The official site of the Port Townsend Acoustic Blues Festival, and other blues education and performance programs offered by Centrum, the nonprofit center for the arts located at Fort Worden State Park, in Port Townsend, Washington.
Thanks to the efforts of some amazing traditional music supporters in Seattle, Port Townsend Acoustic Blues Festival favorite Lauren Sheehan is in the Library of Congress.
Northwest News Network reporter Tom Banse recently interviewed Lauren about her work, and the work of Dyann and Rick Arthur - the couple that have been working hard to boost the representation of women in the traditional music scene through their "MusicBox Project."
Lauren's reaction to being in the Library Of Congress:
"It's unbelievable ... I am only a little drop in the bucket of oral tradition, but I am a drop in the bucket and wonderful players have passed stuff on to me who have now died. All this being in the Library of Congress is so cool because other people can hear that."
2011 Port Townsend Acoustic Blues Festival faculty member Otis Taylor recently performed a 20 minute "Tiny Desk Concert" over at National Public Radio. He even talks about a previous visit to Port Townsend and working with the late John Jackson. Highly recommended viewing and listening...
Taj Mahal will join us midweek for a special concert at McCurdy Pavilion on August 3. In addition to the concert appearance, he will be a featured guest at a meet-and-greet, open exclusively to registered workshop participants, earlier in the day.
Composer, multi-instrumentalist and vocalist Taj Mahal is one of the most prominent and influential figures in late 20th century blues and roots music. Though his career began more than four decades ago with American blues, he has broadened his artistic scope over the years to include music representing virtually every corner of the world. What ties it all together is his insatiable interest in musical discovery. Over the years, his passion and curiosity have led him around the world, and the resulting global perspective is reflected in his music.
There are musicians who travel a well-worn path, and there are musicians who create something new. We’ve asked the amazing Pura Fé to come to the Port Townsend Acoustic Blues Festival in 2011 to teach lap slide guitar and vocals because she brings something unique and special to the blues.
Pura Fé is the founding member of the internationally renowned native woman’s a capella trio, ‘Ulali’, and is recognized for creating a new music genre, bringing Native contemporary music to the forefront of the “mainstream” music industry.
Her singing and lap steel guitar playing are spine-tingling. Her lap slide playing is very individual, she's invented her own style, based on backing herself up.
Curious about the linkages between the Native American experience and the Blues experience? Here’s Pura Fé in her own words on the subject:
"People forget Charley Patton was Choctaw, Scrapper Blackwell was Cherokee, all the early jazz and blues people were mixed; it was like another race that gave birth to this rich musical culture, a race that's largely been forgotten about. My people, the Tuscarora of North Carolina, were known for harboring runaway slaves — black, white and Indian. They were escorts on the Underground Railway and helped stir up the slave uprisings that happened around here, so the races have been mixing and influencing each other for a long time.
"The call-and-response thing in blues and gospel and its modulation is what Indians call Stomp Dance," Pura Fé explained. "The blues shuffle rhythm is a Round Dance, the heartbeat of Native music. Taj Mahal talked about this with me. I had been singing with Lee Gates, who is Albert Collins' cousin, and he pointed out how similar my wailing was to the sound of Lee's guitar. Taj said that the wailing guitar you hear in rock and blues is the sound of the powwow singers; nowhere in Africa do you hear that kind of guitar playing. It's obviously a Native expression."
Port Townsend Acoustic Blues Festival workshop participant Micah Kesselring is making a name for himself at the 2011 International Blues Challenge taking place in Memphis.
Public Radio Station WKNO has a great profile of Micah, who is 17 years old and already in his third IBC. We encourage you to check it out, and listen to the fierce blues this young artist is offering to the world.
We are particularly gratified that Micah talked about the scholarship he received to attend the Port Townsend gathering.
" 'I was awarded scholarship to the Port Townsend Acoustic Blues, and I presented that at the band finals. That was a pretty life-changing achievement,' Kesselring explains. Yes, it was. He met Otis Taylor in Port Townsend, and has since played with Taylor at the prestigious Blues Music Awards in Memphis last year."
We're honored to have the great Nat Reese on faculty this year for the Port Townsend Acoustic Blues Festival. Nat grew up in Virginia listening to his father's guitar and his mother's concertina. After showing some talent on his father's guitar, the family purchased a Martin Tiple 12-string.
Nat began to learn songs from itinerant black musicians who rode the rails throughout the mountain coal camps, company towns that were divided into “colored,” white, and Italian sections.
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 performed together regularly until Armstrong’s death in 2003.
The Virginia Folklife Program produced an excellent video of Nat recording his "Save a Seat for Me" release- we hope that you enjoy it and that it encourages you to come out to Port Townsend to play with Nat.
Born in Orange County, North Carolina in 1929, John Dee has been playing the blues since he was 14. He learned by listening to Blind Boy Fuller's records as well as by playing with musicians who learned directly from Fuller.
John Dee was awarded a National Heritage Fellowship in 1988 and a North Carolina Folk Heritage Award in 1994. While we've presented him here in Port Townsend a few times at our summer festival, we have never brought him to work in a small, intimate setting before.
We still have a couple of spaces left in our Piedmont Blues Intensive - taking place October 15-18. If you are a guitar player who wants to learn Piedmont fingerpicking from the source, you need to join John Dee, along with Michael Roach, and Lightnin' Wells for this gathering. It's a small gathering, and you'll get some seriously premium time with each of these great musicians.
I'm sure many of you have seen the "Stand By Me" video produced in a virtual studio by the "Playing for Change" folks. About one minute and 15 seconds in, 2009 blues workshop faculty Washboard Chaz is a featured participant! Check it out:
