Port Townsend Blues Performance Preview: Saturday, August 7

Saturday afternoon at the Port Townsend Acoustic Blues Festival is a highlight of summer in Port Townsend. When the sun is out, we open the huge hangar doors of McCurdy Pavilion, letting audience members and music spill out on to Littlefield Green. It's simply a great day of music.

This year, we have an especially fun group of performers doing their best to take you down-home - country blues style.

Tickets for all Blues Festival performances are available online, or by calling 800-746-1982. Purchase Festival Packages and Save! Allfest Package: $74/$9; Mainstage Package:$44/$60.

Saturday, August 7
Down-Home Country BluesFest
McCurdy Pavilion | 1:30 pm | $18/$24/$33

The Ebony Hillbillies: One of the Last Black String Bands
Steve James: Roots and Blues via Austin, Texas
Nat Reese and Phil Wiggins: West Virginia Songster with Piedmont Master
The Jerron Paxton Band: Blues Guitar/ Piano Prodigy Joined By a Host of Festival Friends

Ebony Hillbillies
In Southern states in the 19th century up to the ’20s and ’30s, it wasn’t uncommon to hear a hoedown coming from a black man’s fiddle. At the time, music was an interracial affair. White and black musicians seldom played together, but they did share repertoires and traditions—Cajun waltzes, Appalachian murder ballads and the blues.

New York’s Ebony Hillbillies, a string band composed entirely of African Americans, diversifies the foot-stompin’, fiddle-sawin’ archaic country music typically dominated by white players. The 19th century string band sound produced by a core of fiddle, banjo and guitar was a key element in the genesis of blues music, and seeing black musicians reclaim the sound that was once theirs is refreshing. They provide a great introduction to a largely forgotten African American cultural legacy.

Steve James
Guitar goniff, mandolin maven and roots/blues road veteran Steve James is known for his high energy performances and technical virtuosity. Besides his many international tour dates and critically hailed recordings, Steve is known to fans of "the real" from his appearances on NPR's Morning Edition, A Prairie Home Companion and many other syndicated broadcasts; also numerous books, articles and lessons for Acoustic Guitar and instructional DVDs for Homespun.

Nat Reese and Phil Wiggins
We’re extremely honored that Nathaniel Hawthorne “Nat” Reese will make his first visit to Port Townsend this summer. Mr. Reese was born March 4, 1924 in Salem, Virginia to Thomas Walker Reese and Rosa Sylvester Caroline Wilson Reese. Thomas was originally from Montgomery, Alabama, and Rosa from Bessemer, Alabama. The family moved to West Virginia when Nat was four, and it was in the coal company towns that Nat was exposed to many itinerant musicians, and many kinds of music. In 1939, Nat first met and performed with multi-instrumentalist Howard Armstrong, who was traveling through and playing the coal camp circuit from his home in Tennessee. The duo was to perform together with increasing regularity over the next sixty-five years until Armstrong’s death in 2003.

Nat will be performing with the great Phil Wiggins, who was Centrum's first Artistic Director for Blues.

Jerron Paxton
An amazing young musician based out of Los Angeles, Jerron Paxton plays guitar, banjo, piano, harmonica, and washboard. While there are few young African American musicians learning country blues in the communities from which it arose, there is a definite increase in younger black musicians learning and playing blues in much the same way that young white people did forty years ago - by listening to recordings and personally experimenting on their instrument. Jerron Paxton is a supreme example of this, a young man from Watts with a huge repertoire of prewar blues and rags, and an uncanny ability to channel the spirit of pre-war guitar and piano blues music.