The Baton Rouge Blues Festival will kick off its 22nd annual event on April 9 and April 10 in and around Repentance Park and Galvez Plaza in downtown Baton Rouge.
Originally held on the campus of Southern University in 1981, the free festival seeks to promote the blues as the heart of American music, particularly the swamp blues native to Baton Rouge.
BRBF honors the local swamp blues legends who helped shape the genre, like Slim Harpo, Raful Neal and Rudy Richard.
This year, American blues guitarist and six-time Grammy winner Buddy Guy will headline the festival, performing Sunday night.
“He’s the largest blues musician in the world, so to have him play free and open to the public in downtown Baton Rouge is truly something to celebrate and to give this to the city is something spectacular,” Baton Rouge Blues Foundation board member Chris Brooks said.
Other notable performers include Latimore, Curtis Harding, and Kenny Neal and the Neal family, who will perform a tribute to the late Raful Neal.
In an effort to provide more opportunities for attendees to engage with the city of Baton Rouge and the wide variety of performers, this year’s festival will be the first two-day BRBF in over 20 years.
The festival’s performers will take to one of four stages this weekend: The Soul of BR stage, the Front Porch stage, the Foundation stage and the main Swamp Blues stage.
“Our focus with the committee is that those people that come to the festival can really see what Baton Rouge is all about,” Brooks said. “That’s why we have our Front Porch singer-songwriter stage because we have a great singer-songwriter community here, and that’s why we have a Soul of BR stage because our gospel community is absolutely enormous here and a lot of people don’t know about it.”
Additionally, scheduled question and answer sessions with festival performers will be held in the senate chambers of the Old State Capitol at an event called Backstage at the Blues Fest. The festival will also feature an arts market, a food market and a general market for local boutiques.
BRBF is one of many initiatives of the Baton Rouge Blues Foundation, a non-profit organization aimed at honoring the history of swamp blues through educational outreach and other campaigns throughout the city.
The festival kicks off at 11:30 a.m. Saturday with Sundanze Howie.