With Lansing’s Old Town Bluesfest right around the corner, let’s see how far back the playing and listening of blues music goes in our fair state of Michigan. We may never know entirely when it all started but the rec
ent stuff is pretty easy to research and in this context, “recent” means the 1960’s when blues music turned mainstream.
Clearly blues itself had been widespread in other communities long before young white kids in the Midwest discovered Muddy Waters and John Lee Hooker or heard Eric Clapton taking on his own guitar heroes. For now, though, we’ll stick within a more current time frame.
Michiganians can be proud to know that Ann Arbor hosted the very first entirely blues-based festival in North America! The Newport Festival doesn’t quality since they were folk, jazz and blues. Michigan tossed its porkpie hat into the ring on a hot, humid night in August 1969, just two weeks before Woodstock. Thousands of people gathered in the athletic field near the University of Michigan to hear legends like Muddy Waters, Junior Wells, B.B. King, Otis Rush, J. B. Hutto and the Hawks, Howlin’ Wolf, T-Bone Walker, Magic Sam, Freddie King, and many other electric blues players. The festival also featured traditional blues artists like Son House, Clifton Chenier, Roosevelt Sykes and more.
Reading that roster, it is hard to imagine all that incredible blues talent converging in one spot. Converge it did, though, and history was born just down the road from Lansing.
In 1972, the festival was expanded to include jazz and it became (and has remained) the Ann Arbor Blues and Jazz Festival ever since. Legends like Miles Davis, Count Basie, Sun Ra, the Art Ensemble of Chicago, Pharoah Sanders, Archie Shepp, Yusef Lateef, Ornette Coleman, and Cecil Taylor have played the festival, as well as top headliners like Ray Charles, Maceo Parker, Etta James, James Brown, Booker T. & the MG’s, Taj Mahal, Dr. John, Bonnie Raitt, and Al Green.
The U of M’s Bentley Historical Library archives the Ann Arbor Blues and Jazz Festival memorabilia, documents, posters, and history. There’s also a great book of rare photographs from the festival called Blues in Black and White by Stanley Livingston.
Although the Ann Arbor event has been almost completely overshadowed by Woodstock’s fame, to blues enthusiasts, it is by far the more important of the two events. In the October 1969 issue of Downbeat magazine, reviewer Dan Morgenstern, dismissed Woodstock in favor of the Ann Arbor Blues Festival, declaring it was “without doubt the festival of the year, if not the decade.”
Not a bad legacy! Where you there that weekend? If so, leave a comment and tell us what you saw and heard. If you have more stories or information about the history of live blues in the Lansing area, especially before 1970 or so, let us know. This may prove to be a trail worth pursuing and a continuing story to reflect upon.
See you in Old Town!
The 2010 Bluesfest in Old Town had a fantastic opening night. The weather, which was a concern, could not have been nicer; the artists stellar; the crowd packed the streets while many stores and shops stayed open late, which seemed to be drawing in lots of shoppers. Congratulations to all involved and best wishes for a great Saturday.