THE LONE RANGER

Youll have to wait more than two hours for it, but in director Gore Verbinski's The Lone Ranger, you'll finally be treated to a scene that makes sitting through this hugely budgeted action-adventure-Western-comedy totally worth your ... .

Oh, who am I kidding? The movie still isn't worth your time. But as the scene in question is the only truly exhilarating one in the whole of this wildly over-produced and exhaustingly frenetic outing - an updating of the beloved radio and television serial that famously asked, "Who was that masked man?" - I might as well give it the praise it deserves.

If you're an amateur guitarist hoping to turn pro, particularly one with an affinity for blues rock, you could certainly choose lesser talents to emulate than Kenny Wayne Shepherd. The 37-year-old musician, after all, has been already nominated for five Grammy Awards, has won two Blues Music Awards and two Billboard Music Awards, and was once named the world's third-finest blues guitarist by Guitar World magazine, with only B.B. King and Eric Clapton ranking higher.

If, however, you're an amateur guitarist who feels that the world of professional music will forever be out of reach due to your inability to actually read music, don't let that dissuade you from following your dream. It turns out that Kenny Wayne Shepherd doesn't read music, either.

"Yeah, I still play by ear," says Shepherd, who unofficially began his career as a self-taught guitarist at the tender age of seven. "I used to have to sound songs out one note at a time until I got from the beginning to the end of it. It was kind of a tedious process in the beginning, but you know, it's gotten easier over the years. Modern technology is a big help now, because I can just record things on my iPhone, but yeah - I just play what sounds good, and then I just have to remember it."

Toward the end of our recent phone interview, I ask Davina Sowers - the lead vocalist, pianist, and bandleader for her five-person outfit Davina & the Vagabonds - what her plans for the future are, say, five or 10 years down the road.

She answers with her own question: "You mean, aside from world domination?"

I'm fairly certain she's kidding. But considering Sowers' rise to professional and popular acclaim over the past eight years, there's plenty of evidence to the contrary.

A Pennsylvania native now residing in St. Paul, Minnesota, Sowers' career in music, as she tells it, began rather inconspicuously, when the singer/songwriter was performing as a street musician in Key West, Florida. Yet since relocating north in 2005, Sowers has not-so-slowly and surely emerged as one of Minnesota's - and the country's - most exciting and accomplished blues artists, touring extensively with her ensemble of Vagabonds and earning much critical praise in the process.

"You know, it's been interesting," says Christina Myatt, president of the board of directors for the Eldridge-based Countryside Community Theatre (CCT). "Because we wanted to do something big for our 30th anniversary, and this is definitely something big. But when people hear what we're actually doing, they either say, 'That's really great!' or they say, 'You people are insane.'"