The Port Townsend Country Blues Festival: Artist Faculty
The heart of Centrum's Country Blues Workshop is its faculty. Each year, led by Artistic Director Phil Wiggins, we scour the continent to bring you the best teachers and players--masters who are steeped in the traditions of acoustic blues. Their knowledge, stories, musicianship and commitment to the community are part of what makes this week such a special celebration of the blues.
Here is our 2008 faculty
GUITAR
In 1995, Mike Dowling launched his solo performance career with the release of the critically acclaimed Swamp Dog Blues. Dowling’s engaging voice, self-deprecating wit, and arsenal of elegant interpretations of old blues are well known—as is the quality of tone he produces when he lays a slide on a string.
Ari Eisinger is a guitarist and singer who specializes in the blues of the nineteen-twenties and nineteen-thirties. His album You Don’t Understand has been lauded in multiple publications. Eisinger tours extensively, playing blues from the golden age all across the United States.
Rick Franklin plays the Piedmont blues. In addition to his solo performances, he also performs with the popular acoustic blues trio Franklin, Harpe, and Usilton. The group has released Hokum Blues and Doin’ the Dozens. Franklin’s third release, Searching for Frank is a joint project with Mike Baytop.
Before he became known as a blues singer, Robert Jones hosted a radio show in Detroit, and hosted jam sessions at a local club. Now Jones, who is also a minister, is a highly regarded interpreter of acoustic blues. Influenced by Son House, who was also a minister, Jones writes many of the songs he performs, and is also a talented visual artist.
John Miller is a highly respected composer and a complete musician whose teaching is legendary. An authority on the music of many blues greats—including Bo Carter, Blind Blake, and the Reverend Davis—he will devote class time to helping participants learn to listen, observe and experiment.
W.C. Handy-award-winner Louisiana Red has been an active contributor to the blues world for over half a century. His tortured past and peerless, chameleonic understanding of blues music have made him an international legend. Red is in the moment when he plays, his music filled with raw unpredictable emotion.
Del Rey’s guitar playing combines country blues, stride piano, classic jazz, and hillbilly boogie through the sensibility of an autodidact trailer-park esthete. This Port Townsend Country Blues Festival favorite has recorded four solo albums, When The Levee Breaks, X-Rey Guitar, Hot Sauce, and Boogie Mysterioso.
Lightnin’ Wells breathes new life into the vintage tunes of Depression-era America, employing various stringed instruments in a dynamic style which he has developed in over thirty years of performing experience. Wells learned to play harmonica as a young child and taught himself to play the guitar.
Warner Williams has been plying his musical wares for the past sixty-five years. Over the last two decades he has partnered with harmonica player and percussionist Jay Summerour. They have established themselves as master musicians equally at home on the festival circuit or at a friend’s fish fry. Warner is essentially one of the last living “songsters.”
Elijah Wald has been a musician since age seven. He has toured the world as a guitarist and singer, spending years wandering around Europe, Asia, Africa, and Central America. He fronted a blues band in Seville, a swing duo in Antwerp, and a rock band at the Grand Hotel in Colombo, Sri Lanka.
Nineteen-year-old Jerron Paxton says, “I am a po’ boy born in California and raised by Louisiana swamp folk, can speak a little Cajun and will whip yo' ass on the harmonica.” This blind musician also plays guitar, banjo, and washboard, and is one of the best of a rising crop of young African-American musicians learning country blues in the communities from which it arose.
Terry “Harmonica” Bean, from Pontotoc, Mississippi, reflects the true nature of the blues. His style is raw and pure, and he uses a style of fingerpicking that only a student of the real origins of American music, much of which finds its roots in the Mississippi Delta, would recognize.
During Curley Cooke’s forty-year career in the music business he has performed and/or recorded with such greats as Chuck Berry, Jerry Garcia, Ben Sidran, John Lee Hooker, James Cotton, Freddie King, Boz Scaggs, and many others. He also is the founder of a highly successful non-profit organization called Pacific Northwest Blues in the Schools.
MANDOLIN
Ted Howard hails from Sitka, Alaska. He plays mandolin and guitar with the acoustic roots music band Belly Meat, and has opened for Garrison Keillor. His classes will be focused on “blues jam survival skills,” with the goal to give mandolin players tools and techniques for playing in jam sessions.
Steve James is known internationally for his playing, songcraft, and original approach to the roots music he’s heard since childhood. His studio work, both solo and in support of other artists, has earned him many accolades, including Grammy nominations.
FIDDLE
Suzy Thompson’s newest CD, Stop and Listen is a mix of oldtime fiddle rags and blues songs, with many friends helping out, including Del Rey, Eric Thompson, Ben Sigelman, Larry Hanks, Thompson String Ticklers, and Kate Brislin. She plays old-time blues fiddle and is a dynamite singer.
PIANO
Blues prodigy Arthur Migliazza was heavily influenced by Otis Spann, Jimmy Yancey, and Professor Longhair. By the time he was in high school, he was already fronting his own band. In 2004, he released his debut CD, and in 2006 released his second: Pumping Ivories. This year, he makes his first visit to the Port Townsend Country Blues Festival.
Daryl Davis has played with such legendary artists as Chuck Berry, the Jordanaires, Muddy Waters’ Legendary Blues Band, The Coasters, and Bo Diddley to name a few. Daryl is much more than a musician, however. On a quest to explore racism, Daryl met with dozens of Ku Klux Klan members, many of whom gave him their robes and hoods to symbolize the rescinding of their beliefs.
Judy LaPrade is a blues piano player who is recovering from classical piano lessons and is thrilled her natural ability to play by ear survived. She shares that transition in her beginning piano class, breaking blues down to the basics.
HARMONICA
Jay Summerour has been involved with music for well over forty years. Beginning his musical education on the trumpet at age seven, Summerour learned the harmonica from his grandfather. Largely self-taught, Summerour picked up bits and pieces from “folks he ran into”—like Sonny Terry, James Cotton and Magic Dick.
Allen Holmes has been a performer, arranger, and instructor at music gatherings for ten years, including the SPAH and Buckeye harmonica festivals. He now plays the stand-up bass, harmonica, and sings simultaneously as a one man band playing blues, jazz, and gospel. He continues to play with Alison Radcliffe and can be heard at various venues locally in the Washington DC area as well as across the country.
Annette Taborn has been a vocalist and harp player for more than 20 years. She has played music all over the US, overseas in the Netherlands, and now in the Pacific Northwest where she lives in Seattle, Washington. Annette began teaching "Blues in Schools" in 1994, with the mission to enhance young people's appreciation and respect for the Blues and to use Blues music as a tool to promote racial harmony through diversity.
VOCALS
Alison Radcliffe has been singing all of her life. She says, "Music is the embodiment of truth and spirituals are the embodiment of music." She will lead a singing class once a day during the workshop.
Resa Gibbs, the primary vocalist with M.S.G., is from Virginia Beach, Virginia. She is known for her silky, soulful and heartfelt sound. Resa sang background vocals on Gaye Adegbalola’s CD Bitter Sweet Blues. Resa will lead a singing class once a day during the workshop.
GOSPEL CHOIR
Shirley Smith has shared the stage with many of gospel music’s most prolific artists, such as Cece Winans, Vickie Winans, Yolanda Adams, Mark Kibble, Bruce Allen, and Fred Hammond. She is currently the Minister of Music at The Potter’s House Christian Fellowship in Jacksonville, Florida.
IN ADDITION…
Phil Wiggins & John Cephas
In addition to the above, the legendary blues duo Cephas & Wiggins (National Heritage Award-winning blues guitarist John Cephas and Artistic Director Phil Wiggins, Artistic Director for the Festival,) will be in residence. Cephas and Wiggins are leading exponents of the Piedmont Blues—specifically the Piedmont-style guitar, which features alternates the thumb and finger, with the thumb creating a steady, loping bass as the melody is simultaneously picked out on the treble strings. The duo has performed at blues festivals all over the world and entertained at President Clinton’s inaugural party in 1997. They have also received W.C. Handy awards for “Blues Entertainers of the Year” and “Best Traditional Album of the Year.”
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