Kirby performs at Memorial Center

Blending beautiful music and striking visual imagery with a historical narrative and sentimental journey down Main Street U.S.A., renowned ragtime pianist Scott Kirby entertained a packed house at Libby’s Memorial Events Center Saturday evening.

Kirby’s one-man show, “Main Street Souvenirs,” featured slideshow videos along with his incredible piano skills, playing both ragtime classics and his own original compositions.

“Is Main Street a place, or is it an idea?” Kirby asked the audience. “Is it something we created or something that defines us? Perhaps it’s not a place, but a passage, a journey that starts with us and how we gather together.”

Kirby’s journey with the audience started at the central gathering places of small-town America, the bandshell. He spoke of John Phillip Sousa playing thousands of shows in the parks of American towns as he moved to Sedalia, Mo., birthplace of Scott Joplin, the father of ragtime.

America’s very first original pop music, Kirby said, encountered strong opposition in its infancy, incurring the wrath of traditionalists, religious groups and social leaders alike. 

“Ragtime  has produced many crimes, and many criminals in its history,” Kirby joked.

For the next step in the audience’s journey through time, Kirby brought in the national pasttime. Baseball, he said, is an analogy for life’s journey around the bases and back home again.

“And like Dorothy with her ruby slippers, you can’t go home until you’ve made the journey,” he said.

The journey moved the audience from the concert hall of the Memorial Events Center down Main Street in any number of towns across the American west. Towns much like Libby, who find themselves perched between the traditions of the past and the challenges of the future. He spoke of towns scattered across America’s great plains, where tall church steeples or grain silos jutting up from the flat landscape provided notice to weary travelers of a place to rest before moving on.

Kirby’s unique combination of music and imagery, his own photographic essays and watercolors made into slides, transported the audience to the hills and fields of the great prairies and back to the familiar, but distant in time, parks, bandshells and Main Streets of days gone by. It was a night to remember, another brilliant success for the Kootenai Heritage Council’s season of performing arts.