Once a year, banjos, guitars, violins, and harmonicas are a common sight along with plates of Cajun food and voluminous cups of fresh lemonade. For the 10th consecutive year, the sweet sounds of live music and the scent of BBQ floated across the Antioch College campus.
Through the efforts of a dedicated team of volunteers, African American Cross-Cultural Works presented Blues/ Jazz Music Fest ’07 to southwestern Ohio. Residents of the village of Yellow Springs, that hosted the event, as well as festival goers from other parts of Ohio and beyond converged on the west edge of the college campus to enjoy a weekend of live blues and other music.
Guy Davis, a blues performer, has been a part of the festival since its inception 10 years ago. “It’s a small-town festival, sometimes with big members,” he explains. Even so, within the relatively small grounds allotted to the festival, everything from ‘Big Mama’s Bar-B-Que Ribs’ (“Ribs so good make you wanna slap your mama”) to jugglers, to Antioch McGregor recruiters, managed to find a place on the grass and along
the pathways.
The blues festival kicked off on Wednesday the fifth in the elegantly wood panelled sanctuary of the Central Chapel A.M.E. Church. A standing-room-only audience enthusiastically enjoy an evening of soulful gospel music. Everyone from small children to elderly villagers tapped toes, swayed to and fro, or clapped fervently to the lively melodies. An offering was taken and Pastor John Freeman led a prayer. “There are a lot of storms right now that aren’t related to the weather,” the pastor said.
But it is events such as the blues festival that respond to such storms by bringing people together. Sparky Elliott, a former student at Antioch College and guitarist in The Ark Band, cited the community as one of the aspects of Yellow Springs that he loved most. “I’ve had the best two years of my life in this place,” he said, “and it’s because of the people.” And the people are what makes the blues festival such a hit.
“It’s a place where “people rub shoulders with each other,” said Guy Davis. He opened up the Saturday festivities with a small group on the Innovation Stage. No more than a slightly raised platform, the stage, covered by an awning, hosted some of the most impassioned and diverse music of the weekend. From turntabling, to blues, to rap backed up by a harmonica, the Innovation Stage was the place for down-home, spontaneous music.
Both Friday and Saturday turned out to be something of a disappointing for many of the fans who had come to hear headliners like Al Caldwell and The Travelling Hillbillies and Magnolia Bolthead. Rain and overcast skies plagued both days and left the grounds only sparsely occupied. The weather went so far as to force Friday’s music to be cancelled completely. This year was the first time in the festival’s history that it had rained, said Elizabeth Tobey, a 10-year-veteran of the festival.
The sentiment on Saturday afternoon however, was one of pertinacity. As the sky erupted with rain, showgoers took refuge beneath trees and musicians continued to play as they moved under tarps Minutes before the rain, one musician announced “We don’t know if it’s going to rain or not, but if it does, we’re going into the theatre. It’s the blues either way.”
By evening, the theatre was indeed where most of the day’s headliners ended up. The show’s move inside created a logistical quandary when the maximum occupancy of the much smaller theatre was reached and a security guard posted outside the main door to keep further blues fans out. Those wishing to enter were told the crowd inside would be sent out around 9:30pm and a new batch would be brought in. It was a discouraging end to a gloomy day for many at the festival who had persevered in spite of the weather.
Turnout on Sunday, the last day of the festival, was a marked improvement. The presence of sunshine helped fans get into the mood for an afternoon of life music and dancing. Headliners returned to the amphitheatre and bands like The Ark Band with their reggae and calypso music created the perfect atmosphere to get the audience off their seats into the open air arena. Festivalgoers of all ages took to the dance floor to enjoy the music and weather.
While this year’s festival was neither as well attended nor publicized as the previous when comedian Dave Chappelle hosted the show, most people left pleased. Fans of the blues came for the event itself and they got what they had come to hear. “We mostly come to hear who’s here,” said one festivalgoer from Springfield.
Fans of the blues must now wait another year to enjoy the varied pleasures of the AACW blues festival once more.
Tag: AACW
Blues Fest, Inteview with Guy Davis
Erykha Badu performs at AACW Blues Fest – Photo by: Kari Thompson
By Wesley Hiserman
Last weekend Antioch College hosted the African American Cross Cultural Works’ Blues Fest. The festival followed a Gospel Fest at the Central Chapel A.M.F. on Wednesday and, on Thursday a lecture by Kevin Dean of the Ringling School of Art and Design and presentation by steel drum manufacturer Panyard, Inc.
The AACW Blues Fest started with the Terra City Blues Band, W.G. Blues Band, Karen Patterson Jazz Ensemble, and the Ark Band on Friday. The weekend featured sets by Guy Davis, Sangmelé, Jimi Vincent and Stallion, Nerak Roth Patterson, Mo’ Blues, Goapele, Frédéric Yonnet and Erykah Badu. Badu’s set ended the festival on Sunday a few hours after Yellow Springs mayor David Foubert named September eighth through tenth “African American Culture Week.? During this event that might be better described as “African American Culture Weekend,? I got the opportunity to sit down with acoustic blues master Guy Davis. Davis’ original songs are wellwritten and beautifully performed and while playing the oldest form of blues in the festival, he admits that his music is at best a perfectionist’s imitation of the original blues.
“I am not a bluesman, as I’m called. If they call me that, I don’t say anything. What I am is a blues musician,? he said Saturday night shortly after playing his set and making a guest appearance during roots band Sangmele’s. Davis is the son of two successful actors, Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee. He never experienced the anguish that normally corresponds to those who perform the same old style blues as he. As he (and his website) puts it, the only cotton he’s ever picked was his underwear off the floor. His understanding instead stems from an emotional awareness of history.
“My blues, I believe, is ancient blues. My spirit recognizes spirits that were here so, so long ago who came to this country in chains. And since that time, even when the chains were taken off by a proclamation of law, there were invisible chains still that held them down economically and racially. The music that I sing comes directly from those people as they came to rise up and go up off the farms where they labored even after slavery in something resembling indentured servitude.
“Sometimes the blues is entertaining, it’s sexy, it’s about a man who’s got a lot of girlfriends. Or it’s about a woman who lives in a man’s world doing the things that men can do. You know, it can be funny, it can be sad, blues can be many things but I think it originates in a cry of the human spirit for humanity, just for treatment as a human being. That’s where I think blues originates and that’s where I think my blues reaches back to.?
As for what his relationship is to real bluesmen, Davis is certain.
“A bluesman is somebody who came up in the time of Jim Crow and the time of unequal housing, unequal education, unequal health opportunities, job opportunities and such. They came up in a world where the black man was last and the white man was first no matter what else.
“I do not live in that world, although I do see remnants of that world. Some of that ignorance still exists but the world is no longer that and I am not a bluesman. I don’t show up in clubs with a knife looking for a fight. I don’t show up in clubs looking to get drunk because my blues heroes apparently, according to history, got drunk.
“…I could believe that it might help for a man to sing the blues if he has suffered true, deep, utter heartbreak, if he’s been so broke he’s had to beg for money, if his only comfort was newspapers stuffed in his clothing or a warm pint of some kind of whiskey.
“However, remember the world is a progressive experience. The men who came up with the blues dreamed that the world would not truly be like that always and their ancestors, the slaves, dreamt that the would would not be like that always. They wanted a world where their children could grow up and never know what a nigger was, and never know what it was like to be so poor that you had to stuff cardboard into the bottoms of the shoes of your children so that they could walk to school if they could even go to school.?
As a product of this progressive world some 68 years after the death of legendary bluesman Robert Johnson, whose biographical documentary Hellhounds on My Trail Davis played in, Davis is conflicted about what makes a blues musician authentic. The question of race is one area where this conflict surfaces.
“I have differing feelings. If it’s a Tuesday I say yeah, white boy should sing the blues. If it’s a Thursday I say no, they shouldn’t. It’s not really up to me. I don’t think the burden of that choice is up to me.?
Arguably, the line between a well-off African American and a poor White American is blurred as far as social power is concerned. Davis believes the expression of personal and political blues figuratively corresponds to the changes that occur in the world.
“Think of the Black Panthers, think of the black muslims coming along with Malcolm X. These men were saying what their blues was and they were saying that the world had to change and the world was not ready for change. J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI made sure the world did not change. Yet J. Edgar Hoover and all of his kind mostly have died out. So these changes are coming nonetheless. There was a time when I wouldn’t see a black face when I looked at a television screen and now you see them all the time.
“That is not to say there are not still tremendous problems in the entertainment industry regarding black people and work. But you do see more, you do see progress, you do see change. That means that somebody somewhere expressed their blues.?