Daily Updates
This is a compendium of Paul Metsa's musings, including articles, prose, and poetry. We are currently working to include stuff from the way back machine, and then we can move forward.
By Martin Keller, Media Savant Communications | 01/30/20
TWIN CITIES – January 30, 2020 – The Minnesota artist from Virginia, Minnesota, that the Huffington Post once called “Minnesota’s other great Iron Range songwriter,” Paul Metsa, realized yet another Bob Dylan benchmark recently. On January 24, 2020, he helped celebrate “Gerde’s Folk City at 60” — the 60-year anniversary of the opening of Gerdes Folk City club in New York, the famous and intimate Greenwich Village spot where Dylan made his New York City debut in 1961, opening for bluesman John Lee Hooker. The club subsequently supported an array of artists, from folk to blues to rock including Sonic Youth.
If you've been anywhere in Minnesota live music is heard, chances are you've bumped into Paul Metsa on the stand or at the bar. Guitar slinger, bluesman, folkie, singer, songwriter, bandleader, recording artist, radio host, activist, schmoozer, hustler, poet, storyteller and author, the hard-working, affable Metsa is a true Minnesota original, born on the Iron Range and based in Minneapolis since 1978. He has won seven Minnesota Music Awards and played more than 5,000 gigs. He has a rescue dog named Blackie he adores.
Singer/songwriter Paul Metsa is a native of the same Minnesota Iron Range that produced Bob Dylan. His mother was a jazz singer; his father, a tavern owner, also played accordion professionally. In grade school, he had his own folk duo and later a rock band. In 1979, he moved from his home in Virginia, MN, to Minneapolis to pursue his musical career.