The worst news this week is obviously the Olympian destruction at Big Valley Jamboree, which took the life of 35-year-old Donna Moore when violent blasts of wind blew a speaker on top of her and flattened the monolithic stage. As Sun writer Crash Cameron put it in an immediate e-mail my way, “It was a shitstorm. The thing was pancaked in seconds.

“It happened like that,” he wrote with an implied snap of his fingers. “First wind was full-on force. Tents ripped apart like other BVJs, but Sun [promotional] girls told me all the vendor booths on the midway were ripped to shreds. Some damage, too, to the saloon stage. Most with any level of intelligence knew it was done. Question now, is it DONE, period?”

I certainly hope not — though there will clearly be extra space between performers and crowd from now on. I’ve lived and moved amid the backstage of BVJ for 11 years, climbed up to the top of that very scaffolding for a mechanics story, looking across the sea of buckle bunnies and unfilled plastic corporate chairs.

Behind the scenes, Big Valley Jamboree is a purposeful place of eagle-eyed professionals, hearts absolutely aching over what happened: weather that’s loomed above so many times finally taking its structural prey. I was even in a bizarre Flintstones whirlybird once, right in a sudden mess of black clouds. As Charley Pride played below us, we had to emergency-land in a nearby field. Horizon-sized, snap-shifting weather is part of life on the prairies, having no concern for the activities of us little microbes below.

The Alberta government has ordered a meticulous investigation of the act of God, but Larry Werner, now fully in charge of Panhandle Productions, is a meticulous and honest man who will do what’s right without hesitation. I’m vouching for him with utter confidence, and as I feel for Moore and her family, I feel for him and his.

A quote from Robert Plant in Hammer of the Gods, the possibly apocryphal account of the rise of Led Zeppelin: “You can’t give up something you really believe in for financial reasons. If you die by the roadside, then you die by the roadside — so be it. But at least you know you’ve tried. Ten minutes in the music scene was worth 100 years outside of it.”

Heyyyy, would you like to hear a locally-produced song called “Funky Bitch”? Then boy, do I have something for you: The Hardline Blues Band, which is now streaming a live performance at hardlineblues.com.

For urban blues, it’s actually got lots of the ticklish, sinister horn I dig, poking fairly deeply into jazz. Singer Jeremy Loome, who you may recall as a proponent for an all-blues radio station in town, tells us, “The 20 tracks were recorded bootleg-style on single recorder, then cleaned up a bit with a parametric EQ. The show in question, at a local club called The Foxx Den, was also the debut of our excellent new trumpet player, Leif Nygren.”

Hey man, music you can get without free without actually semi-stealing it? SUH-WEET.

Souljah Fyah is getting more than a little air. As a tangent to the Edmonton Canon engine-revving, I “cyber-connected” with Paul Joosse, who showed me the soul-addicted band’s been busy as beaver bankers, having recently released its Tears of a Fool EP at Haven and played the Canmore Folk Fest this weekend. “We’re playing the Edmonton [folk] festival — our performance is at 5 p.m. on Sunday — and the week after that, we’ll be at the Salmon Arm Roots and Blues Festival.” The concert at EFMF is Stage 1. P.S.: There will be dancing.

“We haven’t played any of these events before, so we’re looking forward to it,” Joosse adds. “As for longer-term plans, we hope to do more recording in October, so that we can release an LP early next year.”

My favourite thing Joosse said, though, was right off the bat, just a little random poetry in a heavy week: “Sorry it’s taken so long to get back — keeping up with Facebook is like trying to catch every raindrop.”