State Champ Radio blues
Events that prevented Rachel Dangermond from properly reopening 100 Men Hall, where Ray Charles, B.B. King and Etta James once performed, in the beach town of Bay St. Louis, Miss., over the past six years: Flood. Hurricane. Pandemic. Hurricane. Tornado.
“It is very much spit and glue,” Dangermond says. “Venues are hard.”
Dangermond, a 65-year-old journalist, has spent that time turning the 400-capacity Black-history landmark in a one-story house with blue front steps into a community center. On the hall’s schedule this year: a Saturday-morning writers’ group; a drag brunch; “cigars under the stars”; a performance by bluesman Cedric Burnside; two battling harmonica players known as Harps On Fire; and a festival celebrating the late New Orleans pianist James Booker. Dangermond’s goal is to “keep this juke joint with its historic value open and continue to keep its sacred act of playing music.” She adds: “I’m no longer the owner. I’m more the facilitator of the story of this place.”
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100 Men Hall didn’t start as a hall at all — it began in 1894 as an African-American co-op in which 12 founding members pledged to help each other pay medical and burial expenses. As it grew, the club evolved into the Hundred Members Debating Benevolent Association (DBA), a community support group during Jim Crow and segregation, which, according to Scott Barretta, a University of Mississippi sociology instructor, “helped elevate people into the economy and provide them with social benefits and respectability, where otherwise they were being persecuted.”
In 1922, the DBA built the hall as a meeting space — a worn wooden pediment marked “100 MEN D.B.A.,” recreated based on the original, is at the top of the building — and it soon evolved into a venue for live events. At first, these were plays, wedding showers, Mardi Gras balls and drag shows. By the ’30s, the club became a stop on the Chitlin Circuit, a network of American clubs catering to Black audiences that helped make stars of acts from Billie Holiday to the Jackson 5. “It’s like going back into the past,” says James Keating, a retired physician who publishes the newsletter for the Hancock County Historical Society, of the hall. “It looks like a place that music is performed.”
In 2018, Dangermond was “in a mood” when she found herself in Bay St. Louis, about an hour’s drive from New Orleans and a sort of unofficial suburb with a population of roughly 10,000. She had just lost two promising job prospects, including one as a spokesperson for the New Orleans police chief, and was staying with a friend when someone texted her that 100 Men Hall was available for sale — for $389,000, according to Zillow — including an attached apartment that a previous owner had built. (The value of the property today is nearly $670,000.)
Skeptically, Dangermond and her adopted son, then 9, showed up in bathing suits (they’d been swimming) to the property. “It was just a whim,” Dangermond recalls. “I had this sort of divine clarity. I walked through the door. There was nothing on the walls. It was just a vibe.
“Next thing I know, I was closing.”
Then came the unpleasant surprises. First was a notice that the State of Mississippi had revoked the club’s nonprofit status, and Dangermond had to sign a consent agreement to resurrect it and pay a fine. She had to wait out the bureaucratic process for nonprofit status because without itm the club could not sell liquor at public events. Until she could resolve the issue, she put on political fundraisers and other private events at the hall. This set the table for public concerts by Burnside, the northern Mississippi guitarist, drummer and grandson of the late blues hero R.L. Burnside. “We’re like, ‘Okay, this is going to be great!’ and we’re building, building, building,” Dangermond says. “We get to mid-year, and Hurricane Barry bore down on us. Before that, the rainstorm started flooding the neighborhood. I had an F-150 parked on the street and I looked out and the water was up to the window of the driver’s side. The musicians can’t get here.”
Dangermond and the hall “lost a lot of money,” she says, but they rebounded and booked acts to play every month of 2020 — until the pandemic shut down live music. Like many venues, the hall tinkered with outdoor, masked concerts, but then came Hurricane Zeta and a corresponding tornado that tore the roof off the building, causing $150,000 in damage. Dangermond had sold her New Orleans home to pay for the club, then depleted her savings for the opening, so she relied on insurance and donations to pay for repairs.
“It was like joy and pain,” she says.
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Today, 100 Men Hall puts on events almost daily and breaks even. Blues is a staple and an almost automatic sellout, no matter who’s performing, even as the genre struggles to support clubs throughout the United States. Bay St. Louis locals stop Dangermond at the grocery store and regale her with tales of sneaking in as children to hear Sam Cooke perform. As a ninth grader in 1967, Maurice Singleton learned the swing-out dance from his sister and aired it out during a hall show by soul singer Roscoe Robinson. “It was the first time I went in any building that was dimly lit for a performance,” recalls Singleton, a 71-year-old writer and teacher who lives in town.
Burnside, who performed an outdoor event at the hall just after the tornado literally blew the roof off in 2020, set up his band under a large tree near the “tin house,” a separate structure containing a mural of Etta James, founding Hancock County NAACP president Albert Fairconnetue and others. “It makes me feel real juke-jointy. It was a certain energy about that building,” Burnside says, by phone from a tour stop in Athens, Ga. “It reminded me of a big house party. Everybody [comes] together and drink a little moonshine, have a little food and listen to great music.”
The hall closed in 1982 after the Hundred Members Debating Benevolent Association finally broke up, and the building wound up in the hands of the Disabled Vets of America. In 2005, a couple ran it as an art gallery. Later, a musician and his wife reformed the DBA and scored a state grant to renovate the building, leading to the state historical marker in 2011. Dangermond still can’t articulate the quality of the 100 Men Hall that led her to buy the place. But, she says, “Musicians want to play here, and they hear those voices in the walls. They get up on the stage and they feel it.”
Mike Wheeler says he has 16 gigs lined up in April at clubs in his hometown of Chicago — a solid run but nowhere near the number he was playing before the pandemic. “Things are 50% normal,” says the veteran singer-guitarist, who has performed with Buddy Guy, the late B.B. King and Koko Taylor. “[There are] more clubs open now, but mostly Wednesday through Sunday. We’re trying to find the most gigs I can get in the city, but as far as tours and revenue, it’s kind of limited.”
Even in a blues mecca like Chicago, the genre has taken a significant hit over the past few years. Artists and club owners in musically vibrant cities cite numerous culprits — rising crime rates, the lingering pandemic-era habit of staying home, competition from nearby music festivals, home alcoholic-beverage delivery and the recent deaths of such headliners as Lonnie Brooks, Jimmy Johnson, James “Tail Dragger” Jones and members of The Kinsey Report.
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“It is sporadic, to say the least,” says Lisa Pellegrino, who manages Chi-town’s famed Kingston Mines blues club. “I don’t think anybody’s having a banner year.”
While Tony Mangiullo, founder and owner of nearby Rosa’s Lounge, is more upbeat — “The business is good, that’s all you need to know,” he says — he acknowledges the pandemic changed fans’ concert-going habits. “By 1:30, 2 in the morning, people are tired, the musicians are tired, and we’re tired. In the past, you would have people staying late. I’m really hoping we go back to that.”
Through its rickety constellation of indie labels, roadhouses and juke joints, the blues business is reinventing itself. Its biggest stars have died, retired or reduced their touring activity, leaving fewer headliners to carry festivals and weekend club dates. And while artists like Wheeler and clubs like Rosa’s keep the lights on with hard-drinking customers, door fees and ticket sales, the pandemic and its aftermath have forced many to rethink their models.
Mangiullo has invested in livestreaming and hopes to release live album compilations this fall; venerable Chicago-blues indie label Alligator Records partnered in 2021 with a new music company, Exceleration Music — founded by former Concord Music Group CEO Glen Barros — to handle physical distribution and other functions; and a new generation of stars, from singer Shemekia Copeland to guitar hero Christone “Kingfish” Ingram, has expanded the playing field from traditional clubs to gigs at arts centers and festivals, social media and satellite radio.
U.S. streaming numbers for the genre have increased 41% since 2020, from 1.7 billion in 2020 to almost 2.5 billion last year, according to Luminate. (In comparison, Taylor Swift racked up 17.5 billion on her own.) But owners of indie blues labels say the revenue has little impact on their bottom lines. “It takes a lot of streams to make a nickel,” M.C. Records owner Mark Carpentieri says. “Our better-known classic artists, like Hound Dog Taylor, Koko Taylor and Albert Collins, have a lot of life in the streaming services,” says Bruce Iglauer, founder of 53-year-old Alligator Records. “Our lesser-known artists do not particularly benefit from them.”
The genre remains reliant on touring, and if blues stars use social media to market to their older-skewing fan bases, they’re more likely to use Facebook instead of TikTok. They also sell albums and CDs at gigs for autograph-seekers, and labels are scrambling to make as many titles as possible available on vinyl.
Ingram, whom Iglauer calls Alligator’s “big success story,” is a 25-year-old guitar hero who has grown into an international festival headliner, even though his most popular album, 2021’s 662, has just 9.3 million streams in the United States and has sold 29,000 copies. Many in the blues business point to him as the future, a young talent who can refresh the genre. At first, Ingram’s friends were into hip-hop and didn’t much care for blues; today, he tells Billboard, “I see a resurgence in young people liking it, especially young Black kids.”
Ingram’s manager, Ric Whitney, says blues artists are expanding their audiences by supplementing club gigs with shows at festivals, arts centers and other venues that feature a wider range of music genres and styles. “There are a lot more places that are open to booking blues talent that aren’t necessarily blues clubs,” he says.
Veteran blues-rock guitarist Joe Bonamassa, who estimates his post-pandemic ticket sales are “back and then some,” says he has broadened his marketing efforts to rock fans who attend Foo Fighters, Eagles and Red Hot Chili Peppers shows. “We’ve always looked at it from the point of view [that], ‘If Eric Clapton can pull 15,000 people in a market, there’s clearly 15,000 people who like this kind of music,’” Bonamassa says. “It’s a classic rock-/blues-based audience, and that’s where you want to target.”
Bonamassa suggests artists and clubs identify fan base demographics through Google Analytics and other data tools, then “laser-focus marketing to the people that love this shit.” An effective blues cross-marketer has been Copeland, who uses her show on SiriusXM’s Bluesville channel to promote her albums and steady weekend touring. “This year is going to be one of the best financially that she ever had,” says her manager, John Hahn.
Joe talks with Billboard’s Behind the Setlist podcast about touring, covering Tom Waits, and which younger blues musicians he thinks are exciting.
Others are struggling or modifying their business strategies. Terra Blues, the 34-year-old club in New York’s Greenwich Village that books acoustic locals such as guitarists SaRon Crenshaw and Jr. Mack, relies on the lenience of a landlord. “If not for that, we probably would be closed,” owner Ilan Elmatad says. “Bluesmen do not tour anymore. It’s too expensive. These days, they’re staying where they are, whether it’s Mississippi or Arkansas. There are no blues clubs from Philadelphia to Montreal. We’re the only one.”
The departure of reliable artists from the touring circuit, whether they’ve retired or died, led Austin talent buyer Zach Ernst to rethink his approach to booking acts at Antone’s Nightclub and the Austin Blues Festival. For years, the club’s late founder, Clifford Antone, was strict about sticking to traditional artists, but Ernst says he’s “lucky if I can do one or two blues shows a month.” And whereas blues festivals throughout the United States once relied on straight-down-the-middle artists from Luther Allison to Koko Taylor, the Austin Blues Festival has expanded its lineup beyond the genre, much like the New Orleans Jazz Festival in recent years. This year’s festival stars Buddy Guy (whom Ernst calls “the last Chicago blues headliner, period”), Brittany Howard and blues-adjacent acts from Big Freedia to Dumpstaphunk.
“Everywhere, promoters are dealing with: ‘How do you deal with an aging fan base? How do you deal with a reduced number of headliners that are appealing to the baby boomer generation?’” Ernst says. “We don’t get too prescriptive by explaining exactly what we’re doing. We’re just like, ‘Hey, this is great music. Have a great time.’”
This story appears in the April 27, 2024, issue of Billboard.
From Barbie: The Album to Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, soundtracks tied to blockbuster films have dominated much of the year. As 2023 draws to a close, Quincy Jones, Scott Sanders and Larry Jackson hope their new expanded soundtrack, released last Friday (Dec. 15) for the forthcoming Color Purple movie musical (which hits theaters Dec. 25), marks a new era for R&B soundtracks and continues the healing Alice Walker sparked with her paramount novel 41 years ago.
Walker’s story has undergone countless iterations over the past four decades: an Oscar-nominated Steven Spielberg-helmed film in 1985, a Tony-winning Broadway musical in 2005, a Grammy-winning Broadway revival in 2015, and now a new movie musical directed by Grammy nominee Blitz Bazawule. Led by Fantasia, Danielle Brooks, Taraji P. Henson, Colman Domingo and Halle Bailey, the new film offers a fresh perspective on the timeless narrative, as evidenced by its accompanying star-studded, globe-traversing Inspired By soundtrack. The new set is comprised of 21 new songs inspired by the film, in addition to 16 tracks taken from the Broadway musical. The genre-spanning set is heavily rooted in R&B — a conscious decision given the way R&B has been counted out by major labels over the past decade.
According to Sanders, who produced the 2005 Broadway musical and serves as executive producer on both the 2023 film and its soundtrack (released through Warner Bros. Pictures/WaterTower Music/gamma), Warner Bros. was always planning to do a soundtrack. “We knew it would be an opportune moment for them to add another dimension to The Color Purple brand extension,” he remarks.
And that’s precisely what the new soundtrack is. As cinematic universes continue to dominate mainstream media, The Color Purple has been crafting its own interconnected web of stories for 40 years — and the new soundtrack became a holy site for reunions and healing among the producers, artists, and cast.
The idea of a proper Inspired By soundtrack started to take form during an April lunch between Sanders and Jackson after the gamma. CEO had seen the film and felt its impact on early audiences. “Whatever veneer of impenetrable stoicism I had at that time, [the film] pierced it,” Jackson reflects. “To me, the great Black films are the ones [where] people are talking back to the screen, they’re applauding, there’s conversations going on, and whooping and hollering. It’s an interactive spirit, and this film has that.”
For Jackson, it was Fantasia’s performance that most moved him. The Billboard Hot 100-topping R&B star leads the film as Celie Harris-Johnson, a role for which she has already earned a Golden Globe nomination. Almost 20 years ago, Fantasia captivated America’s hearts and won the fourth season of American Idol. Shortly after her victory, she headed to the studio to record her debut LP, a Grammy-nominated effort on which Jackson would serve as A&R. That album featured singles such as “Truth Is” and the Missy Elliott-assisted “Free Yourself,” a collaboration that now has a three-way connection to The Color Purple universe.
“That was a lot for me at that time of my life — [Fantasia and I] were basically the same age and really related to what needed to be achieved,” Jackson reflects. “I was saying to Missy Elliott last night, she really helped me craft the sound for Fantasia’s first album.”
On the soundtrack, Elliott appears on two remixes: the Shenseea-featuring “Hell No,” a song from the original musical, and “Keep It Movin’,” a new addition to the musical co-written by Bailey. Like most of the artists involved in the soundtrack, Jackson says that the “Work It” rapper decided to join the project after a private screening of the film. It’s the same way he landed Alicia Keys, who co-wrote and co-produced the soundtrack’s lead single (“Lifeline”), Johntá Austin, whose “When I Can’t Do Better” marks his first collaboration with Mary J. Blige since their iconic “Be Without You,” and The-Dream. Fresh off a Grammy win for his work on Beyoncé’s Renaissance, The-Dream could be headed down to the Oscars thanks to “Superpower,” a new song he penned for the Color Purple end credits.
Often, end-credit songs are performed by artists who don’t appear in the film — but in the case of The Color Purple, everyone was in early agreement that Fantasia was the only correct choice to belt the closing ballad. For one, both the song and the movie are Fantasia’s formal re-entry into the public eye as a performer, but her specific voice and story were the best vehicle for The-Dream’s lyrics. “This is older Celie singing to her younger self — it is a quintessential ‘it gets better’ song,” Sanders gushes. “It’s so f—king moving. I can’t stop listening to it. I cry when I listen to Fantasia’s rendition.” For “Superpower,” Jackson told The-Dream, “I just want a spiritual, a song that will move on far past our time. Something that will be sung in high school graduations.”
Although the SAG-AFTRA strike almost prevented Fantasia from recording the song, the timing worked out and she was able to cut her vocal in time. Given that Fantasia played Celie on Broadway for eight months during the Broadway show’s original run, her rendition of the end-credits song is the kind of full-circle moment that most artists dream of. “Superpower” is a rousing song – one in which she deftly displays the expanse of vocal range and control – and a potential comeback vehicle for not just Fantasia, but the R&B soundtrack in general. In crafting The Color Purple (Music From and Inspired By), Sanders, Jackson and film director Blitz Bazawule drew inspiration from iconic R&B film soundtracks of decades past, including Sparkle, The Bodyguard, Boomerang and Waiting to Exhale.
“It had always been on my bucket list to do a soundtrack that felt like the great soundtracks of the 1970s, or the ones in the ‘90s,” Jackson says. “I’ve been involved in a few of them, but Clive [Davis] was always the one who was leading it. It never was something that I was driving with my own personal taste and sensibility, and this was an opportunity for that.”
The Color Purple soundtrack bookmarks a year that began with troubling layoffs for one of the most storied labels in Black music history. In the middle of Black History Month (Feb. 16), Billboard reported that Motown was set to be reintegrated under Capitol Music Group – hence the layoffs – making for a less-than-preferable outcome after the company attempted a run as a standalone label back in 2021. Despite a precarious start to the year, R&B artists have once again forged a spot at the forefront of the mainstream, thanks to acts such as SZA, Victoria Monét, Usher, Coco Jones and more. It’s a level of momentum, Sanders and Jackson hope to continue with their generation-bridging Color Purple tracklist.
In addition to the cast, The Color Purple soundtrack features contributions from Jennifer Hudson, Keyshia Cole, Mary J. Blige, Mary Mary, H.E.R., Ludmilla, Megan Thee Stallion and more. Like Fantasia, Jennifer Hudson’s track marks another full-circle moment for The Color Purple universe. Hudson took home the 2017 Grammy Award for best musical theater album thanks to the Broadway revival, and, of course, she was a contestant on the same season of American Idol as Fantasia. In another connection, Hudson herself also starred in a blockbuster Black movie musical that hit theaters on Christmas Day: 2006’s Dreamgirls, for which she won the Academy Award for best supporting actress.
Although Walker’s novel specifically highlights the stories of Black American women in the American South during the early 20th century, the new Color Purple soundtrack both globalizes those narratives and translates them to contemporary times. Megan Thee Stallion’s remix of “Hell No” — a selection from the original musical – carries a special weight given the way she has refused to let misogynoir drown out her voice over the past few years. Jamaican cross-genre star Shenseea appears on a different “Hell No” remix, and her inclusion on the tracklist – alongside Brazilian singer-songwriter Ludmilla – highlights how The Color Purple’s narrative resonates with Black women around the world.
“Every day was meeting to reaffirm why I’m doing this, to remind myself the importance of this work,” explains director Blitz Bazawule. “It’s daunting. You’re talking about a legacy that you don’t approach if you don’t have anything real to contribute.” Bazawule aimed to contribute new perspectives of childhood and Celie’s inner dialogue in his version of The Color Purple. In translating a Broadway play to the silver screen, Bazawule was pushed to think about which characters and moments in the plot needed songs. “Keep It Movin’,” co-written by Bailey and Grammy-winning songwriting duo Nova Wav, was one of those songs. “Nettie’s character, as I saw it, needed to impart to Celie some level of confidence that will stay with her sister before they reconnect at the very end,” Bazawule says. “[The song] shows a young girl’s innocence which will very soon be snatched away quite violently. I need that moment to be memorable and really reflect the love the sisters have for each other.”
Bailey, who starred as the titular Little Mermaid earlier this year, is, of course, one-half of the Grammy-nominated sister duo Chloe x Halle. The “Angel” singer drew from her relationship with her sister for “Keep It Movin’,” a dynamic that exemplifies the symbiotic healing nature of The Color Purple soundtrack. As artists completed their contributions to the project, they experienced moments of healing themselves. According to Bazawule, those moments occurred throughout filming, spurred by the omnipresence of faith and gospel music on set. Gospel music is a clear throughline between the original music, the Inspired By soundtrack, and the way the musical’s songs were reworked for the film.
“Gospel is the foundation. When you think about how our version of The Color Purple functions, which is the oscillation between joy and pain and turning our pain into power, it’s the definition of gospel,” remarks Bazawule. “You don’t have anything without gospel, so, for us, it was central to how we advanced everything. I also was very clear that I’d have to split my musical journey into 3 three parts: gospel, blues and jazz.” To bring a more cinematic, gospel-infused feel to the original Broadway music, Bazawule tagged in Billboard chart-topping gospel star Ricky Dillard; He also recruited Keb’ Mo’ to bring in the blues, and Christian McBride for jazz. He even made sure his DP (Dan Lausten) and production designer (Paul D. Austerberry) got an authentic Black church experience. With both Fantasia and Domingo regularly leading the cast and crew in prayer, The Color Purple transformed into “spiritual work that shows up in the amount of healing that a lot of us went through making this film,” says Bazawule.
“You cannot work on The Color Purple without understanding what anointing looks like,” Bazawule asserts. “When those singers open their mouths, that’s church talking. That was very clear and it stayed critical up until the end.”
Just days before The Color Purple is set to open in theatres, a Hollywood Reporter piece exploring the hesitancy of studios to promote movie musicals as musicals started to make the rounds online. Black movie musicals are few and far between, especially when holiday films and biopics are removed, and The Color Purple is hoping to dispel the notion that audiences aren’t interested in seeing musicals on the big screen.
“I hope [The Color Purple] opens the door to many more and I hope directors and studios take more chances with Black movie musicals,” muses Bazawule. “Again, when it comes to music, we are unmatched, so you just have to find the narratives. I hope and pray our movie will move the needle.”
When Dan Auerbach, best known as the singer and guitarist of The Black Keys, decided to launch his own record label in 2017, it was largely out of his love for the music he was working on.
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“I had just been making so many records at that point, and I would make an album and give it to whatever label I was working for and it would just be, you know, kind of bittersweet,” Auerbach tells Billboard. “A lot of times I felt I had maybe something more to add in the label department.”
Six years later, he’s proved that to be true. The label, Easy Eye Sound — named after his recording studio in Nashville — has released more than two dozen albums, picked up 16 Grammy nominations and, in 2021, was named Billboard’s No. 1 Blues Imprint following a partnership it struck with Concord in February of that year. “Even in a Nashville landscape crowded with exceptional artistry, Dan has built something genuinely unique,” says Concord CEO Bob Valentine. “His commitment to talent and originality are clear on every album.”
The label is home to a mix of young, emerging acts (Nat Myers, The Velveteers, Early James), established artists (Yola, Shannon & the Clams, Hermanos Gutierrez) and veteran bluesmen (Robert Finley, Jimmy “Duck” Holmes), many of whom are releasing projects with Auerbach serving as producer. Already, the label has grown beyond just a vanity imprint for a successful rocker to use for whatever he’s working on at the moment, and into a full-fledged company, with five employees and a wide purview that extends across multiple genres.
“We have some real breakthrough artists, young and old, and we’ve shown that we’re able to help an artist through a career, not just one record,” he says. “We’re working with an artist like Shannon and the Clams for three albums, and they’ve doubled their shows and the amount of people that come to see them. Someone like Robert Finley, who was playing on the street when I first met him, this is now what he does for a living and he’s going back to France for the third time this year to play more shows. Those kinds of wins get me excited about future projects.”
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But its roots are in the blues, and Auerbach’s latest album, Tell Everybody!: 21st Century Juke Joint Blues From Easy Eye Sound, is a passion project that calls back to his earliest days playing music. The compilation features contributions from Finley, Holmes, Myers, RL Boyce, Gabe Carter, Moonrisers and the late bluesmen Leo “Bud” Welch and Glenn Schwartz, as well as a solo song by Auerbach and one from The Black Keys.
“I’ve got stockpiles of songs — I’ve had the studio now for 13 years, and there’s hard drives full of music, hard-hitting, amazing-sounding records that we didn’t have scheduled to come out,” he says. “I was thinking about how great those early Fat Possum Records samplers were when I was younger, and how it really introduced me to a lot of my favorite artists. So I wanted to do something a little bit like that, to be able to showcase some of the artists that people know and then some ones that they don’t, some that they’ve never heard of and some that we’ve never done recordings of before.”
Building on that lineage of Fat Possum — which began in the early 1990s as a label dedicated to recording lesser-known Mississippi blues artists, before branching out — extended to a show that Auerbach and Black Keys drummer Patrick Carney hosted at Brooklyn Bowl in Nashville earlier this month, which brought the living contributors of the record together to perform live. That show was an homage of sorts to the Fat Possum Juke Joint Caravan shows of the 1990s and early 2000s, where the label would package artists like R.L. Burnside, “T-Model” Ford and Paul “Wine” Jones for a revue that would tour the country. “That was a really beautiful moment for us, and it felt very natural, too, because the music is such a big part of who we are,” Auerbach says. “It’s good for the soul, you know?”
Dan Auerbach performs at the “Tell Everybody!” Album Release Show on August 9, 2023.
Larry Niehues
That may mean more compilations on the horizon — Auerbach said that drummer Kenny Kimbrough, guitarist Eric Deaton and guitarist Kenny Brown were in town for the show, and they “may or may not have” gone into the studio to record afterwards — but he and Easy Eye Sound have plenty going on in the interim. There’s a new Black Keys album on the way, which he says is “taking shape now,” and Easy Eye Sound is reissuing Auerbach’s 2009 solo album Keep It Hid on Sept. 29, with new artwork and six new vinyl variants. But the blues is never far from his mind.
“It’s just so raw and unpretentious, like unrefined beauty. Something that you can’t really study in school,” he says. “It’s just a very free-flowing, f–kin’ wild music, you know? And I just loved it for so many different reasons.”
Tommy Castro won the B.B. King entertainer of the year award for the second year in a row at the 44th Annual Blues Music Awards, which were held at the Renasant Convention Center in Memphis on Thursday May 11.
The evening’s other top award winners were Buddy Guy, Albert Castiglia and John Németh, with two awards each. Guy’s The Blues Don’t Lie picked up album of the year and contemporary blues album. Castiglia won blues rock album (I Got Love) as well as blues rock artist. Németh won traditional blues album (May Be the Last Time) as well as instrumentalist harmonica.
The double wins for Guy’s album make up for its Grammy loss in February. The album was nominated for best traditional blues album but lost to Taj Mahal & Ry Cooder’s Get on Board: The Songs of Sonny Terry & Brownie McGhee. Likewise, Charlie Musselwhite’s Mississippi Son won here for acoustic blues album after losing at the Grammys for best traditional blues album.
For the fourth consecutive year, Christone “Kingfish” Ingram took home contemporary blues male artist. Other artists who held on to their crowns for a second year in a row were Castiglia – blues rock artist; Danielle Nicole – instrumentalist bass, Curtis Salgado – soul blues male artist; and Sue Foley – traditional blues female artist (Koko Taylor award).
First-time winners were Laura Chavez – instrumentalist guitar; Thornetta Davis – soul blues female; and Dylan Triplett – best emerging artist album for Who is He?.
Tedeschi Trucks Band won band of the year for the third time.
In a nice touch, three awards are named after late blues legends. The entertainer of the year award is named after B.B. King, who died in 2015. The award for traditional blues female artist is named after Koko Taylor, who died in 2009. The award for instrumentalist – piano is named after Pinetop Perkins, who died in 2011.
Here’s a complete list of winners for the 2023 Blues Music Awards.
B.B. King entertainer of the year
Sugaray Rayford
WINNER: Tommy Castro
Eric Gales
Bobby Rush
Mr. Sipp (Castro Coleman)
Band of the year
Anthony Geraci & The Boton Blues Allstars
John Németh and the Blue Dreamers
Rick Estrin and the Nightcats
Southern Avenue
WINNER: Tedeschi Trucks Band
Song of the year
Altered Five Blues Band “Great Minds Drink Alike” (Jeff Schroedl)
WINNER: Buddy Guy “The Blues Don’t Lie” (Tom Hambridge)
Eric Gales “I Want My Crown” (Eric Gales, Joe Bonamassa)
John Németh “The Last Time” (John Németh)
Shemekia Copeland “Too Far to Be Gone” (John Hahn/Will Kimbrough)
Best emerging artist album
Blue Moon Marquee / Scream, Holler & Howl
DaShawn Hickman / Drums, Roots & Steel
WINNER: Dylan Triplett / Who Is He?
Jose Ramirez / Major League Blues
Yates McKendree / Buchanan Lane
Acoustic blues album
WINNER: Charlie Musselwhite / Mississippi Son
Corey Harris / The Insurrection Blues
Duwayne Burnside / Acoustic Burnside
Harrison Kennedy / Thanks for Tomorrow
Rory Block / Ain’t Nobody Worried
Blues rock album
WINNER: Albert Castiglia / I Got Love
Bernard Allison / Highs & Lows
Colin James / Open Road
Eric Gales / Crown
Tinsley Ellis / Devil May Care
Contemporary blues album
WINNER: Buddy Guy / The Blues Don’t Lie
Diunna Greenleaf / I Ain’t Playin’
Janiva Magness / Hard to Kill
Larry McCray / Blues Without You
Shemekia Copeland / Done Come Too Far
Soul blues album
Kat Riggins / Progeny
Kirk Fletcher / Heartache by the Pound
WINNER: Sugaray Rayford / In Too Deep
The Love Light Orchestra / Leave the Light On
Trudy Lynn / Golden Girl
Traditional blues album
Kenny Neal / Straight From the Heart
Bob Corritore / Bob Borritore & Friends: You Shocked Me
Duke Robillard / They Called it Rhythm & Blues
WINNER: John Németh / May Be the Last Time
John Primer / Hard Times
Acoustic blues artist
WINNER: Doug MacLeod
Guy Davis
Harrison Kennedy
Rhiannon Giddens
Rory Block
Blues rock artist
Walter Trout
WINNER: Albert Castiglia
Tommy Castro
Joanne Shaw Taylor
Tinsley Ellis
Contemporary blues female artist
WINNER: Ruthie Foster
Beth Hart
Janiva Magness
Teresa James
Vanessa Collier
Contemporary blues male artist
Selwyn Birchwood
Chris Cain
WINNER: Christone “Kingfish” Ingram
Ronnie Baker Brooks
Mr. Sipp (Castro Coleman)
Soul blues female artist
Annika Chambers
Trudy Lynn
WINNER: Thornetta Davis
Kat Riggins
Vaneese Thomas
Soul blues male artist
John Németh
Johnny Rawls
WINNER: Curtis Salgado
Don Bryant
Billy Price
Traditional blues female artist (Koko Taylor award)
Dietra Farr
Diunna Greenleaf
Rhiannon Giddens
Rory Block
WINNER: Sue Foley
Traditional blues male artist
Billy Branch
Duke Robillard
WINNER: John Primer
Johnny Burgin
Sugar Ray Norcia
Instrumentalist – bass
Bob Stronger
WINNER: Danielle Nicole
Larry Fulcher
Michael “Mudcat” Ward
Willie J. Campbell
Instrumentalist – drums
Chris Layton
Cody Dickinson
Derric D’Mar Martin
WINNER: Kenny “Beedy Eyes” Smith
Tony Braunagel
Instrumentalist – guitar
Chris Cain
Christoffer “Kid” Andersen
Joanna Connor
Kirk Fletcher
WINNER: Laura Chavez
Instrumentalist – harmonica
Billy Branch
Bob Corritore
Jason Ricci
WINNER: John Németh
Dennis Gruenling
Instrumentalist – horn
WINNER: Deanna Bogart
Gregg Piccolo
Jimmy Carpenter
Mark Kaz Kazanoff
Sax Gordon Beadle
Instrumentalist – piano (Pinetop Perkins piano player award)
WINNER: Anthony Geraci
Ben Levin
Dave Keyes
Jim Pugh
Kenny “Blues Boss” Wayne
Instrumentalist – vocals
Curtis Salgado
Danielle Nicole
Diunna Greenleaf
John Németh
WINNER: Shemekia Copeland
Nearly nine years after Johnny Winter‘s death, a battle for control of the legendary blues guitarist’s music is being fought in court with allegations of theft and greed flying back and forth.
The legal fight pits Winter’s former personal manager and bandmate, Paul Nelson, against the family of the bluesman’s late wife, Susan, who died in 2019.
Winter’s in-laws say Nelson and his wife improperly took more than $1.5 million from Winter’s music business, including auctioning off some of the late musician’s guitars.
Nelson and his wife have countersued, saying Susan Winter’s siblings swooped in when she was medicated and dying of cancer and tricked her into giving them control of Winter’s music, stripping away Nelson’s rights as the beneficiary of Susan Winter’s estate.
The case was scheduled to go to trial in a Connecticut court in April, but was rescheduled for September.
At stake is ownership of Winter’s music catalogue, proceeds from record and merchandise sales and authority to approve any commercial use of his songs, the value of which is uncertain.
“The case is about preserving Johnny Winter’s legacy and vindicating and making sure the Nelsons haven’t improperly taken the moneys rightfully owed to the plaintiffs,” said Timothy Diemand, a lawyer for the Susan Winter’s siblings, Bonnie and Christopher Warford.
Nelson wants to be reinstalled as the beneficiary of Susan Winter’s estate.
“The Plaintiffs orchestrated the wrongful termination of Paul Nelson during a difficult time in Susan Winter’s last year of life,” the Nelsons said in a statement released by their lawyer, Matthew Mason. They said it was clear that both Johnny and Susan Winter wanted Nelson to be responsible for Johnny Winter’s music and legacy.
John Dawson Winter III was born and raised in Beaumont, Texas. He burst onto the world blues scene in the 1960s, dazzling crowds with his fast licks while his trademark long, white hair flew about from under his cowboy hat. He and his brother Edgar — both born with albinism — were both reknowned musicians.
Winter played at Woodstock in 1969 and went on to produce albums for Blues icon Muddy Waters in addition to his own music. In 1988 he was inducted into the Blues Foundation Hall of Fame.
Rolling Stone magazine listed him as the No. 63 best guitar player of all time in 2015. He released more than two dozen albums and was nominated for several Grammy awards, winning his first one posthumously in 2015 for Best Blues Album for “Step Back.” Nelson produced the album and also took home a Grammy for it.
Winter, who spent two decades living in Easton, Connecticut, before his death, battled heroin addiction for years and credited Nelson, whom he met in 1999, with helping him get off methadone, according to the 2014 documentary “Johnny Winter: Down & Dirty.”
Before he got clean, bandmates and friends said they were concerned because of his frail appearance and trouble talking. Nelson also credits himself with reviving Winter’s music career.
The Winters and Nelsons became good friends. Paul Nelson played guitar in Johnny Winter’s band and started running his music company beginning in 2005. Nelson’s wife, Marion Nelson, did bookkeeping for the Winters and the music business, according to legal filings in the lawsuit.
Winter died at the age of 70 on July 16, 2014, in a hotel room just outside Zurich, Switzerland, while on tour. Susan Winter and Paul Nelson have said the cause of death was likely emphysema.
Susan Winter was the sole beneficiary of her husband’s estate, which she put in a trust in late 2016. She named herself as the trust’s sole trustee and Nelson as the successor trustee, meaning he would inherit the rights to Johnny Winter’s music after she died.
But in June 2019, four months before her death from lung cancer, Susan Winter removed Nelson as the successor and replaced him with her sister and brother.
The Nelsons allege in their lawsuit that Bonnie and Christopher Warford got control by lying to their sister, wrongly telling her the Nelsons were mismanaging the music business and her affairs.
The Warfords’ lawsuit accuses the Nelsons of improperly taking more than $1.5 million out of Winter’s business “under the guise of royalty income, commissions, reimbursements, fees, social media expenses and other mechanisms, while obfuscating and misrepresenting these dealings to Susan Winter.”
They have also accused the Nelsons of taking three of Winter’s guitars, worth about $300,000 total, and selling them at auction without permission. The Nelsons deny the allegation.
“In short, this is the classic case of a manager taking advantage of an artist-client, and worse here, an artist’s surviving family,” Diemand wrote in a legal filing.
It’s not clear why Edgar Winter, a noted musician in his own right, was not involved in his brother’s estate after his death. Edgar Winter and his representatives did not return phone and email messages seeking comment.
The Warfords’ lawsuit is similar to one the Winters filed against Johnny Winter’s former manager Teddy Slatus for alleged financial wrongdoing around 2005. Slatus died in late 2005. It’s not clear what happened with the lawsuit.
“Johnny and Susan have been battling lawsuits all their lives, and still can’t rest in peace,” said Mary Lou Sullivan, who wrote a biography titled “Raisin’ Cane: The Wild and Raucous Story of Johnny Winter” published in 2010.
Both the Warfords, of Charlotte, North Carolina, and Nelsons, of Weston, Connecticut, declined interview requests by The Associated Press.
Eric Clapton dropped the star-studded lineup for his 2023 Crossroads Guitar Festival on Monday morning (April 17). This year’s event will take place over two nights (Sept. 23-24) at the Crypto.com Arena in Los Angeles, where Clapton will again gather some of the best guitar players in the world for headlining sets and impromptu collabs.
Though not everyone on the roster will repeat over the weekend, Clapton will perform both nights, joined by Gary Clark Jr., Sheryl Crow, Santana, Jakob Dylan, Albert Lee, Los Lobos, Stephen Stills, Taj Mahal, ZZ Top, the John Mayer Trio, Robert Randolph, H.E.R., Marcus King and many more.
Tickets for the fest will go on sale on Friday (April 21) at 10 a.m. local time via Ticketmaster; there are no two-day passes, only single-day tickets.
Also slated to perform at the event are: Joe Bonamassa, Doyal Bramhall II, James Bullard, Jerry Douglas, Andy Fairweather Low, Samantha Fish, Sonny Landreth, Pedro Martins, John McLaughlin, Del McCoury Band, Roger McGuinn, Keb’ Mo’, Ariel Posen, Eric Gales, Vince Gill, Buddy Guy, Ben Haggard, Sierra Hull, Christone “Kingfish” Ingram, The Bros. Landreth, Robbie Robertson, Kurt Rosenwinkel, Gustavo Santaolalla, Daniel Santiago, Molly Tuttle, Jimmie Vaughan, Breadley Walker and The War on Drugs.
Longtime co-sponsor Guitar Center will again host the Guitar Center Festival Village at the adjacent Xbox Plaza and Chick Hearn Court at L.A. Live, where some of the world’s best guitar and gear manufacturers will host interactive exhibits where fans can try out new products and instruments.
In addition to some multi-million-dollar historical guitars on display at the Legends Collection area, there will also be an unveiling of the 25th anniversary Crossroads Guitar Collection, a rare series of limited-edition guitars based on some of Clapton’s vintage gear; a significant portion of profits from the sale of the guitars will go to aid Clapton’s Crossroads Centre at Antigua treatment and education facility.
Courtesy Photo
The 2023 Bourbon & Beyond festival at the Highland Festival Grounds in Louisville, Kentucky will host headliners Brandi Carlile, The Killers, The Black Keys and Bruno Mars atop an eclectic lineup of rock, pop, folk, blues and country acts from Sept. 14-17.
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The four-day event’s roster announced on Wednesday (March 8) will also feature Billy Strings, Train, Midland, Buddy Guy, Mavis Staples, Drew Holcomb and the Neighbors and The Lone Bellow on the first night, which will be topped by Carlile.
Night two will find the Killers atop a list including Duran Duran, Hozier, Brittany Howard, Bastille, The Gaslight Anthem, Wayne Newton, Inahler, Joy Oladokun and more. The Keys and Crowes will top Saturday’s rocking run-down, with support from The Avett Brothers, Spoon, First Aid Kit, Old Crow Medicine Show, City and Colour, Paolo Nutini, Luke Grimes and Danielle Ponder. The final night pairs headliner Mars with Blondie, Jon Batiste, Ryan Bingham, Babyface, Aloe Blacc, ZZ Ward and Fantastic Negrito, among many others.
Each day will also feature a full lineup on the Bluegrass Situation Stage with acts including Kelsey Waldon, Michael Cleveland & Flamekeeper, The Lil Smokies, Twisted Pine, The Cleverlys, Town Mountain, Della Mae, Sunny Mar, Lindsay Lou, Dan Tyminski and Frank Solvian & Dirty Kitchen.
Tickets — including weekend GA, Weekend Mint VIP, Angels Envy Beyond VIP and single day GA and single day Mint VIP — are all available now here. As always, in addition to a full day and night of music, the fest will host bourbon and food stages with appearances from master distillers, A-list chefs and, of course, dozens of bourbons to taste.
Check out the full lineup on the festival poster below.
It’s no great secret why Buddy Guy has chosen to make this year’s touring cycle his last.
“My next birthday (July 30) I’m gonna be 87, man,” the blues icon tells Billboard from his home in Chicago, where he’s operated a club, Buddy Guy’s Legends, since 1989. “My late friends — Muddy (Waters), B.B. (King) — all of them were, like, 20 years older than me and they used to look at me and say, ‘Boy, wait’ll you get to be my age….’ And they’re no longer here for me to tell them that it’s true.
“You get in the 80s, man, and the little aches that didn’t used to ache, they come on and you don’t know where they’re coming from. I can play, but getting from Point A to Point B, the trips that take all day on the bus or the airport and all that…Anybody would say, ‘That’s enough.’”
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But Guy is quick to add that an end to touring doesn’t mean a complete retirement.
“I’m still going to probably play some of the big festivals,” promises Guy, who began the Damn Right Farewell Tour on Feb. 12 at the Mahnidra Blues Festival in Mumbai, India and has dates booked through early October. “The New Orleans Jazz Festival wanted me to play there for the rest of my life, which is once a year, so that’s not too bad. But what’s coming up this year is a lot. We’re gonna make it to a lot of places we’ll probably never play again.”
The tour puts a cap on one aspect of what’s been a legendary career by any measure, one that’s stretched across more than 70 years and 19 studio albums and has included associations with forebears such as Waters, King and many more, as well as acolytes like Eric Clapton, the Rolling Stones, the late Jeff Beck and Steve Ray Vaughan, Bonnie Raitt, Kenny Wayne Shepherd, Johnny Lang, John Mayer and Christone “Kingfish” Antone. Clapton has called Guy “the best guitarist I’ve ever heard” on frequent occasions. Carlos Santana considers him “probably the most naked musician on the blues scene — just raw and intense in every note he plays.”
It’s not only peers who have sung Guy’s praises. He’s won eight Grammy Awards plus a Grammy lifetime achievement honor — performing during the afternoon premiere ceremony at this year’s event — as well as 23 Blues Music Awards. He’s received a Kennedy Center Honor, a National Medal of Arts, an American Academy of Achievement Award and a Billboard Century Award in 1993. He’s been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, the Musicians Hall of Fame and the Louisiana Music Hall of Fame. A portion of U.S. Highway 418 going through his hometown of Lettsworth, La., is named Buddy Guy Way, and there’s a marker that bears his name on the Louisiana side of the Mississippi Blues Trail.
“I did the best I could,” the characteristically humble Guy says. He considers those honors “as a dream come true for me, ’cause sometimes I had to pinch myself and say, ‘Did I really make it in there?’ — like the hall of fame and all that stuff. I didn’t start out thinking anything like that would happen — COULD happen, to be honest with you.”
Guy’s biography has the elements of a classic blues song. He grew up a child of poor sharecroppers. When not picking cotton, he learned to play on a two-string diddley bow made from a piece of wood and wires from a window screen. “My brothers and sisters used to tell my mama, ‘Get him outta here with that noise,’ ’cause I didn’t know how to play anything. I was just fooling around,” remembers Guy, who penned a memoir, When I Left Home: My Story, a decade ago. Eventually a stranger who saw him playing on his sister’s porch steps told him, “Son, you could probably learn to play if you had a real guitar” and bought the youngster a Harmony acoustic that Guy subsequently donated to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
“Where I grew up, you’d have sandlot baseball teams to play games, and that’s about it,” Guy says. “I wanted to do something the rest of the other kids couldn’t do, and that was play guitar. And I heard Lightnin’ Hopkins and T-Bone Walker, all those great blues players and thought that’s something I wanted to try, too.
“The first thing I learned how to play was ‘Boogie Chillen” by John Lee Hooker. I was so excited when I figured it out that I walked a mile and found every distant relative I had and said, ‘Look! Listen!’ They’d say, ‘Yeah, that kind of sounds pretty good there.’ I finally had something — and I was afraid to quit so I held it so long my fingers started bleeding.”
By the mid-50s Guy was in Baton Rouge, working as a janitor at Louisiana State University and playing in bands around town. He recorded a pair of demos during 1957 for Ace Records, which were not released. Later that year he moved to Chicago, where he became the hot new arrival on the scene, learning at the feet legends such as Waters — who brought Guy a bologna sandwich when he first came to hear him — Willie Dixon, Junior Wells (whom Guy backed on several albums under the pseudonym Friendly Chap) Ike Turner and others. He played in competitions with Otis Rush and Magic Sam, signing an early deal with Cobra Records before joining the Chess label in 1959.
Chess gave him work, including sessions for Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Little Walter, Koko Taylor, Sonny Boy Williamson and more. But the Chess brothers were not fans of Guy’s raw, aggressive playing style and pushed him to record more polished fare. Guy, who had a day job driving a tow truck, wouldn’t release an album with Chess until I Left My Blues in San Francisco in 1967. Across the pond, however, British players had discovered Guy through his session work and began singing his praises and seeking him out when they came to Chicago.
“It got back to Leonard Chess that Jimi Hendrix wanted to know who I was,” Guy says. “When Leonard Chess found that out he sent Willie Dixon to my house, and Willie said, ‘Put a suit on. Leonard wants to see you.’ When I went there Leonard bent over and said, ‘I want you to kick me in my butt.’ I said, ‘For what?!’ And he pointed out what those British guys were saying about me and said, ‘You came here with this and we were too dumb to listen.’”
Guy continued to play shows and made records for Vanguard, Isabel and JSP during the ’70s and ’80s, some with his younger brother Phil Guy, who followed in his guitar-playing footsteps. He was part of the Festival Express train tour in Canada with the Grateful Dead, Janis Joplin, The Band and others before opening the Checkerboard Lounge on Chicago’s South Side in 1972 with L.C. Thurman. Guy gave up his stake 13 years later and set up Buddy Guy’s Legends — where he’s in residence throughout every January — in the city’s South Loop.
That came just in time for Guy’s own legend to finally gain momentum. First he was Eric Clapton’s invited guest for the 24 Nights concert series at London’s Royal Albert Hall in 1990 and 1991. Then Guy signed with Silvertone Records (still his label home) for 1991’s Damn Right, I’ve Got the Blues, his first release in nine years. He’s released 12 albums since — including last year’s The Blues Don’t Lie — many featuring a who’s who of players vested in keeping Guy’s career alive and vital.
“Those guys are great,” he says. “They’ve always been good for me, and they never took anything except the music — and they’ve always told people where they got it. The Eric Claptons, the Rolling Stones, the Bonnie Raitts, they haven’t forgotten people like myself.”
Despite that eminence, Guy still considers himself a student of music. “I took things from the (younger) people, too,” he acknowledges. “You’re never too old to learn something.” A case in point was his Grammy-nominated 2001 album Sweet Tea, for which producer Dennis Herring took him to Mississippi Hill Country and introduced him to the music of Junior Kimbrough — whom he called “this kid” at the time — and R.L. Burnside. “I said, ‘What the hell is this?’” Guy recalls. “Y’know, I played with Muddy Waters, Son House, Fred McDowell…I thought I had found everything to come out of Mississippi…but I went back there and started digging in again.”
Throughout his resurgence, Guy has conducted himself with a kind of missionary exuberance, sworn to keep the blues alive as he saw a generation of elders, and even some contemporaries, pass away. (He played with Stevie Ray Vaughan in East Troy, Wisc., on Aug. 26, 1990, the day before Vaughan was killed in a helicopter crash. The two were supposed to have lunch together the following day in Chicago.) He’s still happy to help nurture new talent, whether on stage at Legends or by paying for the occasional recording session for an upstart. Guy has been particularly aggrieved at the lack of mainstream media support for the genre, especially at radio, where it’s consigned to specialty programs, NPR and satellite.
“Blues is like a stepchild now,” he says. “I’ve kept doing it so people don’t forget Muddy and Wolf, B.B., all the rest of ’em. But the big FM stations don’t play blues — if they do, I don’t hear it. And if people can’t hear it…It’s like they say about cooking; you don’t know how good the gumbo is in Louisiana until you go down there and taste it. Whether you like it or not is up to you, but at least you tasted it. And the blues is being treated like that. I don’t care how good a blues record you make — if nobody hears it, it’s just there. It bothers me because I’ve dedicated my life to the blues, and a lot of other people have, too. What did we do to be treated like that? I don’t know, man, but I’d like to see it get straightened out.”
Blues and soul harmonicist, singer, and songwriter John Németh is the top nominee for the 2023 Blues Music Awards. Németh received five nominations – song of the year, traditional blues album, band of the year, instrumentalist – harmonica, and instrumentalist – vocals.
Trailing Németh in the nomination count are Shemekia Copeland, Rory Block and Eric Gales, with three nods each. The 44th Annual Blues Music Awards are set for May 11 at Memphis’ Renasant Convention Center.
Three past winners of the B.B. King entertainer of the year award are nominated in that category again this year – Tommy Castro, who won last year; Sugaray Rayford, who won in 2020; and Bobby Rush, who won in 2015. This year’s other two nominees are Gales and Mr. Sipp (Castro Coleman).
Tedeschi Trucks Band and Rick Estrin and the Nightcats, both two-time winners of band of the year, are nominated again in that category, along with Anthony Geraci & The Boton Blues Allstars, John Németh and the Blue Dreamers and Southern Avenue.
Buddy Guy’s The Blues Don’t Lie, which is nominated for a Grammy for best traditional blues album, is nominated here for contemporary blues album. Copeland’s Done Come Too Far is nominated in the contemporary blues album category at both awards shows.
Charlie Musselwhite’s Mississippi Son, which is nominated for a Grammy for best traditional blues album, is nominated here for acoustic blues album. Gales’ Crown, which is Grammy-nominated for best contemporary blues album is nominated here for blues rock album.
Willie J. Campbell, who died in December, is posthumously nominated for instrumentalist – bass.
In a nice touch, three awards are named after late blues legends. As noted, the entertainer of the year award is named after B.B. King, who died in 2015. The award for traditional blues female artist is named after Koko Taylor, who died in 2009. The award for instrumentalist – piano is named after Pinetop Perkins, who died in 2011.
The Blues Music Awards are presented by The Blues Foundation. Tickets range from individual seats for $150 to premium tables (seats 10) for $1,800. Ticket sales are now open.
On May 10, the night before the BMAs, the Blues Foundation’s Blues Hall of Fame induction ceremony will take place at Memphis’ Halloran Centre at the Orpheum. Tickets, which include ceremony and reception admission, are $75 each. The 2023 class of inductees will be announced in the coming weeks.
The complete list of Blues Music Award nominees can be found below and on The Blues Foundation’s website (www.blues.org). The ballot will be open for current Blues Foundation members until 11:59 P.M. CST on Friday, March 20. To become a Blues Foundation member, visit www.blues.org to learn about the different membership levels and how to join. Upon membership confirmation, new and renewing members will be sent instructions on how to access the 2023 Blues Music Awards ballot.
The Blues Foundation is a Memphis-based organization whose mission is to preserve blues heritage, celebrate blues recording and performance, expand worldwide awareness of the blues, and ensure the future of this uniquely American art form. Founded in 1980, the Foundation has approximately 4,000 individual members and 173 affiliated blues societies representing another 50,000 fans and professionals worldwide.
Here’s a complete list of the nominees for the 2023 Blues Music Awards.
B.B. King entertainer of the year
Sugaray Rayford
Tommy Castro
Eric Gales
Bobby Rush
Mr. Sipp (Castro Coleman)
Band of the year
Anthony Geraci & The Boton Blues Allstars
John Németh and the Blue Dreamers
Rick Estrin and the Nightcats
Southern Avenue
Tedeschi Trucks Band
Song of the year
Altered Five Blues Band “Great Minds Drink Alike” (Jeff Schroedl)
Buddy Guy “The Blues Don’t Lie” (Tom Hambridge)
Eric Gales “I Want My Crown” (Eric Gales, Joe Bonamassa)
John Németh “The Last Time” (John Németh)
Shemekia Copeland “Too Far to Be Gone” (John Hahn/Will Kimbrough)
Best emerging artist album
Blue Moon Marquee / Scream, Holler & Howl
DaShawn Hickman / Drums, Roots & Steel
Dylan Triplett / Who Is He?
Jose Ramirez / Major League Blues
Yates McKendree / Buchanan Lane
Acoustic blues album
Charlie Musselwhite / Mississippi Son
Corey Harris / The Insurrection Blues
Duwayne Burnside / Acoustic Burnside
Harrison Kennedy / Thanks for Tomorrow
Rory Block / Ain’t Nobody Worried
Blues rock album
Albert Castiglia / I Got Love
Bernard Allison / Highs & Lows
Colin James / Open Road
Eric Gales / Crown
Tinsley Ellis / Devil May Care
Contemporary blues album
Buddy Guy / The Blues Don’t Lie
Diunna Greenleaf / I Ain’t Playin’
Janiva Magness / Hard to Kill
Larry McCray / Blues Without You
Shemekia Copeland / Done Come Too Far
Soul blues album
Kat Riggins / Progeny
Kirk Fletcher / Heartache by the Pound
Sugaray Rayford / In Too Deep
The Love Light Orchestra / Leave the Light On
Trudy Lynn / Golden Girl
Traditional blues album
Kenny Neal / Straight From the Heart
Bob Corritore / Bob Borritore & Friends: You Shocked Me
Duke Robillard / They Called it Rhythm & Blues
John Németh / May Be the Last Time
John Primer / Hard Times
Acoustic blues artist
Doug MacLeod
Guy Davis
Harrison Kennedy
Rhiannon Giddens
Rory Block
Blues rock artist
Walter Trout
Albert Castiglia
Tommy Castro
Joanne Shaw Taylor
Tinsley Ellis
Contemporary blues female artist
Ruthie Foster
Beth Hart
Janiva Magness
Teresa James
Vanessa Collier
Contemporary blues male artist
Selwyn Birchwood
Chris Cain
Christone “Kingfish” Ingram
Ronnie Baker Brooks
Mr. Sipp (Castro Coleman)
Soul blues female artist
Annika Chambers
Trudy Lynn
Thornetta Davis
Kat Riggins
Vaneese Thomas
Soul blues male artist
John Németh
Johnny Rawls
Curtis Salgado
Don Bryant
Billy Price
Traditional blues female artist (Koko Taylor award)
Dietra Farr
Diunna Greenleaf
Rhiannon Giddens
Rory Block
Sue Foley
Traditional blues male artist
Billy Branch
Duke Robillard
John Primer
Johnny Burgin
Sugar Ray Norcia
Instrumentalist – bass
Bob Stronger
Danielle Nicole
Larry Fulcher
Michael “Mudcat” Ward
Willie J. Campbell
Instrumentalist – drums
Chris Layton
Cody Dickinson
Derric D’Mar Martin
Kenny “Beedy Eyes” Smith
Tony Braunagel
Instrumentalist – guitar
Chris Cain
Christoffer “Kid” Andersen
Joanna Connor
Kirk Fletcher
Laura Chavez
Instrumentalist – harmonica
Billy Branch
Bob Corritore
Jason Ricci
John Németh
Dennis Gruenling
Instrumentalist – horn
Deanna Bogart
Gregg Piccolo
Jimmy Carpenter
Mark Kaz Kazanoff
Sax Gordon Beadle
Instrumentalist – piano (Pinetop Perkins piano player award)
Anthony Geraci
Ben Levin
Dave Keyes
Jim Pugh
Kenny “Blues Boss” Wayne
Instrumentalist – vocals
Curtis Salgado
Danielle Nicole
Diunna Greenleaf
John Németh
Shemekia Copeland
