The announcement came 10 days after the final notes of the 2015 Mississippi Valley Blues Festival should have filled LeClaire Park: There would be no 2015 Mississippi Valley Blues Festival.

Citing financial difficulties, on July 15 the Mississippi Valley Blues Society (MVBS) said that it had canceled the festival. This followed a decision in February to move the blues fest from its traditional Independence Day weekend to the Labor Day weekend, and to reduce it from three days to two - changes designed to lessen the chance the event would be flooded out of LeClaire Park, to give the blues society the opportunity to raise more money, and to cut costs. The board was sharply divided on both the date-change and cancellation votes.

There are several cruel ironies here.

The cancellation comes a year after the Blues Foundation honored the festival with a Keeping the Blues Alive award for U.S. festivals, citing the Quad Cities event as "one of the longest-running, most-prestigious blues festivals in the world."

And there was no Fourth of July flooding in LeClaire Park this year, and the weather was rain-free and just about perfect. Had the festival happened at its normal time - as it had for the past 30 years - the MVBS would very likely have shored up its financial position significantly. "It would have been the best weather we've had in 16 years," said MVBS Board Member Ric Burris.

Instead, the organization now faces an existential crisis. Will the MVBS be able to put on a festival next year - as its president and many board members hope to? How will the group rebuild its board and fundraising efforts in the wake of this year's cancellation? And would a Mississippi Valley Blues Society without the blues fest be a shell of its former self - or could it perhaps be a stronger organization more focused on its education programs and smaller concerts?

George Thorogood's parents encouraged him to pursue a music career, but to hear the guitarist/singer/songwriter tell it, they didn't have much choice. They didn't see any more-conventional options to point him toward - and they were just glad he wasn't following in the tracks of his brothers.

"My older brothers, they were real terrors," Thorogood said in a recent phone interview. "They were like the Dennis Hoppers and the James Deans of the Delaware area on their motorcycles. ... My parents almost wept when I told them I wanted a guitar for a Christmas present. They were so pleased they couldn't see straight. And once they saw me perform once or twice, they said, 'This is what he's destined to do. All he has to do is stay with it long enough to get good at it.' And they also said this to me: 'George, you can't work.' That's true. I can't. I'm not good at it. Could you imagine Tom Petty working in an accountant firm? ... Some people are cut out to do what it is they do."

And, Thorogood added, it wasn't merely a hunch his parents had about him being a natural performer: "They didn't think it. They knew it. ... You know your own children."

Of course, 40 years into the career of George Thorogood & The Destroyers, it's more than clear Thorogood's parents were right about their son.

If you're one of your parents' 11 children and are looking for something rewarding and fun to do with your 10 brothers and sisters, there are actually a number of options to choose from. You could, for example, form a football team. Or a soccer team. Or a field-hockey team.

Or, you could do what the children of East Moline's Charles and Barbara Westbrook did: You could form your own band.

"We did all of it," says Delores Westbrook-Tingle of her and her siblings' ensemble the Westbrook Singers, who began performing together in 1975. "I mean, some of us just played instruments - we had a couple of drummers, keyboard players, a guitar, a bass guitar ... . So when we actually started, all 11 of us, we had all our musicians and the vocalists, as well." She laughs. "We were pretty much self-contained."

Nowadays, however, the official number of full-time Westbrook Singers stops at four; after seven performers either moved from the area or retired from the group, the current lineup consists of Delores, brother Gary, and sisters Brenda Westbrook-Lee and Cynthia Westbrook-Bryson. Yet given the gospel quartet's smooth, stirring vocals and harmonies that clearly come from lifetimes of practice together, no one who has heard the group in its numerous concert and festival sets, CDs, or televised specials for the Quad Cities TV station WQPT could argue that they're getting only four-11ths of a great thing.

Roy Book Binder considers last year's The Good Book to be his most important album. And he never thought it would happen.

"I didn't really want to make any more records," he said in a recent phone interview. "I didn't want to do any more covers of [Mississippi] John Hurt and this one and that one. I figured, 70 years old coming up, why bother? ... I kept telling people, 'When I write enough songs, I'm going to put out an album.' I never thought I'd really do it."

But, he said, there was another pull, the simple fact of getting older: "If I don't make my mark soon, I ain't ever going to make it."

He said he had two good songs, and "I did a live album [2005's Live at the Fur Peace Station] just to get them out before I died, you know?"

When people would ask about a new album, Binder said, he'd pay lip service to the idea: "I kept saying it would be out in the spring, but it never was. Then finally I said, 'It's really going to be out in the spring.'"

But when he returned home in the winter from his annual six-month trek around the country, his wife asked him how it was going. "I got out my notebooks and my pads," he said, "and I had like three and a half songs written, plus the two that I put on the live album ... ." Then, during a visit to the Caribbean, "the songs came to me."

The resulting record, he said, will likely be his legacy.