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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

The Blues Foundation’s 2023 “Keeping the Blues Alive Award” honorees are notably international in scope. The eight individuals and organizations set to be honored hail from such far-flung blues outposts as Denmark, Poland and Colombia.
This year’s honorees will be recognized for their achievements at the Keeping the Blues Alive Awards brunch, taking place Jan. 27, 2023, at 10:30 a.m. CT in the DoubleTree by Hilton Hotel in Memphis. 

The ceremony represents just one part of the Blues Foundation’s 38th annual International Blues Challenge. The IBC Week kicks off Tuesday, Jan. 24, 2023, with International Showcase performances on historic Beale Street, and concludes with the finals at Memphis’ Orpheum Theatre on Jan. 28 at noon CT.

The Blues Foundation has also programmed a variety of seminars, showcases, master classes, film screenings, book signings, exhibits, networking events and receptions.

To purchase an International Blues Challenge Pass and final seating upgrades, along with tickets to the Keeping the Blues Alive Awards brunch and ceremony, visit this link: IBC & KBA TICKETS.

For more information about the International Blues Challenge, including the full schedule of events, IBC merchandise and links to reserve discounted hotel rooms at The DoubleTree Hotel, visit Blues.org.

Recipients of the 2023 Keeping the Blues Alive Awards are:

The Little Village Foundation

The Little Village Foundation, formed as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit in 2015 by Grammy-winning keyboardist Jim Pugh, focuses on seeking out, recording, and promoting artists whose music has not yet been discovered outside of their communities. Among the 51 recordings released by Little Village, the majority are blues related. CDs nominated for recent Blues Music Awards include albums by Tia Carroll, Memphissippi Sounds and Sonny Green.

John Guregian

For more than 40 years, John Guregian has been spinning the blues on his radio show, “Blues Deluxe,” hosted on WUML-FM in Lowell, Mass. Starting in 1979, when Guregian was still a student, the show aired for four hours on Saturdays. This led to a stint as blues director for the station, along with subsequent work emceeing many blues festivals and club shows. “Blues Deluxe,” which is now on the air every Saturday from 3 p.m. to 6 p.m. at www.wuml.org.

Marilyn Stringer

Marilyn Stringer is among the most prolific photographers currently documenting the blues. She began covering the blues in earnest in 2006 and has since become the head photographer for some of the top blues festivals in the U.S. Stringer has also published three books in her Blues in the 21st Century series. She recently started her fourth book, Blues Souls, which will feature black-and-white photos of renowned blues performers.

The Sierre Blues Festival

In 1995, Swiss native Silvio Caldelari established the Blues Bar music club in Sierre, Switzerland. Fourteen years later, Caldelari and a group of volunteers founded the Swiss Blues Society. After affiliating their new organization with The Blues Foundation, Caldelari’s group decided to launch the first-ever Sierre Blues Festival. Since that inaugural event, the three-day festival has grown in popularity. Caldelari has continued to work with European blues leaders to nurture the European Blues Union and its partnership with The Blues Foundation.  

Franky Bruneel

In 1982, at age 15, Franky Bruneel started his blues radio show, “Back to the Roots.” His show ran on several local and national radio stations throughout Belgium, his native country. In 1991, Bruneel began organizing blues concerts and created a link that brought American artists to Europe for short tours. In 1995, Bruneel created a modest fanzine named after his old radio show. Back to the Roots is now one of the most important blues magazines in Europe.

Ron Wynn

Blues journalist Ron Wynn began his career in the 1980s as the chief music critic for the Memphis Commercial-Appeal. He currently writes for the Nashville Scene, the Tennessee Tribune, the Tennessee Jazz and Blues Society, and Jazz Times, among other publications and websites. Wynn’s liner notes for From Where I Stand—The Black Experience in Country Music received a Grammy nomination in 1998. Wynn has contributed to three books, including Ain’t But a Few of Us: Black Music Writers Tell Their Story, slated for publication in December.

Blue Front Cafe

Located on Highway 49 in Bentonia, Miss., the Blue Front Café has been the home of the Bentonia School blues tradition since 1948, when Jimmy “Duck” Holmes’ family opened the café. The café is still open daily and presents live blues performances every weekend. As the headquarters of the Bentonia Blues Festival, which Holmes started in 1972, the Café has become a beacon for blues fans. A series of videos shot at the Café for The Black Keys’ Mississippi hill country-inspired album, Delta Kream, put even more focus on the Blue Front as a musical mecca.

Teddy’s Juke Joint

Teddy’s Juke Joint, owned by Lloyd “Teddy” Johnston, sits at the end of a dirt road off Highway 61—one of the last remaining juke joints on the Chitlin’ Circuit. Johnston was born in this shotgun shack in the woods north of Baton Rouge. After touring the country in the ’50s and ’60s as a DJ, he returned to Zachary, La. in the early ’70s to expand his childhood home into a bar. He allowed gospel groups to practice in the building, and when they began to form blues bands of their own and needed a place to perform, Teddy’s Bar & Lounge became Teddy’s Juke Joint.