The Portland Waterfront Blues Festival is starting up, and I’ve noticed that the crowd seems to be about 95% Caucasian, and when news crews on the various local news outlets interview performers they are also almost exclusively Caucasian. Is it like this at other Blues Festivals around the country?
That seems to be plausibly in line with the local demographics, what *should *we expect at a music festival?
I’ve noticed that in Blues festivals around here.
Basically, white musicians started taking over the blues in the 1960s and black musicians usually went to other forms. Once rap/hip-hop became popular, that’s where the musicians went. The audience underwent the same change.
I saw an article recently on Buddy Guy complaining that the blues was dying out, but his daughter telling him that it had just evolved.
Can’t we all get along? Is there something wrong with a white guy liking the blues, first originated by black musicians? Is there some requirement that your skin color match the genre of those who first promoted it? Is there something wrong with a black guy being an astronomer? A country singer? Aren’t concerns like this representative of racism of the worst type?
Wow-you sure overreacted to my simple question.
No, I reacted to the reactions to your simple question.
The last Blues Festival I attended in Indianapolis (which was 10-12 years ago) was about half-and-half black-and-white. Dunno about now.
Pretty mixed here in Chicago but that’s to be expected given the demographics.
It is merely an observation that is obvious to anyone who knows the history of the blues. There is nothing right or wrong about it: it is a neutral look at social change.
I love the blues and find the change interesting. When I was a kid, white audiences didn’t go to blues shows. Now they’re the majority. Noting bad about that.
Yeah, and you will see the same thing at a lot of hip-hop and jazz concerts.
I should clarify. Even though it’s mixed, it’s probably still significantly much more white than the population of the city as a whole.
Which reactions? The one that said “eh, that’s the demographics”, the one that said “the demographics of the audience and performers shifted,” or the one that shared an article about how white audiences kept the blues alive when black audiences moved to different styles?
Which of those constitutes “not getting along”? Which of those even hinted that there’s something wrong with a “white guy liking the blues”?
Well, that’s Portland for ya. I went to see Michael Franti and Ziggy Marley at Edgefield and man was that a painfully white crowd. Everybody was happy and diggin’ the music though so that’s what’s important, I’d say.
I have friends in Blues bands, friends who own Blues clubs and friends who run a Blues Cruise and can confirm that the audience for Blues in almost entirely older White people.
I’ve attended blues festivals in Pennsylvania and West Virginia, and yes, the crowd was mostly older white folks.
Could it be that music festivals, in general and regardless of the genre, attract a mostly-white audience?* Maybe music festivals are just one of those things, like camping or kayaking, that stereotypically attracks white people.
*I’m not asking this from a place of snark or facetiousness. I’m genuinely curious.
HeyHomie, the jazz festival in Richmond usually attracts a big black audience. Not exclusively black by any means, but I would say black folk make up a majority of attendees.