Guitar
Rev. Robert B. Jones (Michigan) has more than twenty years of experience as a performer, musician, storyteller, radio producer/host and music educator. He has opened for and played with some of the finest musicians in the world, including BB King, Bonnie Raitt, Pinetop Perkins, Willie Dixon, John Hammond, Keb Mo’, Howard Armstrong, and many more. Still, Robert considers his greatest honor to be his call to the gospel of ministry. Born in Detroit, of a father from West Pointe, Mississippi and a mother from Conecuh County, Alabama, Robert grew up in a very Southern household. By age 17, Robert had already amassed a record collection of early blues and begun to teach himself guitar and harmonica. Robert developed an educational program called Blues For Schools, which took him into classrooms all over the country, and for the next 15 years Robert polished his craft as a performer and a music educator. Spiritual, blues, work songs, field hollers, country music, folk songs, gospel and original songs - he’ll offer them all at the workshop.
Jeffrey Scott (Virginia) is a Piedmont Blues musician from Culpeper, Virginia, and nephew of the late, legendary blues artist John Jackson. He has been a featured performer at many events and festivals, including the Smithsonian Folklife Festival, the Kennedy Center, and the D.C. Blues Society Festival. Accompanying his vocals with Piedmont-style guitar and old-time banjo playing, Scott draws on the musical sources and community heritage of the Blue Ridge Mountains region, as well as many of the songs, stories, and sayings of his famous uncle. The music he plays ranges from blues to gospel to country dance tunes. Jeff makes his first visit to Port Townsend.
Nat Reese (West Virginia) 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.
Jerron Paxton (Los Angeles, CA) 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.
George Rezendes (Washington) has been playing Country Blues and Ragtime guitar since 1970. At age 14 a friend brought him recordings of John Hurt, Blind Blake, and Leadbelly, and George found his the music that would be his foundation as a musician for the rest of his life. Interested in many styles of music, he filters everything he plays through the rhythms and syncopations that he learned from these masters.
Steve James (Texas) Guitar goniff, mandolin maven and roots/blues road veteran Steve James will return to Port Townsend in 2010. Besides his many international tour dates and critically hailed recordings, Steve is known to fans of "the real" from his appearances on NPR 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.
Guitar and Harmonica
Terry Bean (Mississippi) Terry “Harmonica” Bean is still relatively young, but has decades of experience with the blues. A lifelong resident of Pontotoc, Bean first heard downhome blues at home. His father Eddie Bean, a native of Bruce, sang and played blues guitar and prior to Terry’s birth traveled with an electric blues band. For many years Eddie Bean, who died in 1985, hosted informal music and gambling gatherings at the family’s house on “Bean Hill” in west Pontotoc. He also worked as a sharecropper, enlisting Terry and other of his 24 children to pick cotton in the surrounding fields.
Terry began playing guitar and harmonica as a child, and eventually his father began featuring him at the home gatherings and taking him along to other house parties. Terry is consciously dedicated to keeping alive older styles of blues. “I’m a hill country man,” he says. “What’s stimulating to me is people hearing the blues played like they used to hear it.”
Uke and Guitar
Yes, we have a ukulele track at the blues gathering this year, and yes there is a ukulele blues tradition. Del and Lightnin’ will each split their time between uke and guitar.
Del Rey (Seattle, WA) is a Festival favorite, who quite simply one of the finest players of the guitar and uke active today. Her bass lines are sublime; the melodies she puts against them leave musicians asking the question, “How did she do that?” Del and Lightnin’ will each give a daily uke class during the week.
Lightnin’ Wells (Fountain, NC) breathes new life into the vintage tunes of the 1920s and depression era America. Lightnin’ learned to play harmonica as a young child and taught himself to play the guitar as he developed a strong interest in traditional music. He has presented his brand of acoustic blues throughout NC, the United States and Europe. Lightnin' remains an insatiable student and researcher, studying the various forms of American roots music from bygone eras.
The Ebony Hillbillies (New York) include Henrique Prince - fiddle, Norris Bennett - banjo, David Gibson - washboard and percussion, and William Salter - bass.
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.
Like many New York performers, the Hillbillies can be found doing their thing for tips in subway stations. Henrique Prince, the lead Billie, hails from a family of musicians from St. Thomas, growing up around all kinds of music, from instrumental dance to traditional Caribbean, Hawaiian and country styles. In his preteens, he taught himself to shuffle on the violin, his favorite instrument. His thoughts on the African roots of old-time music: “Africans, particularly West Africans, have had string bands for centuries—the ekonting, is the banjo’s ancestor. The ekonting players were said to have been captured and made to perform on the decks of slave ships to allow the (enslaved Africans) to get enough exercise to survive the Middle Passage. Left off in America, those players became the first black fiddlers and made the earliest gourd banjos. Somewhere in the mountains of Appalachia, knowledge of the banjo got transferred to other groups.”
Banjo
Norris Bennett - see “Ebony Hillbillies”
Mandolin
Gerry Hundt (Indiana) was playing Chicago Blues in taverns before he was allowed to drink in them. Born in Wisconsin and raised in Illinois, Gerry has since lived in Vermont, New York City, Colorado, and Chicago. In Denver, he worked, toured, and recorded with the likes of John-Alex Mason, Ronnie Shellist, and The ClamDaddys. For the last five years Gerry toured the USA and Europe relentlessly as a member of Chicago's Nick Moss & The Flip-Tops, filling the role of "utility man," playing bass, guitar, harmonica, and, of course, mandolin. On the strength of his critically-acclaimed Blue Bella Records CD, "Since Way Back," Gerry was nominated for Blues Music Awards in 2008, 2009, & 2010 for Best Instrumentalist. Gerry now resides in Northwest Indiana, where SteadyGroove - the One Man, Chicago Blues Band - consistently draws fans new and old to deep Chicago Blues.
Harmonica
Phil Wiggins (Takoma Park, MD) was attracted to the blues harp as a young man and began his musical career with some of Washington’s leading blues artists, including Archie Edwards and John Jackson, and attributes his style to his years spent accompanying locally noted slide guitarist and gospel singer Flora Molton.
Phil’s harmonica sound developed from listening to piano and horn players, as well as the music of Sonny Terry, Sonny Boy Williamson I, Little Walter, Big Walter Horton and Junior Wells.
Phil served as Centrum's first Artistic Director for the Port Townsend Acoustic Blues Festival, and it is a pleasure to have him back at Fort Worden.
Hook Herrera (San Jose, CA) brings a pan-cultural appreciation of the blues to Port Townsend. A gifted harmonica and guitar player, Hook's family roots span Italy, Mexico and pre-colonized America.
He has shared the stage with Junior Wells, Hollywood Fats, as well as the Allman Brothers and Gov't Mule.
Piano
Daryl Davis (Washington, DC), has played with such legendary artists as Chuck Berry, the Jordanaires, Muddy Waters’ Legendary Blues Band, and Bo Diddley. 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 (Takoma Park, MD) grew up playing piano, the standard classical lessons kids get, and she played in church and at home. Her sessions at the workshop will focus on freeing yourself from the “chains of classical music,” as she is well aware of how frightening it can be to play a form without written music.
Jenny Peterson (Washington) will serve as the piano assistant this year.
Singing
Ben Payton (Jackson, Mississippi) Ben Payton's voice resonates with a passion for life and his skills as a guitarist evoke the tradition of the original Delta blues greats such as Robert Johnson, Tommy Johnson, Charley Patton, and Son House. Yet Payton has a style all his own. Ben was born in Coila, Mississippi, in the hill country just east of the Delta, and his early musical influences included his grandmother Mabel Johnson’s gospel piano playing and his Uncle Joe Birch’s blues guitar. When in his mid-teens, Ben and his family moved to Chicago, where Ben soon became active in the city’s blues scene. He worked regularly with Bobby Rush and Joe Evans and the Supersonics, who backed many prominent artists as the house band at clubs including Peyton Place, the Green Bunny, and High Chaparral. Ben also played in R&B bands, and has worked with artists Eddie Shaw and the Wolf Gang, Junior Wells, Fenton Robinson, Little Mack Simmons, Barkin’ Bill Smith, Taildragger, Bobby King, Big Moose Walker, and Muddy Waters Jr.
Choir
The gospel choir will be led by Vera Long (Chesterfield, VA). She’s been singing, teaching, and directing choirs and ensembles for over forty years. Vera grew up in a musical family where her father taught her how to sing harmony and how to read notes from hymnals. She attended Howard University with a concentration in vocal supervision. She has directed numerous choirs in the Richmond Metropolitan area, including the WKIE Community Choir, Seed of Abraham, and choirs at various churches throughout the region. Currently, Vera she sings in the Women's Choir of the Saint Paul's Baptist Church, and is a member of a praise team there, the Sounds of Praise.
Washboard
Washboard Chaz Leary, (New Orleans, LA) plays congas, hand percussion, and drums, but in truth he is one of the world’s only professional washboard players. Over the years he’s performed onstage with Bonnie Raitt, John Hammond, and many others.
David Gibson - see “Ebony Hillbillies”
Fiddle
Henrique Prince - see “Ebony Hillbillies”
Fiddle and Guitar Accompaniment
Suzy Thompson (Berkeley, CA) is one of the rare musicians today who has mastered the blues violin, following in the footsteps of Lonnie Chatmon, Clifford Hayes and Eddie Anthony. A powerful blues singer in the styles of Memphis Minnie and Bessie Smith, Suzy is unique in her ability to fiddle and sing at the same time.
At the workshop, she’ll offer two classes - one, she’ll dish up hillbilly fiddle rags, soulful blues, and vintage material for the fiddle, and two, she’ll teach a song-based guitar class, where the focus will be on learning to play easy and satisfying guitar accompaniment for yourself as a singer. Arrangements will be simple and accessible, not requiring any tablature. You’ll learn some standards and also songs from sources like Memphis Minnie, Bessie Smith, Memphis Jug Band, Mississippi Sheiks, covering a wide variety of grooves, tempos and keys.
Stand-up Bass
William Salter - see “Ebony Hillbillies”
Keyboard Accordion
Bruce “Sunpie” Barnes (New Orleans, LA) A true Renaissance Man, Sunpie has traveled to over 35 countries playing his own style of blues, zydeco, Afro-Caribbean, and Afro-Louisiana music. With his group the Louisiana Sunspots, Sunpie has played festival and concerts as far away as Ranvinimi, Finland located 3 hours above the Arctic Circle, Brazil, South Africa, Spain, France, and Martinique to name a few.
He’s also a veteran park ranger with the National Park Service currently working at New Orleans Jazz National Historical Park; Second Chief of the North Side Skull and Bone Gang, one of the oldest existing carnival groups in New Orleans and a member of the Black Men of Labor Social Aid and Pleasure Club.
