Tedeschi Trucks Band
Once again, the stars aligned nicely for the annual Chesapeake Bay Blues Festival, bringing beautiful weather and another superb mix of established and up-and-coming acts to Annapolis’ Sandy Point State Park this past weekend.
We weren’t able to stick around long enough to see Sunday night headliner Jonny Lang close out the program – which would have been wrapping up either shortly before or just about the time of Sunday night’s rare annular (a.k.a. “ring of fire”) solar eclipse – but we did catch most of the weekend’s other performances. And although we didn’t hear any of the artists actually reference the eclipse, this year’s festival did have plenty of seemingly astronomical aspects, from Ruthie Foster‘s slowed-down take on Johnny Cash’s “Ring of Fire” and an out-of-this-world performance from Saturday headliners The Tedeschi Trucks Band, to Swiss bluesman Philipp Fankhauser‘s encore cover of another Johnny’s (as in Johnny “Clyde” Copeland) song “Pie in the Sky” and an electric set from rising star Michael Williams, to heavenly tributes to the recently-departed Michael “Iron Man” Burks from fellow guitarslingers Bernard Allison and Lurrie Bell as well as Shemekia Copeland.
Shemekia Copeland
We’ll have a fuller recap of the weekend’s performances, along with photos, in the coming days. In the meantime, we’d love to hear from those who attended about your favorite part(s) of this year’s festival.