Hunting Bigfoot in a Blue Canoe
Sasquatch Training Ground at Blue Canoe in Tupelo, Mississippi — July 30, 2026
What do Bigfoot, a blue canoe, a five-time championship dessert and a Monkee have in common? One packed Thursday night on the Cathead Stage.
Most of my week is spent around the house. Then Thursday arrives, and somewhere between Thursday and Saturday the routine changes. That is music time — time to get out, support the scene, make connections and capture what is happening while it is still happening.
The route north was familiar on July 30. The destination was different. The purpose was not.
This time, I was headed to the Blue Canoe in Tupelo for Sasquatch Training Ground. Same trip north, different landing. There was no water anywhere in sight, but when the venue has a name like Blue Canoe and the band waiting inside is named Sasquatch Training Ground, you accept that normal directions have already failed.
So, let’s get the canoe.
No water required
Blue Canoe has been part of Tupelo’s live-music life since 2011, the kind of room where young artists can test themselves in front of people close enough to notice every choice. The Cathead Stage has hosted names that later grew far beyond it. Tyler Childers, Sturgill Simpson, Lukas Nelson and the Red Clay Strays are among the acts tied to its history. Christone “Kingfish” Ingram has played there too, before his schedule carried him onto some of the biggest blues stages in the world.
That kind of list can make a small venue sound like a waiting room for future fame. It is better than that. A room earns its place in a scene by giving musicians somewhere meaningful to play before the rest of the world decides to pay attention. Blue Canoe has done that long enough for the evidence to be hard to ignore. Even Garden & Gun spotlighted the venue, describing it as a classic Mississippi juke joint.
The kitchen has its own headliner. Connie’s Blueberry Doughnut Bread Pudding, made with blueberry doughnuts from Tupelo institution Connie’s, has won Mississippi Magazine’s Best Dessert title five times. There is the championship dessert from the opening question. Around here, apparently even the bread pudding has a résumé.
One of my favorite examples of what the room can mean came on May 1, 2025, when Buffalo, New York jam band Organ Fairchild recorded a live set at Blue Canoe. They had performed in New Orleans during Jazz Fest and picked up the Tupelo date on the way home. I was there. They were a great bunch of guys, and I walked out a fan. Sometimes a stop added to finish the drive becomes the part somebody remembers.
Blue Canoe’s past is impressive, but old booking calendars do not fill a room on a Thursday. The band playing tonight still has to do that.
Sasquatch Training Ground did.
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The training ground fills up
Northeast Mississippi had already put together a strong week for live music. Five nights earlier, Creed’s Summer of ’99 Tour had hit the newly renamed Huntington Bank Arena, playing what friends who attended described as a sold-out show. Reports from the smaller rooms had been just as encouraging. By Thursday, that momentum had moved from the arena to North Gloster Street.
When I walked into Blue Canoe, the room was already packed. Very few seats remained, and Sasquatch Training Ground had not played a note yet. That detail says more than a dozen promotional adjectives could. People had made plans to be there.
The Tupelo-based Sasquatch Training Ground lineup is Jeff Houin on bass and vocals, Jeff Spencer on guitar, Todd Hunt on drums and Rex Harsin on guitar and vocals. Rock, blues and funk form the center of what they do, but the set on this night reached into reggae, heartland rock, country, British hard rock, rockabilly and funk without stopping to explain the changes. Four players, two guitars and enough familiar songs to turn a crowded room into a training session where everybody already knew part of the lesson.
I counted somewhere between 17 and 20 songs. Yes, I lost track. I got caught up in the room, and I spent part of the night talking with new connections in the crowd. A perfect set-list count would have required behaving like an accountant. Nobody came to the Cathead Stage to audit Sasquatch.
The sheriff goes down and Elvis comes home
The opening lesson was “I Shot the Sheriff”, the Bob Marley song that has spent decades passing between reggae and rock audiences. It was a useful declaration of intent. Sasquatch Training Ground was not going to stay inside a single genre, and the band did not need a long runway before testing how quickly the room would follow.
A run of Tom Petty material came next, including “Mary Jane’s Last Dance”. Petty’s catalog works in a bar because the songs leave room for both kinds of listener — the person paying attention to every guitar turn and the person who only realizes halfway through the chorus that the words never left. On a night built around recognition, it was an easy fit without feeling like filler.
The first set closed with “That’s All Right”, Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup’s song forever connected to Elvis Presley’s first Sun single. In another town, it would have been a foundational rock ’n’ roll cover. In Tupelo, the song carries a hometown address. The band did not need to build an elaborate tribute around it. Playing it on the Cathead Stage was enough — a nod to the King in the city where his story began, then the first lesson was over.
There is a difference between playing old songs and knowing where to place them. Ending that set with Elvis in Tupelo showed the band understood it.
Honky-tonk women, werewolves and one long jam
The next lesson began with “Honky Tonk Women”, one of my favorite Rolling Stones songs. The crowd’s response made it clear I had company. Some riffs announce themselves so quickly that people react before they have time to decide whether they are going to react. This was one of those moments.
Then came Warren Zevon’s “Werewolves of London”, a song that becomes more fun as the number of people hearing it increases. Zevon wrote a dark joke with a piano hook, but crowds have spent decades turning it into a communal cue. In a room already gathered for Sasquatch, the werewolf did not have far to travel.
Free’s “Wishing Well” gave the band more open space. Sasquatch Training Ground treated it as a beginning-to-end jam, turning a familiar hard-rock frame into one of the night’s real musical stretches. The pleasure was not simply hearing a song people knew. It was hearing the band stay inside it long enough for the tune to loosen its grip and the players to take over.
That is where a cover band can reveal whether it is merely collecting recognizable titles or actually listening to one another. “Wishing Well” did not feel checked off. It felt explored.
The country singalong arrived with “You Never Even Called Me by My Name”. Its authorship is a little messier than barroom memory tends to allow. Steve Goodman holds the official credit, John Prine helped write it and David Allan Coe made it famous. None of that history had to be announced from the stage. The crowd knew its assignment. People rocked, swayed and joined the singing, exactly the response the song has been built to draw from crowded rooms for half a century.
The band was not playing at the audience. For a few minutes, the audience became part of the arrangement.
A Monkee joins the hunt
The answer to the final part of the opening question was already in the room. Matt Nolan of the Spunk Monkees was in attendance, and he joined Jeff, Jeff, Todd and Rex for the Kinks’ “You Really Got Me”.
One minute Nolan was part of the crowd. The next, he was inside one of rock music’s most instantly recognizable riffs. That guest spot worked because it did not feel imported for spectacle. It came from the same local network already standing around the stage. A musician showed up for another local band, then stepped in and played. No grand speech was necessary.
The song itself leaves nowhere to hide. Its central figure is blunt, distorted and immediate, and the whole performance either locks around it or does not. With Nolan added to the lineup, the moment carried the loose pleasure of friends making use of an opportunity while the crowd got the payoff.
Sasquatch Training Ground turned toward funk for the final lesson. Wild Cherry’s “Play That Funky Music” kept bodies moving, and “Superstition” followed with one of popular music’s most durable rhythmic hooks. My notes list another song as “Get Hott” [title verification needed] before the band closed with Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode”.
Very few people had left.
That closing run made sense of the whole night. Marley, Petty, Elvis, the Stones, Zevon, Free, country, the Kinks, Wild Cherry, Stevie Wonder and Chuck Berry all landed in the same set without Sasquatch Training Ground pretending they came from the same place. The common element was usefulness. These were songs the band could play with, songs the crowd could enter and songs sturdy enough to survive another night in another room.
“Johnny B. Goode” brought the class to an end with rock ’n’ roll reduced to its essential equipment — a guitar, a beat and the belief that somebody playing in a small room might one day have a name glowing above a much larger one. At Blue Canoe, with its long list of artists who passed across the Cathead Stage before bigger rooms came calling, that old story did not sound so far-fetched.
Afterglow
I said my farewells and caught up with Jeff Spencer before heading home. The ride back is usually wind-down time, when the volume is gone and one or two moments keep replaying anyway. Often it is a song that pulls an involuntary “yeah” from somebody because they have not heard it in years. Sasquatch Training Ground built an entire night around the possibility of that reaction.
This was not my first visit to Blue Canoe, and it will not be my last. I had missed several Sasquatch Training Ground shows because other events or obligations got in the way, so finally catching the band also meant catching up with an old friend. Jeff and I go back so far there is no date attached to it. Way back. That is the official historical record.
There are arena nights when the production announces every important moment from fifty feet high. Then there are nights when the room is nearly out of chairs before the band begins, an old friend is onstage, another musician walks out of the crowd to join him and a song you had forgotten you missed suddenly returns. Northeast Mississippi needs both kinds of nights. This week, it got both.
Thanks to Sasquatch Training Ground for the music and to Blue Canoe for giving the local scene another packed Thursday on the Cathead Stage. The venue stays in the rotation. So does the band.
Another show was waiting the next night.
Until next time, get on trak with Iron Trakks Media.
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