Kim Beggs

by Mark DemingWhile many musicians move to the Big City in search of stardom, singer and songwriter Kim Beggs found both her muse and a growing following after making her home in a beautiful but remote section of Canada. Beggs was born in the town of Val d'Or in Quebec, and lived a nomadic childhood as her family moved from one mining town to another in northern Ontario. When Beggs was a teenager, her family pulled up stakes and moved to Toronto, but the city didn't agree with her, and she took her savings (all of 50 dollars), stuffed her belongings in a backpack, grabbed a cheap guitar, and hopped a bus for the Canadian Yukon. While supporting herself as a carpenter, Beggs played and sang with friends at parties, but it wasn't until she'd logged several years as an amateur that Beggs began writing her own songs and her pals encouraged her to perform them in public. Beggs' first break came when her friend Kim Barlow recorded Beggs' song "Low Down" and included it as a hidden bonus track on her album Gingerbread. In 2002, Beggs recorded her first demo, and released an EP called Beautiful in 2003. The honest, emotionally charged beauty of Beggs' music earned her spots on a number of regional compilation albums as well as a set in a nationally broadcast CBC Radio One concert of musicians from the Canadian north; she also took part in a cross-country concert tour with Anne Louise Genest dubbed Those Bloomin' Yukoners. Near the end of 2004, Genest released her first album, Streetcar Heart, though the Yukon-based Caribou Records label; the album earned an enthusiastic response from folk-oriented Canadian broadcasters, and a second full-length disc, Wanderer's Paean, was issued in the fall of 2006.