BLACK MOUNTAIN, N.C. (828newsNOW) — Western North Carolina is just a week away from the 2nd annual Black Mountain Blues Festival, an arts and culture celebration of storytelling, blues music and Appalachian history.
The festival will run from Friday, Sept. 26 to Sunday, Sept. 28 in the heart of downtown Black Mountain, N.C.
Tickets can be purchased as day passes, festival passes or VIP passes at www.blackmountainblues.org/all-tickets. 50% of all festival proceeds will go to support Hurricane Helene relief efforts.
Mixing history, culture and music
In addition to blues music, the Black Mountain Blues Festival will spotlight the history and culture of the tradition.
“We want to make sure that we’re not just highlighting music, but celebrating and helping people understand the full culture of the blues,” said festival director Atiba Berkley. “In reality, blues is the folk culture of African Americans in this country, especially Americans of the South, but also other places that they’ve found themselves.”
To honor the spirit of blues culture, festival attendees will have the opportunity to attend workshops at the Black Mountain Center for the Arts, a community non-profit arts facility located at 225 W. State St.
“We have Doug MacLeod, who will be doing some guitar playing workshops, talking about style and how to execute when you play. We have Lightnin’ Wells, who is a Piedmont-style picker primarily, but also just an amazing storyteller,” Berkley described. “Doug’s a great storyteller too, but Lightnin’ has spent a lot of time with old Piedmont-style pickers that were his friends, and that he toured with and was on the road with regionally and internationally. People like John Dee Holeman and Algia Mae Hinton. So, he is going to be sharing his experience of the culture of blues from that perspective of firsthand account.”
Wells’ workshop, “NC Blues (The Next Generation),” will be held at 2:30 p.m. on Saturday, Sept. 27, while MacLeod’s, “Stories and Acoustic Blues,” will commence at 4 p.m. later that afternoon.
For a full list of workshops, visit www.blackmountainblues.org/workshops.
However, even if you only attend the festival concerts, you will hear the history of the musical tradition, Berkley said.
“We’ll be having music, so people can engage with the lyrics, and with the tones and the sounds that all come from the African diaspora and have been maintained through the culture,” Berkley said. “The use of coded language is a big part of the blues. When you hear a blues song and you say, ‘You ain’t nothing but a hound dog,’ what a way to describe a cheating person, right? But why that way? And it’s because we needed to have a voice and be able to speak in ways that we could understand, but sometimes we didn’t want others to for various reasons, usually of safety.”
Black Mountain and the blues
Layers of culture and musical heritage are baked into the blues and the blues is baked into Black Mountain. The mountain town has a long legacy with the musical form.
One of the spaces hosting concerts during the Black Mountain Blues Festival will be the Roseland Gardens Stage at White Horse Black Mountain.
“The Roseland Garden stage is designed to pay homage and bring awareness to Roseland Gardens, which was the historic Black music venue, juke joint and a picnic area for the Black Mountain area. It functioned from the ’20s all the way up to, like, 1974,” said Berkley. ”People like Bessie Smith, and Etta Baker ,and Mac Arnold and Blind Boy Fuller played there.”
Berkley and his team are working closely with BMCA and Swannanoa Valley Museum & History Center to bring historical materials to the festival.
“I think it’ll be really good for the community to learn about Roseland Gardens and that history, so that they can understand that, like, the blues was everywhere, including in the mountains,” Berkley said.
Festival headliners
The festival will be headlined by Nik West, Robert Randolph, Chambers-DesLauriers, Eric Gales, Ra’Shad the Blues Kid and Mac Arnold, in addition to dozens of other blues musicians, including musicians from Black Mountain and the broader Western North Carolina region.
For the full lineup of Black Mountain Blues Festival musicians, visit www.blackmountainblues.org/artists.
For more about the musicians playing the festival, read our previous coverage: