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One of the most successful homegrown music tours featuring New Zealand country music stars starts today.
Highway of Legends, New Zealand's biggest-selling tour series, will be a precursor to the biggest tour of a Kiwi act in the United States since Crowded House visited.
The show has been signed by a US tour company, Revolution Concerts and Events America, to perform in America next year.
The New Zealand Legends show starts in Hamilton tonight and will play in 17 venues. The tour will end on November 22.
Singers John Grenell, Eddie Low and Brendan Dugan - who will front the tour as MC - were rehearsing at Corelli Music School in Browns Bay yesterday.
The session was special for Grenell - best known for the song Welcome to Our World - as he has recently been reunited with his first guitar. The instrument, which Grenell bought for $6 when he was 11 years old, was seized and put up for auction for an unpaid traffic fine.
Musician Graham Shaw bought the guitar, but when he heard that Grenell had been trying to get it back again, he returned it to him at a gig at the Woodcote Retirement Village in Christchurch last week.
Other acts in Highway of Legends include singer, guitarist and comedian Kevin Greaves promoter and guitarist Gray Bartlett, guitarist Chet O'Connell, fiddler Marian Burns and singer Brendon Ham.
The tour will play in Rotorua, Tauranga, Auckland, Taupo, Napier, Palmerston North, Wellington, Wanganui, New Plymouth, Whangarei, Blenheim, Greymouth, Christchurch, Timaru and Dunedin.
