Blues conference at Grammy Museum to feature Aaron Neville

Registration is open for the 4th annual International Conference on the Blues, which will take place on Oct. 1–3 in Cleveland, largely on the grounds of the Grammy Museum Mississippi. The featured artist is New Orleans soul/R&B vocal legend Aaron Neville, who will perform on the 3rd, and the conference will also celebrate the centennial of blues icon John Lee Hooker and the Delta fieldwork of folklorist Alan Lomax.

The conference is part of Delta State University’s International Delta Blues Project, a program run by the Delta Center For Cultural and Learning that also offers a blues studies minor and graduate certificate as projects intended to boost the region’s cultural economy.

"The mission of the Delta Center is to promote greater understanding of the Mississippi Delta's culture and history,” the Center’s director, Rolando Herts, said. “The blues was born here, and educating residents and visitors about the global significance of blues music and culture is very much a part of fulfilling Center's mission." 

For the last three years the conference has been held mostly on campus, and the decision to move to the adjacent Grammy Museum Mississippi was made in tandem with the museum’s celebration of Hooker’s centennial. Their exhibit “King of the Boogie,” which opened on August 22 (Hooker’s birthday), features instruments owned by Hooker, personal photographs and performance outfits, his Grammy for “Don’t Look Back,” as well as the previously unreleased recordings.

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The conference opens at the museum on Sunday, Oct. 1 with events including a tour of the exhibit and a panel with young blues musicians Jontavious Willis from Georgia, Marquise Knox from St. Louis, and Christone “Kingfish” Ingram from Clarksdale. Later in the evening each of the musicians will record segments for the new Mississippi Public Broadcasting show “Amped and Wired.”

The trio will also be featured in a tribute concert to Hooker on Monday night on the lawn of Cleveland’s courthouse downtown, as well as a “blues in the round” session led by songwriter Tricia Walker,  director of DSU’s Delta Music Institute. Other events on Monday include a presentation by Adam Gussow of Oxford on his new book “Beyond the Crossroads: The Devil and the Blues Tradition,” and papers on topics such as blues and hip-hop, prison-themed blues, and blues tourism.

Monday morning will be dedicated to the legacy of Lomax, who conducted fieldwork in Mississippi between the early 1930s and the late 1970s and recalled his experiences here in the book “The Land Where the Blues Began.” The Delta Center at DSU recently teamed up with the Alan Lomax Archive/The Association for Cultural Equity (ACE) in a project to help “repatriate” his recordings to communities in the Delta.

The keynote speaker at the conference is veteran folklorist and music journalist John Szwed of Yale and Columbia University, who recently authored a biography of Lomax. Szwed has also penned biographies of Sun Ra, Miles Davis and Billie Holiday.

“We’re thrilled to have Dr. Szwed as well as ACE director Jorge Mateus and Anna Lomax Wood there to announce our Lomax Mississippi Collection partnership,” says Herts. “We look forward to making early recordings of Delta-based blues and gospel singers available to their families and the communities that they called home.”

Tuesday’s events will include a mini film festival featuring the documentaries “Two Trains Running,” which examines the connections between the blues revival and the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s, and the Mississippi Fred McDowell-themed “Shake ‘em On Down.” (co-produced by myself). Oxford based photographer and blues booking agent Dick Waterman, who appears in both films, with be featured on a panel.

The “keynote lunch” on Tuesday will feature an interview with Neville by conference co-organizer Don Allan Mitchell, and later in the evening the Aaron Neville Duo will perform at the Bologna Performing Arts Center on the DSU campus. Reviews of recent shows with the duo, featuring pianist Michael Goods, suggest that it will feature an impromptu set list with Neville recollecting his long life in music.

Scott Barretta is the host of Highway 61, which airs on MPB on Saturday at 10 p.m. and Sunday at 6 p.m. He maintains a music calendar at highway61music.blogspot.com