|  By
Kim "Festival Junkie" Welsh
 Buddy
Guy, Bobby Rush, Irma Thomas, Sonny Landreth, T-Model
Ford and many blues greats performed at the fourth
annual Crescent City Blues & BBQ Festival, a
free event presented by the New Orleans Jazz &
Heritage Foundation. The festival took place on
Saturday, Oct. 17, and Sunday, Oct. 18, with music
on two stages, a crafts fair and the best barbecue
in the South.
Amedee Frederick comes from the countryside around
Abita Springs in St. Tammany Parish, just across
Lake Ponchartrain from New Orleans. His Creole roots
run deep and his family has been making music for
five generations. His fiery approach to the guitar
— pulling out every soul-drenched note —
has been compared to Albert Collins, among others,
and is one outrageous Southern Louisiana musical
gumbo. When Amedee was a boy, he was exposed to
a number of Delta musicians who jammed with his
father. Amedee has shared stages with Lightnin’
Hopkins, John Lee Hooker and other famous bluesmen.
Guitarist/vocalist and blues legend Guitar Shorty’s
blistering, rocked-out guitar work and his fierce,
soulful vocals make his music unmatched. His perceptive
and meaningful lyrics are unique among modern bluesmen.
Credited with influencing both Jimi Hendrix and
Buddy Guy, Shorty has been electrifying audiences
for five decades with his supercharged live shows
and his incendiary recordings, beginning in 1957
with a Willie Dixon-produced single on the Cobra
label. He was awarded the 2007 Blues Music Award
winner in the Contemporary Blues category with his
“We the People” CD.
Sonny
Landreth, the “King of Slydeco” is a
slide guitar wizard who needs no introduction in
the Crescent City. He tore up the night with his
searing slide and covered many songs from his “From
the Reach” CD. This Southwest Louisiana-based
guitarist, songwriter and singer is a musician's
musician. His blues slide guitar playing is distinctive
and unlike anything else you've ever heard. His
unorthodox guitar style comes from the manner in
which he simultaneously plays slide and makes fingering
movements on the fret board. He heated up the cool
New Orleans evening.
Moreland
and Arbuckle hail from Kansas and work perfectly as
a three-piece band. Dustin Arbuckle's gritty, unfettered
vocals and sneering harp dovetail effortlessly with
Aaron Moreland's panoply of strings. Add Brad Horner's
propulsive drum chops, and the result is music with
an uncontrived sense of energy and magnetism. Their
authentic songwriting shines!
Buddy Guy is a Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee,
a chief guitar influence to rock titans like Hendrix,
Clapton, Beck, and Vaughan, a pioneer of Chicago's
fabled West Side sound, and a living link to that
city's halcyon days of electric blues. Buddy has received
five Grammy Awards, 23 W.C. Handy Blues Awards (the
most any artist has received), the Billboard Magazine
Century Award for distinguished artistic achievement,
and the Presidential National Medal of Arts.
Sunday afternoon was “Jack Daniels Time”
with blues singer and guitarist T-Model Ford (“The
Taildragger”) sipping Jack between songs. He
was born as James Lewis Carter Ford in 1924 in the
small rural town of Forest, Mississippi. With his
savage moan of a ragged voice and gritty guitar playing
style, Ford brings a gloriously raw and blunt ferocity
to Mississippi Delta blues music that's both passionate
and powerful in equal measure.
Bobby Rush finished off the festival with his lovely
dancing girls who definitely “have back”
which is much adored through their myriad costume
changes...That dressing room may have been the most
entertaining part of this act to me. Most were entertained
while a few, including myself, longed for his acoustic
set. If I never see those damned extra-large underwear
again, that would suit me just fine! Needless to say,
there was a whole lotta bootie shakin’ goin’
on dolloped with sexual innuendo and his “folk
funk” bluesy style.
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