Fine Arts Center Down Home Blues Festival Schedule

The Carolina Downhome Blues Festival returns to the streets of Camden this week, bringing a lively international blues scene back to its roots in the American South.

The festival is a weathered institution at this point, much like the blues and the city itself, but that's an inherent part of the Oct. 7 event's appeal, according to organizer and longtime Charleston blues bandleader Gary "Shrimp City Slim" Erwin. He reasoned every element of the 25-year-old festival allows for a distinctively Southern cultural experience that has attracted attendees from all over the globe.

"I think interest in Southern tourism is really important to do the whole scene down here," he offered. "South Carolina is a very desirable destination and the way it always works with Charleston and has worked with Camden is that the blues component and the performances are part of everything else. I mean the food, the countryside, the history."

And that appeal works in concert with the vision that the festival provides.

Erwin says the festival originally was an outlet for many of the old-time blues musicians who were still performing and they've strived to maintain the connection to that tradition while also bringing in more modern and blues-rock outfits that represent how the genre has evolved.

For this year's festival, that ranges from the folk-blues picker Robert Lighthouse from Sweden, North Carolina's Steady Rollin' Bob Margolin (who played guitar in Muddy Waters' band) and the Maryland-based electric blues outfit The Nighthawks, famously featured as the seasoned bar band in season 2 of the HBO series The Wire.

These national and international names are also balanced by a healthy dose of local talent, including Columbia's long-running Elliot and the Untouchables, guitarist and poet Rev. Marv Ward, and the electric group Blues Deluxe.

For Erwin, the mission of the festival is to stay true to the roots of the blues as a Southern music tradition, one which now lives on in music scenes throughout the world. That allows the festival to stay true to its sense of place.

"Attendees are coming to where it started, to its roots," he contended. "They want to see the cotton fields up there on 601. They want to see the old, ramshackle houses where grandma and grandpa used to live, falling down. They can envision a guy with a guitar sitting on a porch. They want to see that stuff because that's what they see in their imagination when they hear the blues, that whole Southern tableau."

Erwin, who came up in the Chicago scene before moving to Charleston in 1983 and becoming the city's primary blues promoter and cheerleader, said the Downhome festival is based directly on the Charleston Blues Festival that he started in the 1990s.

Given Charleston's larger size and massive tourism appeal, he was initially skeptical that the model — which at the time was a street crawl-style experience featuring two dozen venues over two weeks — would work in a smaller inland community like Camden.

Ultimately, Erwin says the town's rich history and Southern hospitality bonafides made him believe a multi-day blues festival would be possible.

"The fact that Camden was South Carolina's oldest inland city, that there was this Revolutionary War battlefield and equestrian culture and everything, we decided to try something to see if it'll work," he concluded.

After booking a few well-received shows locally, Erwin and the Kershaw County Fine Arts Center gave it a go, and it's become a go-to blues destination ever since that inaugural festival in 1997.

This remains true this year, even though Erwin said it was especially difficult to book because many artists were having difficulty routing a tour to the festival amid the ongoing pandemic. The range of acts and offerings maintains the event's appeal. Last year, the pandemic forced Erwin and other organizers to cancel the festival.

Fitting for a year still plagued with pandemic concerns, this year's iteration of the festival features a family-friendly outdoor day festival at the Arts Center. That comes before the regular nighttime street crawl and, on Sunday, a special "blues mass" and brunch at the Grace Episcopal Church on Littleton Street.

Erwin will lead a seasoned quartet for the service, and then the Hermosa Prairie Dogs duo will play the brunch in the church hall.

"We have something for everybody–all different flavors of blues, day and night, at affordable pricing," Erwin said in his closing pitch. "And certainly that Saturday event at the Art Center is real family friendly. Why not expose your children to live music? Why not expose them to blues."

"They need to feel the emotion and the warmth of a live performance."

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Carolina Downhome Blues Festival

Oct. 7-10. $15-$20. Arts Center of Kershaw County. 810 Lyttleton St. fineartscenter.org

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Source: https://www.postandcourier.com/free-times/music/camden-s-carolina-downhome-blues-festival-returns-oct-7/article_9f3528a6-22e2-11ec-8979-ff9fcde03f2b.html

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