items tagged with Mississippi Valley Blues Society

Four photographers offered us their images from the 2011 Mississippi Valley Blues Festival, and here’s a sampling of their work, covering 18 Blues Fest acts. Many thanks to Cole Carrara, Steve France, Scott Klarkowski, and Norman Sands for sharing their work. (Sands’ full Blues Fest gallery can be found here.)

Eric Gales

Otis Clay

DelGrosso/Del Toro Richardson Band

Dwayne Dopsie & the Zydeco Hellraisers

Ryan McGarvey

Koko Taylor Tribute

Paul Rishell & Annie Raines

The Way of the Blues Revue

Chris Beard

The Candymakers

Linsey Alexander

The Paul Smoker Notet

Chocolate Thunder

Mississippi Heat

Peaches Staten

R.J, Mischo with Earl Cate & Them

Sherman Robertson

Studebaker John & the Hawks

The audience

This year’s Mississippi Valley Blues Festival – co-sponsored by the River Cities’ Reader – will be held July 1 through 3 in downtown Davenport’s LeClaire Park. The event features 27 acts spread over two stages, and the music begins at 5 p.m. on Friday and 2 p.m. on Saturday and Sunday.

In the links that follow, you’ll find interviews with five of this year’s performers.

• Eric Gales: Friday, July 1, 7 p.m., Bandshell
• Lionel Young Band: Saturday, July 2, 4 p.m., Bandshell
• Nellie “Tiger” Travis: Saturday, July 2, 7:30 p.m., Tent Stage
• The Paul Smoker Notet: Sunday, July 3, 5:30 p.m., Tent Stage
• Otis Clay: Sunday, July 3, 9:30 p.m., Tent Stage

In addition, the full festival schedule can be found on the back page of this week’s River Cities’ Reader or at MVBS.org/fest.

Advance tickets – $17 for a single day and $50 for the weekend – are available through June 30 at the Adler Theatre box office, Ticketmaster outlets, and local Hy-Vee stores. Admission at the gate is $20 per day. Children 14 and younger are admitted free with a paid adult.

It would be hard to argue that acclaimed trumpet player and bandleader Paul Smoker isn’t an ideal local-musician-makes-good choice for the 2011 Mississippi Valley Blues Festival. After all, the 70-year-old was raised in Davenport, performed in numerous Quad Cities nightclubs (starting at the tender age of 14), and earned four degrees from the University of Iowa, including a doctorate in music.

Granted, if you were feeling particularly quarrelsome, you could note that Smoker isn’t a blues musician, as he freely admits. But while he and his bandmates – the four-man ensemble the Paul Smoker Notet – will be performing at this year’s festival in the annual slot reserved for jazz artists, it’s not as though the blues is a genre he’s unpracticed in.

When Nellie “Tiger” Travis sang “Wang Dang Doodle” – Koko Taylor’s signature hit – she could never hit the high notes in the chorus: “We gonna pitch a wang dang doodle all night long.”

“I always did it down low,” Travis said in a recent phone interview. Then came Taylor’s funeral in 2009.

“I hit the high note for the first time ever,” Travis said. “That day, it just came out like that. ... I do it all the time now. ... I can’t explain it. I don’t know if it was a spirit thing, or if I was just so full until it just came out ... . I just know I hit it now.”

“Is he soul? Is he blues? Is he gospel? Yes, and he has become an iconic figure in all those genres.” – Chicago Sun-Times

“I’ve always been a bit open-minded about the music,” Otis Clay said in a recent phone interview. He recalled that when he first went professional, he performed a genre of music called jubilee that included show tunes alongside gospel. “In the ’60s we would be all up in the Catskills during the week, and do churches on Sunday. I had done secular even then. [But] I never left gospel. It was all mixed up in there.”

That genre-blending had begun even before Clay – who will receive the Mississippi Valley Blues Society RiverRoad Lifetime Achievement Award before his July 3 festival performance – started touring when he was 18. Born in Waxhaw, Mississippi, in 1942, Clay started singing in the church at four, but even then he was also getting a different music education. “My father was an entrepreneur – he always had a juke joint, and my mother was very religious. But ... for the Saturday-night fish fries, she would cook and sell sandwiches,” Clay said. There he would listen to John Lee Hooker, Muddy Waters, and Howlin’ Wolf on the jukebox. He was seven years old when he experienced his first live concert: Muddy Waters in Clarksdale.

With his 2008 victory in the solo/duo division, and his six-man ensemble’s 2011 triumph in the band category, Lionel Young stands as the first double winner in the history of Memphis’ International Blues Challenge (IBC). Meanwhile, the reviews that he and his Lionel Young Band have amassed would seem to back up the IBC’s choices; Blues Blast Magazine wrote that the group “deserve[s] a place on your must-see list,” and American Blues News called Young himself “an entertainer’s entertainer.”

Yet even given his awards and plaudits, this Colorado-based musician – one of the genre’s few professional violinists – understands the importance of daily practice, and not just at the blues elements you might expect.

“Most people play loud and proud all the time,” says Young during a recent phone interview. “Especially in the blues. But in any music, just like in any conversation, dynamics play a very important part. You know, when people want you to pay attention to what they’re saying, they can either yell at you, or they can say something re-e-eally quiet. If you say something really quiet, people listen a lot harder.

You wouldn’t know it from his discography, but 2010’s Relentless marked a comeback for the blues-rock guitarist/singer/songwriter Eric Gales. The Story of My Life was released in April 2008, and its follow-up came this past July – a pretty standard interval in the music business.

But there’s a hint of his troubles on Relentless’ lead track, “Bad Lawbreaker,” on which he sings: “I’m a bad lawbreaker / Three strikes ain’t enough for me.”

In between those two albums, Gales served 21 months of a three-year sentence for violating the probation he received in 2006 for drug and gun charges. “I was smoking weed on the road and I didn’t want to risk them telling me to come home in the middle of the tour” because of a dirty urine sample, he said in a recent phone interview. “I just said to myself, ‘I’ll deal with it when I get home.’” So he turned himself in after the tour and was sent to prison. (He couldn’t play a guitar for his first six months of incarceration but – because of the intervention of a warden who knew who he was – eventually led a prison band.)

Images by photographer Chris Jones from Bo Ramsey's performance at the 2009 IH Mississippi Valley Blues Festival Click on any photo for a larger version.

(Here you'll find links to all the content in the official guide to the 2009 IH Mississippi Valley Blues Festival, along with previous coverage of this year's performers from the River Cities' Reader.)

Thursday, July 2

Bandshell (Performer Bios)

5 p.m.: Bob Dorr & the Blue Band (2001 interview, 2006 review)

7 p.m.: Peña Brothers Band

9 p.m.: Cobalt Blue

11 p.m.: Roy Rogers & the Delta Rhythm Kings (2009 interview)

Tent Stage (Performer Bios)

5 p.m.: Radoslav Lorkovic (2009 interview)

6:30 p.m.: Hawkeye Herman (2007 interview)

8:30 p.m.: Bo Ramsey (2008 interview)

10:30 p.m.: Saffire - the Uppity Blues Women (2001 interview)

Friday, July 3

Bandshell (Performer Bios)

2 p.m.: The Avey Brothers

4 p.m.: Ellis Kell Band

6 p.m.: Eugene "Hideaway" Bridges

8 p.m.: Ric E Bluez

10 p.m.: Eddy "The Chief" Clearwater (2008 interview)

Tent Stage (Performer Bios)

2 p.m.: T.J. Wheeler

4 p.m.: David "Honeyboy" Edwards

5:30 p.m.: Fiona Boyes (2009 interview)

7:30 p.m.: Dee Alexander (2009 interview)

9:30 p.m.: Sugar Pie DeSanto (2009 interview)

Free Workshops

1 p.m.: Saffire (2001 interview)

2:30 p.m.: Fiona Boyes (2009 interview)

4 p.m.: David Horwitz, Blues Photography

5:30 p.m.: David Berntson

BlueSKool

2:30 p.m.: Winter Blues Academy Kids

3:45 p.m.: David Berntson

5 p.m.: T.J. Wheeler

Saturday, July 4

Bandshell (Performer Bios)

2 p.m.: Steady Rollin' Band

4 p.m.: Robin Rogers (2009 interview)

6 p.m.: Craig Horton

8 p.m.: Larry McCray (2009 interview)

10 p.m.: Rod Piazza & the Mighty Flyers (2004 interview)

Tent Stage (Performer Bios)

2 p.m.: Marquise Knox

3:30 p.m.: Juke Joiunt Duo

5:30 p.m.: Kenny Brown

7:30 p.m.: Diunna Greenleaf

9:30 p.m.: Magic Slim & the Teardrops (2005 interview)

Free Workshops

1 p.m.: T.J. Wheeler

2:30 p.m.: Kenny Brown

4 p.m.: Hawkeye Herman (2007 interview)

5:30 p.m.: Radoslav Lorkovic (2009 interview)

BlueSKool

2:30 p.m.: Winter Blues Academy Kids

3:45 p.m.: T.J. Wheeler

5 p.m.: David Berntson

How to Buy Tickets

Advance tickets for the 2009 IH Mississippi Valley Blues Festival are available at all IH Mississippi Valley Credit Union locations, the River Center/Adler Theatre Box Office, and through Ticketmaster. The price of an advance three-day pass for the fest is $30. Individual fest tickets at the gate will cost $5 on Thursday, July 2, and $15 on Friday, July 3, and Saturday, July 4.

IH Mississippi Valley Credit Union and Mississippi Valley Blues Society members can purchase individual advance fest tickets at a discounted rate of $12.50 each only at IH Mississippi Valley Credit Union locations.

Children 14 and under will be admitted free if accompanied by an adult with a ticket. Tickets are good for admission only on the day printed on the ticket.

The Steady Rollin' Blues Band, 2 p.m.

If you're into the Quad Cities blues scene, you're bound to be into the Steady Rollin' Blues Band featuring Jimmie Lee Adams. The hippest Quad Cities blues fans have been listening to them every Sunday night at Creekside Bar & Grill when they host a jam that's frequented by every local blues musician worth hearing.