival is also a good warmup for the main event, the Hank Snow Tribute from August 14 to 16.

“I am so excited for the tribute because it is youth-oriented,” Moses says.

“And I can tell you this, some of them have been coming here since they were five and six. And they are now teenagers. They’re touring all over the Maritimes. They’re going to Nashville. We have two of them just got back from Nashville. So we feel like we’re their parents because we have helped them become performers that everybody knows now.”

More than 40 acts will be coming to Liverpool for the tribute.

“We have young folks like Carson Fullerton, who’s like seven years old, has been to Nashville and back. Carson actually did a recording while he was there. We have folks like the Jovial Joes. They’re a young group of sisters from Halifax. We discovered them here. We asked them to come to our summer show. And boy, now they’re touring all over the Maritimes.”

Moses says organizers this year wanted to highlight young musicians while welcoming older favourites.

“You know, it’s interesting because you think of Hank Snow and you think, oh, old, nobody’s going to know Hank Snow. If you see the people who come here to visit, you would not believe it. They come from all over the world. And they all love music. They love country music. And they know that for a lot of these folks, Hank Snow started it for them. He’s the reason that people in Canada can go down to Nashville.”

As for this weekend’s festival, Moses says organizers tried to keep ticket prices as low as possible.

A weekend pass for one person is $55 or two for $100. And if you can make it for only part of the festival, ticket prices range from $15 for Saturday afternoon to $20 for Friday or Saturday evening.

“This weekend, we just want you to come and have fun. And we’ll have lots of food and we’ll have lots of fellowship and we’ll have lots of great music.”

More information about the Hank Snow Hometown Museum Summer Fest 2025 can be found on their Facebook page.

Email: rickconradqccr@gmail.com

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Hank Snow Museum. Photo Ed Halverson

Organizers of the annual Hank Snow Tribute are calling this year’s event a rebuilding.

Aside from a mini tribute that was held in 2022 to mark the 30^th anniversary of the show the COVID 19 pandemic kept the event off the schedule for the past three years.

That was bad news for the Hank Snow Hometown Museum which relies on the proceeds of the Tribute to fund its year-round operations.

Museum administrator and Chair of the Hank Snow Tribute Vina Moses says the Friends of Hank Snow Society are determined to get things back on track.

“COVID devastated us financially, it devastated us, of course, you know, we were down, our feelings were down but we all kept saying we are going to make it,” said Moses. “So, this particular tribute is a rebuild. And it’s a rebuilding for all of the things that we have to do. Rebuilding with the musicians, rebuilding of a new type of tribute.”

Organizers are shaking up the event this year by expanding from one headlining act for the festival to four days of headliners. Included in the list are Ruth Manning and the Prospectors, the Nova Scotia Country Music Hall of Famers, Southern Breeze, the Rhinestone Romeos and Joyce Seamone.

Moses who is also a long-time host and former General Manager at QCCR says keeping the legacy of Hank Snow alive is important.

She says the Liverpool native opened the door to the Nashville Music scene for generations of Canadians to follow. The former train station that houses the Hank Snow Hometown Museum was significant to Snow during a rough childhood.

“Well, it’s very interesting that Hank Snow called this particular train station his safe place when he was a child. He was an abused child and whenever he thought he was going to be abused, he came in here and laid down and slept here,” said Moses. “So, when they called him and told him they were going to have the train station as a museum he was so excited.”

Moses says roughly 3,000 people from around the world, including some prominent Canadian country musicians make the pilgrimage to the museum each year. She is excited to see the RVs rolling in across from the museum to set up base camp for the four-day tribute.

Tickets for the event being held at Queens Place are still available at Ticketpro.ca. More information on the Hank Snow Tribute can be found on the museum website and Facebook page.

E-mail: edhalversonnews@gmail.com

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Hank Snow Museum. Photo Ed Halverson

It’s Groundhog day for the Hank Snow Tribute show.

Organizers of the annual event, normally held each year in April, have announced the 2021 edition has once again, been postponed.

The 2020 edition would have been the 30^th anniversary of the event but was called off because of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Co-chair of the organizing committee Jessica Smith says they couldn’t go ahead with the capacity limits required to meet social distancing rules and the uncertainty around the vaccine rollout.

“We need to have as many people as we usually have in an arena,” said Smith. “There’s just no safe way for us to have that many people together, especially if the vaccine still isn’t done.”

Smith says they’ve already informed the musical acts and suppliers of the postponement.

She says everyone is very understanding and headliner Carroll Baker has already committed to performing next year.

The cancellation is the latest in a string of festival that have announced they will be postponing their events until 2022, including the Apple Blossom Festival in the valley and Liverpool’s Privateer Days.

Money raised from the tribute show accounts for the lion’s share of funding to keep the Hank Snow museum operating year-round.

Smith says the museum has been closed through the pandemic but is aiming to reopen in the coming weeks.

Going without their largest source of revenue has meant the museum has had to come up with other ways to raise money.

“We did a couple of different things. We partnered with South Shore Drive In. We started building the drive-in theatre and we opened in September. We were, kind of, thinking to the future because we knew that COVID wasn’t going to be something that came and went quickly,” said Smith.

Along with opening their parking lot for the drive-in, the Hank Snow Society also offered barbeques each Wednesday and partnered with QCCR in a 50/50 draw.

Smith expects to continue those projects and hopes to see the drive-in open as early in the season as possible.

She’s optimistic the 2022 edition of the Hank Snow Tribute Show will go ahead.

“Obviously people are disappointed. There’s a lot of people that enjoy going to the tribute every year and seeing old friends and camping and just having a good weekend in general. We’re hoping we can continue on with that and 2022 will be better.”

Reported by Ed Halverson 
E-mail: edhalversonnews@gmail.com
Twitter: @edwardhalverson

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