Fall Festival Fun As summer turns to autumn, the air around the Mid-South begins to fill with music. by Mark Jordan t’s that time of year again. As the sweltering summer heat turns to the cool crisp breezes of fall, it is safe to go outside once more. And what better way to celebrate surviving another Southern summer than with a party – complete with music, food, and libations. Memphis and the Mid-South are known for their quality festivals held year-round. (Of course, every place has music festivals, but with the well-documented high caliber of talent that has come out of this region, Mid-Southerners can be forgiven for thinking their festivals are at least a notch above the others.) But even in the Mid-South, the weeks between Labor Day and the first freeze of winter are specifically known as “festival time,” when a whole series of spectacular events vie for music-lovers’ attention. With upcoming appearances in both Greenville and Helena, Robert Jr. Lockwood is leading this autumn’s wave of regional music festivals. The festival season actually kicked off a few weeks ago with the Sunflower Blues Festival in Clarksdale, Mississippi, which was sadly marred by rain, and St. Louis’ Blues Heritage Festival. But over the coming weeks the pace of events really starts picking up, culminating in the ever-popular King Biscuit Blues Festival October 8-11. Here are a few of the more noteworthy festivals coming your way in the next few weeks. This list is by no means complete – we’ve completely left out state fairs, for instance, because they are a different, smellier beast from straight-ahead music festivals – but it should be enough to get you motivated and into the car. Eureka Springs Jazz Festival Eureka Springs, Arkansas. Thursday through Sunday, September 17-20. Admission: $25 and $12; tickets available in advance. Call 501-253-6258 for more information. The Ozark Folk Festival Eureka Springs, Arkansas. Friday-Sunday, September 25-27. Admission: $25; tickets available in advance. Call 501-253-8737 for more information. We didn’t know this ourselves, but apparently Eureka Springs is the “Festival Capital of the Ozarks.” Now, on the face of it that may not seem very impressive, but this mountain resort town near the Missouri border really does have an astonishing calendar of events that includes a Memorial Day blues festival, an opera festival in July, and these two festivals held on successive weekends in September. Held in the town’s historic auditorium and in the Basin Park Hotel Ballroom, the Eureka Springs Jazz Festival will feature Herbie Mann, 13-time winner of Downbeat magazine’s best flautist award. Also performing will be Angela Hagenbach and the Latin ensemble Musa Nova and the New World Funk Ensemble. Celebrating its 51st year, the Ozark Folk Festival is reportedly the oldest continuously running festival west of Mississippi and the third oldest in the United States. Also held in the auditorium, the lineup for this festival includes headliners Billy Joe Shaver, one of the original Texas outlaw songwriters, and Louisiana’s Buckwheat Zydeco. Mississippi Delta Blues & Heritage Festival Greenville, Mississippi. Saturday and Sunday, September 19-20. Admission: $13 in advance; $15 day of festival. Call 888-812-5837 for more information. While not one of the best-run festivals around, the Delta Blues and Heritage Festival is loaded with so much talent that it is hard to resist. This year’s lineup includes Lattimore, Othar Turner and the Rising Star Fife and Drum Band, chitlin’ circuit favorite Bobby Rush, and blues legend Robert Jr. Lockwood Festival organizers have also added a gospel tent that they’ve packed with quality local artists. Also new this year is an admission policy that allows all children age 17 and under in free. Brownsville Blues Festival Brownsville, Tennessee. Friday and Saturday, September 25-26. Admission: Friday, $5; Saturday, free. Call 901-772-2193 for more information. Though not in the Delta, this little town about an hour outside of Memphis has a rich blues heritage, and in recent years it has made a strong push to promote it. Earlier this summer the town debuted the restored home of its most famous blues citizen, Sleepy John Estes, which has been relocated and turned into a museum. And the town will honor Estes once again at noon on Saturday, September 26th with the unveiling of a monument for his gravesite at Elam Baptist Church. In true blues style, however, the solemn dedication will be followed by a night-long program of good-time music in the town’s Court Square. Scheduled performers include John Kilzer, Blind “Mississippi” Morris, Preston Shannon, and the Radio Kings. And from 2 p.m. to 4 p.m. on Saturday, organizers will be conducting bus tours of the area highlighting sites prominent in the blues songs of Estes, Hammie Nixon, and Yank Ranchell. In addition to Saturday’s free lineup of music, on Friday in Volunteer Park there will be a barbecue cook-off with music by Larry Garner and the Bugaloo Blues Band. Memphis Music and Heritage Festival Memphis, Tennessee. Friday-Sunday, September 4-6. Admission: Free music outdoors; $10 wristband to see select acts in the clubs on Beale. Call 525-3655 for more information. The Beale Street Music Festival is fun and all, but until the addition of gospel and local stages a few years back, it could have been any festival anywhere in the country. For 12 years now the only place to get that uniquely Memphis festival vibe has been the Center for Southern Folklore’s Memphis Music and Heritage Festival. More like New Orleans’ Jazz and Heritage Festival than BSMF, every year the heritage festival showcases the best of local music, food, culture, and arts and crafts. One difference this year, however, is that the festival is moving to Beale Street, hoping to re-create some of the electricity that characterized the street in its heyday. The lineup, however, is as strong as ever. Artists scheduled to appear include rockabilly legends Billy Lee Riley and Sonny Burgess, salsa band Caliente, Hi Records diva Ann Peebles, the Vance Ensemble, and plenty of good blues with the North Mississippi All-Stars, T-Model Ford, Mose Vinson, and DiAnne Price. Artists will be playing for free in Handy Park and on other stages around Beale. In addition, a $10 wristband will get festivalgoers into all the clubs on Beale for special performances, with part of the proceeds from wristband sales going to the nonprofit center. The King Biscuit Blues Festival Helena, Arkansas. Thursday-Sunday, October 8-11. Admission: free. Call 870-338-8798 for more information. For many this is the blues festival. Four days of great blues, food, arts and crafts, and carnival rides in the cool October air on the banks of the Mississippi. Hundreds take advantage of the park adjacent to the festival grounds to camp out for the weekend, often turning the campgrounds into another party entirely. As usual, the Biscuit features one of the strongest bills of any area festival. This year’s lineup includes Frank Frost and Sam Carr, Pinetop Perkins and Bob Margolin, Stax great J. Blackfoot, Grammy winners the Kinsey Report with patriarch Big Daddy Kinsey, Joe Louis Walker, and the blues mama power trio of Irma Thomas, Tracy Nelson, and Marcia Ball. And, of course, no King Biscuit festival would be complete without a performance by Robert Lockwood Jr., the co-host (along with Sonny Boy Williamson II) of the KFFA radio blues program that inspired the festival and the only artist to perform in all 12 previous festivals.

		Music Notes by Mark Jordan New Stuff In The Bins: Blues Edition Ecko Records’ newest is Love Seat by Charles Wilson. Though once again laden with John Ward’s decidedly, shall we say, inorganic production, Love Seat survives the process (and it does sound like it’s been processed) because of some really spirited writing, most of it by the team of Ward and Raymond Moore and a few guest guitar appearances by Preston Shannon. These are almost all “cheatin’” songs of the variety so popular on the blues charts these days. One exception is what I believe to be the first song on the impotency drug of the ’90s, Viagra, appropriately called “The Viagra Song.” If the makers of the drug ever need a jingle, they could do a lot worse than this ditty, which features lines like: “It got so bad in the bedroom/My woman threatened to leave/Until I got a hold of that wonder drug/And knocked her back on her knees/Now takin’ that little blue pill/Won’t let my nature bend/Thanks to that little old drug Viagra/I can bone it like I own it again.” On the reissue front, MCA Records has released volume two of Bobby “Blue” Bland’s greatest hits. Together with the first installment, Bobby Bland: Greatest Hits, Volume II presents the most comprehensive overview of the Sinatra of the blues’ career, leading up to his early ’80s work. And while most of Bland’s best-known songs were on volume one, for my money volume two is the superior collection. Dominated by Bland’s ’70s recording, volume two is full of slightly funky and deeply soulful blues like “Goin’ Down Slow” plus such great titles as “I Wouldn’t Treat A Dog (The Way You Treated Me)” and “Sittin’ On A Poor Man’s Throne.” Finally, Delmark Records has recently released three CDs by Mid-South blues masters. Memphis Slim U.S.A is culled from sessions the great blues pianist did for United Records in 1952-53. This is Slim at the height of his powers, but the real gem here is discovering a young hot-dog guitarist from Sunflower, Mississippi, named Matt “Guitar” Murphy, then just 22 years old. Robert Nighthawk’s Bricks In My Pillow, also originally recorded for United, finds the guitarist as he was just coming into his own as a bandleader and master of the slide, with some fine piano accompaniment by Roosevelt Sykes. And anyone curious about the old jug-band sound that dominated Beale Street in the ’20s and ’30s but has been turned off by the poor quality of the few surviving recordings to come out the era needs to check out Yank Rachell’s Tennessee Jug-Busters. Though recorded 30 years after jug music’s heyday, the album benefits from improved sound and the reunion of one of the greatest jug-blues groups ever. The album features Rachell on mandolin (worth hearing in itself) and his legendary lifelong partners Hammie Nixon on harmonica and jug and Sleepy John Estes on guitar. And rounding out the supporting cast on guitars are two legends in their own right, Big Joe Williams and Mike Bloomfield. An essential for any fan. Erratum In last week’s music note on Memphis music Web sites we mistakenly gave the online version of BluesSpeak’s URL as bluesspeak.com. In fact, the correct URL is bluespeak.com, with just one “s.” We apologize for any confusion this may have caused.