For blues fans, this is the week when everyone can exhale. All the world of blues has just brought their best game to Memphis. The International Blues Challenge (IBC) has been completed, the winners announced. The performers are now looking to their coming year of shows. But not all who are honored during the IBC are performing artists; they may just return to their day jobs. This time around, we take a look a this last group: the winners of the Keeping the Blues Alive awards.
These awards go to individuals and organizations that have made significant contributions to the Blues world, often during a brunch as part of the IBC weekend of events.
Unlike the Blues Music Awards, the Keeping the Blues Alive (KBA) awards go to non-performers strictly on the basis of merit, as interpreted by a select panel of Blues professionals. The committee generally refrains from awarding the KBA to an individual or organization more than once. Instead, a new winner is selected each year, except in rare cases when a significant period of time has elapsed since the first award. Yet such is the global span of blues culture now that new pivotal figures in keeping the heart of the blues beating are always appearing.
This year’s recipients include a particularly Memphis-centric winner, writer Ron Wynn, who served as chief music critic at The Commercial Appeal in the ’80s. Beyond that, Wynn has been writing about music for more than 40 years for publications as varied as Boston’s Bay State Banner, Connecticut’s Bridgeport Post-Telegram, The New Memphis Star magazine, Nashville’s City Paper, and, most recently, the Nashville Scene and Tennessee Tribune. He’s also a columnist for the Tennessee Jazz and Blues Society’s website and writes for Jazz Times. His liner notes for From Where I Stand—The Black Experience in Country Music were nominated for a Grammy, and his work was part of the Grammy-winning Night Train to Nashville, Vol. 1 compilation (covering the Nashville R&B Scene) in 2005. Later this year, a book to which he contributed, Ain’t But a Few of Us: Black Music Writers Tell Their Story, will be released.
Other recipients of the KBA award reveal the diversity of generous spirits dedicated to the blues. DJ John Guregian has hosted his Blues Deluxe show on WUML-FM in Lowell, Massachusetts for over 40 years, scoring many impressive artist interviews along the way. Photographer Marilyn Stringer specializes in the blues, and is the head photographer for some of the most prominent blues festivals in America. She has also published three volumes in her Blues In The 21st Century series, the last focused on Blues Music Awards performances and related events in Memphis. The Blue Front Café, on Highway 49 in Bentonia, MS, opened by Jimmy “Duck” Holmes’ family in 1948, has been essentially unchanged ever since, and has become a beacon for blues fans worldwide as the home of the free Bentonia Blues Festival.
The Little Village Foundation nonprofit, founded by Grammy-award-winning keyboardist Jim Pugh, focuses on seeking out, recording, and promoting artists whose music has not yet been discovered outside of their communities. Franky Bruneel has put 40 years of work into the blues as a DJ, writer, photographer, editor, and publisher of his own blues magazine, website, and record label — a veritable anchor of the European blues community. Lloyd “Teddy” Johnston, owner of Teddy’s Juke Joint, maintains one of the last remaining juke joints on the Chitlin’ Circuit in Zachary, Louisiana, where he expanded his childhood home into a bar over fifty years ago. And Swiss native Silvio Caldelari was instrumental in launching the first-ever Sierre Blues Festival, which attracted 11,000 fans last year.
Of course, the work all these awardees do comes down to the music in the end. And there was plenty of that during the IBC’s. This year’s notable winners included Mathias Lattin, representing the Houston Blues Society, who won both the Band Division and the Gibson Guitar Award for Best Band Guitarist; Frank Sultana from the Sydney Blues Society, who won the Solo/Duo Division; and Adam Karch of the Montreal Blues Society, who nabbed the Memphis Cigar Box Guitar Award. Winning the Best Self-produced CD was Lincoln, Nebraska’s Josh Hoyer and Soul Colossal for their album, Green Light.