Springing the Blues is an annual blues festival held in
Jacksonville Beach, Florida
Jacksonville Beach is a coastal resort city in Duval County, Florida, United States. It was incorporated on May 22, 1907, as Pablo Beach, and would later change its name to Jacksonville Beach in 1925. The city is part of group of communities col ...
. It is one of the largest and oldest blues festivals on the
East Coast of the United States
The East Coast of the United States, also known as the Eastern Seaboard, the Atlantic Coast, and the Atlantic Seaboard, is the coastline along which the Eastern United States meets the North Atlantic Ocean. The eastern seaboard contains the ...
. It was first held in 1990 and has been held yearly on the first weekend of April.
History
The first Springing the Blues festival was held in 1991. The 20th anniversary edition in 2010 featured new features including an exhibit at Beaches Historical Museum and a story contest. The event is free.
Past festival lineups
Past performers have included
Joe Bonamassa
Joseph Leonard Bonamassa ( ; born May 8, 1977) is an American blues rock guitarist, singer and songwriter. He started his career at age twelve, when he opened for B.B. King. Since 2000, Bonamassa has released fifteen solo albums through his ind ...
,
Derek Trucks
Derek Trucks (born June 8, 1979) is an American guitarist, songwriter, and founder of The Derek Trucks Band. He became an official member of The Allman Brothers Band in 1999. In 2010, he formed the Tedeschi Trucks Band with his wife, blues s ...
Larry McCray
Larry McCray (born April 5, 1960), is an American blues guitarist and singer from Magnolia, Arkansas.
Early life
McCray, the second youngest of nine siblings, grew up living on a farm.
Tinsley Ellis
Tinsley Ellis (born June 4, 1957) is an American blues and rock musician, who was born in Atlanta, Georgia, United States, and grew up in South Florida. According to ''Billboard'', "nobody has released more consistently excellent blues albums ...
,
Saffire – The Uppity Blues Women Saffire – The Uppity Blues Women was a three-woman blues musical ensemble in the Washington, D.C. area. It was founded in 1984 by Ann Rabson, Gaye Adegbalola and Earlene Lewis. Lewis separated from the band in 1992 and was replaced by Andra F ...
,
Maurice John Vaughn
Maurice John Vaughn (born May 10, 1952) is an American blues musician from Chicago, Illinois, United States. He is a guitarist, saxophonist, keyboardist and singer.
Biography
Vaughn began playing professionally in 1968 as a saxophonist in Chicag ...
,
Earl King
Earl Silas Johnson IV (February 7, 1934 – April 17, 2003), known as Earl King, was an American singer, guit ...
Susan Tedeschi
Susan Tedeschi (; born November 9, 1970) is an American singer and guitarist. A multiple Grammy Award nominee, she is a member of the Tedeschi Trucks Band, a conglomeration of her band, her husband Derek Trucks’ and other musicians.
Early ...
,
North Mississippi Allstars
North Mississippi Allstars is an American blues and southern rock band from Hernando, Mississippi, founded in 1996. The band is currently composed of brothers Luther Dickinson (guitar, lowebow, vocals) and Cody Dickinson (drums, keyboards, ele ...
,
Tab Benoit
Tab Benoit (born November 17, 1967) is an American blues guitarist, musician, and singer. His playing combines a number of blues styles, primarily Delta blues.
He plays a stock 1972 Fender Telecaster Thinline electric guitar and writes his ow ...
,
Little Jimmy King
Emmanuel Lynn Gales (December 4, 1964 – July 19, 2002), known professionally as Little Jimmy King, was an American Memphis blues guitarist, singer and songwriter. A left-handed guitarist who played the instrument upside down, he concocted his ...
Clarence "Gatemouth" Brown
Clarence "Gatemouth" Brown (April 18, 1924 – September 10, 2005) was an American singer and multi-instrumentalist from Louisiana. He won a Grammy Award for Best Traditional Blues Album in 1983 for his album, ''Alright Again!''.
Early life
B ...
,
Ruby Wilson
Ruby Wilson (February 29, 1948 – August 12, 2016) was an American blues and gospel singer and actress. She was known as "The Queen of Beale Street" as she sang in clubs on Beale Street, Memphis, Tennessee, for over 40 years. She had a success ...
,
Charlie Musselwhite
Charles Douglas Musselwhite (born January 31, 1944) is an American electric blues harmonica player and bandleader, one of the white bluesmen who came to prominence, along with Mike Bloomfield, Paul Butterfield, and Elvin Bishop, as a pivotal ...
Robert Jr. Lockwood
Robert Lockwood Jr. (March 27, 1915 – November 21, 2006) was an American Delta blues guitarist, who recorded for Chess Records and other Chicago labels in the 1950s and 1960s. He was the only guitarist to have learned to play directly fr ...
Victor Wainwright
Victor Lawton Wainwright, Jr. (born February 4, 1981) is an American blues and boogie-woogie singer, songwriter, and pianist. Wainwright's musical style was described by the American Blues Scene magazine in 2013 as "honky-tonk and boogie, with ...
and the Wildroots,
R. L. Burnside
R. L. Burnside (November 23, 1926 – September 1, 2005) was an American blues singer, songwriter and guitarist. He played music for much of his life but received little recognition before the early 1990s. In the latter half of that decade, Burn ...
Smokey Wilson
Robert Lee "Smokey" Wilson (July 11, 1936 – September 8, 2015) was an American West Coast blues guitarist. He spent most of his career performing West Coast blues and juke joint blues in Los Angeles, California. He recorded a number of albums ...
,
Coco Montoya
Coco Montoya (born Henry Montoya, October 2, 1951, Santa Monica, California) is an American blues guitarist and singer and former member of John Mayall & the Bluesbreakers.
Musical career
Montoya's career began in the mid-1970s when Albert Co ...
,
Smokin' Joe Kubek
Smokin' Joe Kubek (November 30, 1956 – October 11, 2015) was an American Texas blues electric guitarist, songwriter and performer.
Biography
Born in Grove City, Pennsylvania, Kubek grew up in the Dallas, Texas area. In the 1970s during his tee ...
,
JJ Grey & MOFRO
JJ Grey & Mofro (formerly Mofro) is an American Southern soul- rock band from Jacksonville, Florida.
History Early career
The early days of Mofro can be traced back to the mid-nineties when John Higginbotham aka "JJ Grey" and Daryl Hance signed ...
,
Bnois King
Bnois King (born January 21, 1943) (pronounced "buh-noise")Bridget Kelly Band.
Accolades
*Named by ''
DownBeat
' (styled in all caps) is an American music magazine devoted to "jazz, blues and beyond", the last word indicating its expansion beyond the jazz realm which it covered exclusively in previous years. The publication was established in 1934 in Chi ...
'' magazine as one of the top 50 Music Festivals in the World.
*Named by SouthEast Tourism Society as one of the top 20 destination events in the country.
*Voted in 1997 as "Best Festival in Northeast Florida" by the ''
Folio Weekly
''Folio Weekly'' is an alternative weekly newspaper published in Jacksonville, Florida. It covers topics such as politics, lifestyle, and entertainment.
It is the largest and most influential alternative paper in Northeast Florida and is distribut ...
'' magazine annual poll.
*Sam Veal is the festival's founder. Springing the Blues was the first festival he produced.
See also
*
List of blues festivals
Blues festivals are music festivals which focus on blues music. Blues is a genreKunzler's dictionary of Jazz provides two separate entries: blues, an originally African-American genre (p.128), and the blues form, a widespread musical form (p.131 ...
*
List of folk festivals
A folk festival celebrates traditional folk crafts and folk music. This list includes folk festivals worldwide, except those with only a partial focus on folk music or arts. Folk festivals may also feature folk dance or ethnic foods.
Handicraf ...