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.
Chuck Berry aficionado Peter O'Neil came out to Port Townsend for the 2010 Port Townsend Acoustic Blues Festival. The draw for him was faculty member Daryl Davis, who in addition to being an outstanding and complex musician in his own right, also serves as musical director for Berry.
Peter was kind enough to write about his experience, and it is one of the most informative reviews (from a concert-going perspective) we've seen. He talks about Daryl's musical effort to inform the public about the true roots of Rock-n-Roll, Annieville Blues, and also gives a nice tourist snapshot of Port Townsend.
"Aside from great music, what the show gave me was a better sense of who
Daryl Davis is: not only a great musician and entertainer, but also an
historian and teacher. He teaches the audience where the music comes
from, and obviously takes huge pleasure in teaching his craft to the
workshop attendees."
We love everything about the Port Townsend Acoustic Blues Festival, but Blues in the Clubs seems to set the town ablaze with music. On Friday and Saturday night, the artist faculty head to numerous venues in Port Townsend's historic downtown and uptown districts to play sets in all sorts of interesting combinations.
It's jamming at its finest, and an experience you don't want to miss. One cover each night gives you access to an amazing variety of musicians. Sets begin at 9pm, 10pm, and 11pm.
Tickets are available online, or by calling 800-746-1982.You can also get club tickets at the door of each venue while the music is playing. "Will Call" tickets can be picked up at the Upstage.
Visit our Blues in the Clubs page for the complete schedule. Here is a list of the clubs - and please - show them how much you value their participation by purchasing food and beverages:
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.
Each year, hundreds of blues musicians descend on Fort Worden State
Park, turning the historic facility in to a giant resonating chamber for
acoustic blues music. The Park comes alive, and so does each musician
who makes it happen.
After a week of workshops, we present the
renowned artist/faculty in a series of public performances - in Fort
Worden's WWI-era McCurdy Pavilion, as well as intimate club
performances in Port Townsend's historic downtown district.
Today, we're going to preview the Friday, August 6 evening mainstage performance at McCurdy Pavilion.
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.
Lightnin’ Wells: Blues, Rags and Roots From a Piedmont Master
David Bromberg Quartet: Instrumental Virtuosity Meets
Spontaneous Energy and Humor
Lightnin' Wells Hailing from Fountain, North Carolina, Lightnin' Wells breathes new life into the vintage tunes of the 1920s and depression era
America.
He 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, and he is a favorite of workshop participants and Festival audiences, who enjoy his guitar, banjo and uke mastery.
David Bromberg We're excited to welcome David Bromberg back to Port Townsend after almost 20 years! His live shows remain as unique as ever; the give and take between band members
is complete, spontaneous, and totally sincere.
Bromberg started playing guitar at age 13. He heard Pete Seeger and
The Weavers and, through them, Reverend Gary Davis who became his
mentor. He then discovered Big Bill Broonzy, Muddy Waters and the
Chicago blues. His sensitive and versatile approach to
guitar-playing earned him jobs as a backing musician for Tom Paxton,
Jerry Jeff Walker and Rosalie Sorrels, among others. He became a
first-call, hired gun guitarist for recording sessions, ultimately
playing on hundreds of records by artists including Bob Dylan, Link
Wray, The Eagles, Ringo Starr, Willie Nelson, and Carly Simon. Solo success soon followed, receiving a Grammy nomination in 2007 for his solo release Try
Me One More Time.
Blues in the Clubs is perhaps the signature experience of the Port
Townsend Acoustic Blues Festival. On Friday and Saturday night, dozens of musicians fan out to numerous venues in Port Townsend's historic
downtown and uptown districts to play sets in all sorts of interesting
combinations.
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.
We'd
like to take a moment to thank all of the passionate workshop
participants and blues fans who helped transform Port
Townsend into the acoustic blues capital of the nation during the 2009 Port Townsend Acoustic Blues Festival.
Did you attend the workshop, or attend a blues show? Please share
your photos and videos with us. A great place to do that is on our Blues Community site.
Join the site today (it's free), and connect with your fellow blues fans.
We've already got plenty videos from the week online, with more to come--especially when you add YOURS.
If you use Flickr and or YouTube, simply tag your photos and videos with "porttownsendblues09" and we'll showcase them here.
Artistic Director Corey Harris has put together a great weekend of music, and it all kicked into high-gear last night during Blues in the Clubs. At the end of the post is a video of one of Friday's club venues. After our afternoon and evening mainstage shows today (tickets now available at the gate), we return to the clubs once more - both downtown and at Fort Worden State Park.
We have an informal blues shuttle running tonight starting at 9pm between the Fort (building 204) and downtown so that you can see it all - club tickets are available at the mainstage concerts, or at the door of each club.
Online
and phone sales (800-838-3006) for the Port Townsend Acoustic Blues Festival will
continue through Friday morning at 9am.
After that, all remaining
tickets will be sold at the McCurdy Pavilion Box Office, which will
open for sales 90 minutes before each show. (Blues in the Clubs tickets may be purchased at each club door during the Festival.)
If Saturday afternoon's reserved seating sells out, we will offer lawn seating.
