The American Folk Blues Festival doesn’t usually come up in conversations about music festivals. However, in addition to being a rousing success in mixing cultures, it threw fuel on a smoldering music movement, resurrected a dying industry, and probably did more than any single event to save one of the truly great contributions the USA made to the world. The pitiable irony is that it’s pretty much unknown in America.
In the States in the early 60’s, blues at best was considered an early springboard of Jazz; it’s three chord progressions naive. While blues always had enclaves along the Chitlin circuit in Texas, the Delta, and Chicago, it was getting little support from the mainstream. Blues was quietly dying in America’s boondocks. You have to admire the marketing savvy -- and nerve -- of country blues guitarist Big Bill Broonzy to present himself as the “last of the Chicago Bluesmen”. Fortunately that wasn’t completely true
For starters, let’s not forget my aging hippy cohorts, and the urban folk revival. While the electric guys, Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, and company, were still facing flower powered scorn from the love generation, Sonny Terry & Brownie McGhee, and the pre-war acoustic blues were mighty welcome along with Woody Guthrie and other assorted vagabonds. -- Hey Bob, remember the shit you got when you first pulled out your electric guitar at Newport? But, the times they were a’changin.
While in Chicago, German Jazz expert Joachim Berendt went to a garage jam session at drummer Jump Jackson’s house. Back in Germany, he informed Horst Lippmann, then a director of a German Jazz TV program, “Gehort und Gesehen”, that blues was alive and kicking up its heels in a contemporary blues scene in Chicago. It’s not clear whether he suggested that Lippmann should feature an all blues special on his TV program, or, promote a concert tour of the afore mentioned musicians. Lippmann did both, using the combined income to fund the tour and pay the musicians.
Promoted by Horst Lippmann and Fritz Rau, both in their early 30s, the American Folk Blues Festival became an annual event from 1962 to 1982. The first year, with money from the TV show, Lippmann pieced together a tour through Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Paris, Scandinavia and, after a struggle, a single English date in Manchester. It intended to bring the blues culture to Europe. It succeeded. That Manchester show was to have global ramifications because it lit the fuse on the Rhythm & Blues scene in London.
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