A rock singer who survived a horrific car crash in Australia and rebuilt his voice one show at a time.
A Northern Ontario country artist who writes, records, and books her own gigs without a label or a manager.
A Saskatchewan storyteller whose songs have reportedly reached the ears of King Charles III.
And a Kawarthas regular who made the move from Florida to become a familiar face on local stages.
On October 15, 2026, all four will sit within a few feet of each other inside a converted barn theatre on Pigeon Lake Road. That is the premise behind The Dockside Sessions III, the latest installment of a concert series that has quietly become one of the hardest tickets to get in the Kawartha Lakes region.
Presented by the Bobcaygeon Music Council, the event pairs four singer-songwriters at very different career stages for one night of original music and the stories behind it, moving for the first time into the café-bar space at Globus Theatre after two sold-out runs at a rustic marina building on the water.
Introducing You to The Dockside Sessions III: What You Need to Know About the Event
The Dockside Sessions III takes place on Thursday, October 15, 2026, with doors opening at 7:00 p.m. and the show starting at 7:30 p.m. Eastern time.
It is a 19-plus event, and general admission seating operates on a first-come, first-served basis inside a venue capped at 120 people, which makes it considerably more intimate than a typical concert hall booking.
The format is built around an evening of music with singer-songwriters, their stories, and their songs.
That structure is the defining feature of the entire Dockside Sessions concept. According to the Bobcaygeon Music Council, the series exists to give performers who normally play covers in bars and restaurants a rare chance to showcase the music they actually wrote, along with the personal history behind it.
Tickets for the Dockside Sessions III are priced at $45.00 CAD plus fees, sold through Ticketscene.
Inside Globus Theatre, the New Home for Dockside Sessions
For its first two editions, The Dockside Sessions was staged in a rustic building dating to the late 1800s or early 1900s at The Yacht Club, part of the Gordon Yacht Harbour Marina at 81 Front Street East in Bobcaygeon.
For the third edition, the Bobcaygeon Music Council has shifted the show to the café-bar seating area at Globus Theatre, located at 2300 Pigeon Lake Road.
Globus Theatre itself is a professional theatre company founded in 2003 by the husband-and-wife team of James Barrett and Sarah Quick, who staged their productions in various spaces before becoming company-in-residence at the Lakeview Arts Barn in 2006.
That building, a former cattle barn, was transformed into a 150-seat theatre with an attached restaurant, and it has hosted the company’s mainstage plays, comedy shows, and musical performances for close to two decades.
In 2025, after a multi-year capital campaign that raised more than 1.7 million dollars, Globus Theatre purchased the Lakeview Arts Barn outright, giving the charitable theatre company ownership of the building it had operated in as a tenant for nearly twenty years.
The company has since been recognized with a Tourism Award of Excellence from the Lindsay and District Chamber of Commerce, and it continues to run a full slate of mainstage productions, dinner-theatre nights, and one-off music and comedy bookings throughout the year.
Booking Dockside Sessions III into Globus Theatre’s café-bar space rather than the main 150-seat house keeps the room close to the same scale as the marina venue used for the first two editions, while giving the Bobcaygeon Music Council access to a professional stage, sound setup, and accessible facilities that a converted 19th-century boathouse cannot easily match.
The event listing confirms that washrooms at the venue are accessible, and the Music Council has said it will work directly with anyone needing help arranging accessible seating.
The Bobcaygeon Music Council: Two Decades of Free Concerts Behind One Ticketed Series
The organization behind Dockside Sessions is easy to overlook if you are not already plugged into the Kawarthas live music scene, and that is largely by design rather than by accident.
The Bobcaygeon Music Council was incorporated as a not-for-profit charity in 2006 by Bobcaygeon resident Andy Harris and a small group of collaborators, who initially brought three or four concerts a year to Trinity United Church, a space prized for its acoustics.
Within a couple of years, the council extended its reach outdoors, launching free Thursday evening concerts at Lock 32 on the Trent-Severn Waterway, a series that continues every July and August and regularly draws crowds in the hundreds, with council leadership noting that turnout has approached a thousand people on both sides of the canal during peak nights.
The organization also runs a week-long summer music camp for young people aged eight and older, offers vocal and instrumental instruction from professional musicians and teachers, operates the North Winds Concert Band, sends musicians into local schools for workshops, and maintains a bursary fund that supports music students from the Bobcaygeon area.
Funding comes from a mix of ticket sales, sponsorships from local businesses, and donations, since the free Lock 32 concerts operate on a pass-the-hat basis rather than paid admission.
The Dockside Sessions represents the council’s attempt to formalize a smaller, ticketed, and more intimate alternative to those larger free shows, and to do so with a specific creative angle: give established and rising songwriters a stage where the audience has explicitly opted in to hear original material and the stories behind it, rather than a set of familiar covers.
Board chair Liz Byrnes, who became involved with the council in 2016, has described the sellouts as a good problem to have, while acknowledging that a larger room would let more people attend. That tension between demand and capacity is a running theme across all three editions of the series.
The Dockside Sessions III Lineup: Here Are Your Four Songwriters
The bill for Dockside Sessions III spans four distinct corners of the Canadian music landscape, from a decades-deep rock veteran to an independent artist building a following in real time.
Carl Dixon: The Coney Hatch Frontman Who Rebuilt His Voice After a Near-Fatal Crash
Carl Dixon is the name on this bill with the deepest professional history, a Canadian rock singer, keyboardist, and guitarist whose career stretches back more than four decades. Born in Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario, Dixon moved to Montreal in 1979 to play with a touring bar band called Firefly before relocating to Toronto in 1981, where he answered a classified ad and became lead singer of Coney Hatch. He wrote or co-wrote eight of the ten songs on the band’s gold-selling, Kim Mitchell-produced 1982 debut album, including staples like “Hey Operator” and “Devil’s Deck,” and spent much of the decade opening North American arena tours for Iron Maiden, Judas Priest, Triumph, Ted Nugent, and Accept. A staff songwriting deal with Rondor Music, later Universal, followed, producing “Taste of Love,” co-written with Brett Walker for Jimi Jamison, which was later featured on Baywatch, along with song placements on Dawson’s Creek, Degrassi, and The Saddle Club. Dixon toured and recorded with April Wine from 2001 to 2004, appearing on the band’s Greatest Hits Live album, before joining The Guess Who as lead vocalist in 1997, a role he held across two stints totaling roughly eight years. In April 2008, a high-speed car crash in rural Australia left him comatose for ten days with 52 injuries, including a traumatic brain injury, and required months of hospitalization and extensive titanium bone replacement. Dixon rebuilt his career from there, releasing solo albums including the six-disc anthology Peaced Together, writing the memoir Strange Way to Live, and becoming an in-demand inspirational speaker. Coney Hatch itself has kept touring in parallel, releasing the 2023 album Postcard from Germany and playing festival dates including Sweden Rock and Germany’s Hamburg Summer Festival. Dixon now also tours solo, as an acoustic duo called Northern Strum, and with his band Wild North Rock, earning a description from CBC as “one of Canada’s stellar rock voices.” He lives in nearby Haliburton, making him one of the more locally rooted names on the Dockside Sessions III bill.
Jeffery Straker: The Prairie Storyteller Whose Song Reportedly Reached Buckingham Palace
Jeffery Straker is a classically trained pianist and singer-songwriter based in Punnichy, Saskatchewan, whose rootsy, storytelling style has drawn repeated comparisons to Kris Kristofferson, Jackson Browne, Harry Chapin, and Murray McLauchlan. He grew up on his parents’ Saskatchewan grain farm, splitting his early musical life between the country music that filled the house and formal classical piano training that had him performing full sonatas before he ever wrote his own songs, a duality that still shapes his sound. He has been named Roots-Folk Artist of the Year in Saskatchewan twice, earned a Western Canadian Music Award, and been recognized as the Saskatchewan Country Music Awards‘ keyboard player of the year multiple years running. In 2014, he won the Vina del Mar International Song Competition in Chile representing Canada, performing for a live audience of 20,000 and a television audience estimated in the hundreds of millions across the Spanish-speaking world. His ninth studio album, Great Big Sky, produced by Steve Dawson at The Henhouse in Nashville and recorded live off the floor, earned him the 2025 Canadian Folk Music Award for Contemporary Canadian Folk Singer of the Year and reportedly caught the attention of King Charles III, a story that made national news after CBC reported the monarch’s message to Straker following the album’s arrival at Buckingham Palace. He has since performed at the National Arts Centre in Ottawa, represented Canada in a week-long residency at Expo 2025 in Osaka, Japan, and appeared on CBC’s The Current in a live national broadcast. After having played the summer series with the Bobcaygeon Music Council a few years ago, this Dockside Sessions songwriter-in-the-round performance marks a welcome return to Bobcaygeon for him.
Makinna Givens: The DIY Country Artist Turning Northern Ontario Grit into Radio-Ready Sincerity
Makinna Givens is an independent country artist from Temiskaming Shores in Northern Ontario who writes, records, produces, and engineers her own music, drawing on an audio engineering background from Fanshawe College, and who manages every part of her own career without a label or management team, an approach she sums up in her own tagline as “country music for the chronically sincere.” Her 2024 debut single, “If We Meet Again,” announced that sincerity immediately, earning Music Video of the Month honours from the Country Music Association of Ontario alongside a CTV News segment that praised her sound. In March 2026, a jury of eleven industry experts selected her as one of six finalists in the Igniter Songwriter Camp, a joint initiative between the Country Music Association of Ontario and the Songwriters Association of Canada, choosing her from 43 entrants that included far more established names. That same year, she was named a top-four finalist in the national Country Rising contest presented by Cottage Springs and Starseed Entertainment, an opportunity that had her opening for The Reklaws, Griffen Palmer, and Nate Haller, and she was selected as a Field Pick for the Lucknow Music in the Fields Emerging Artist Showcase. Her momentum has since carried her onto festival main stages alongside Russell Dickerson, Kip Moore, Kameron Marlowe, Josh Ross, Owen Riegling, and Sass Jordan, while her recordings have picked up support from SiriusXM’s Top of the Country, CBC Radio, and Apple Music editorial playlists. Her most recent single, “Cheap Cigarettes,” released earlier in 2026 with a companion music video, keeps the same unfiltered, story-first songwriting that has defined her output since her debut, with a follow-up EP reportedly on the way. Givens has performed in Bobcaygeon before, and in announcing her Dockside Sessions III booking, she noted it had been a few years since she’d played beautiful Bobcaygeon.
Jesse Byers: The Local Country Voice Who Plays Bobcaygeon as Often as He Sells It
Jesse Byers is the artist on this bill most directly woven into the community the Bobcaygeon Music Council serves every summer, a country singer-songwriter who studied at Florida State University before relocating to the Kawarthas and building a career that now runs almost entirely through the towns and lakes around Bobcaygeon. He has released a steady stream of original music, including his 2019 album Target and the single “Let Me,” alongside collaborations with fellow songwriters Jeff Forgeron and Preston Keith, available across Spotify and other streaming platforms under his own name. Rather than chasing a national circuit, Byers has built his profile through consistent, visible local bookings, playing regular sets at spots like Bellys Restaurant and appearing at Bobcaygeon Music Council events including its free Concerts in the Park series at the Lock 32 gazebo, where he has been featured performing live as recently as this past summer. He was also part of the entertainment lineup for Bobcaygeon’s 150th anniversary celebrations, a booking that reportedly sold more than 80 tickets well ahead of the event, reflecting the same loyal local following that has made him a go-to name for the Music Council’s programming. Off stage, Byers works as a realtor with The Hales Kawartha Waterfront Sales Team, a day job that keeps him embedded in the same lakeside communities his music speaks to, and he describes himself online simply as a country artist, Kawartha real estate agent, husband, and dad. That dual identity, equal parts working musician and working local, is part of what makes his inclusion on the Dockside Sessions III bill feel earned, taking the same spotlight as three touring, award-recognized songwriters to tell his own story on his own turf.
The Dockside Sessions I: How the Series Began in 2025
The original Dockside Sessions launched on October 2, 2025, at The Yacht Club within the Gordon Yacht Harbour Marina, featuring singer-songwriters Pat Temple, Emily Jean Flack, Melissa Payne, and Brennen Wilson.
Tickets went on sale August 29, 2025, and the show sold out within days, well ahead of the event date.
The venue itself was part of the pitch: a rustic building on the water dating back to the late 1800s or early 1900s, offering more capacity than the council’s usual Trinity United Church booking while still preserving an intimate, small-room feel.
The format that would define the series was set here, with each performer playing original songs rather than covers and speaking about the stories and inspiration behind them, an approach the council framed as giving artists who rarely get to perform their own material a dedicated, receptive audience.
Emily Jean Flack, an Ennismore-based artist with deep ties to Celtic music and step dancing who had previously performed as part of the council’s summer series, described the appeal of a small-town platform for original songwriting, noting that meaningful music does not only happen in big cities.
Pat Temple, a longtime fixture of the Canadian live circuit with three decades of stage experience, joined Melissa Payne and Brennen Wilson to round out a bill built around the same principle that would carry through to later editions: strip away the covers, and let songwriters tell the audience what their songs actually mean.
The Dockside Sessions II: Doubling Down at the Marina
The Bobcaygeon Music Council returned to the same Yacht Club venue at Gordon Yacht Harbour Marina for The Dockside Sessions II on Thursday, June 11, 2026, again starting at 7:00 p.m.
This second edition featured a fully different lineup of Erin Blackstock, Brian Galloway, Jeanne Truax, and Matt Zaddy, priced at 50 dollars per ticket, a five-dollar increase over the base ticket price of the eventual third edition, though direct comparisons are complicated by differing fee structures across the two listings.
Like its predecessor, Dockside Sessions II sold out, with the Bobcaygeon and Area Chamber of Commerce listing confirming the sold-out status well ahead of the June date.
The second edition kept the marina venue and the same storytelling format that had defined the debut show, reinforcing that Dockside Sessions was not a one-off experiment but an ongoing series with its own identity distinct from the council’s free Lock 32 concerts.
Two consecutive sellouts at the same roughly 120-person venue set up the logic behind the council’s decision to shift the third edition to Globus Theatre: the demand had outgrown the marina space, even as the council wanted to preserve the same intimate scale that made the format work in the first place.
Small Town, Big Talent for the Dockside Sessions III
Here’s the plain truth about this show: rooms this small don’t stay available for long, and this series has never once made it to showtime with empty seats. Two editions, two sellouts, and a council that had to move to a bigger stage just to keep up with demand it created itself.
That’s just what happens when 120 seats meet an audience that already knows what they’re getting: a full night of original music, told the way the artists actually meant it, in a room small enough that every seat feels close to the stage.
If Bobcaygeon’s Dockside Sessions has taught the Kawarthas anything, it’s that hesitating is how you end up reading about a sold-out show instead of sitting in the room for one.
