September 1, 2005

By Lauren Heaton

Each year for the last decade, the AACW Blues Festival has attracted bigger and bigger crowds of people who come to Yellow Springs to hear the soulful lyrics and the rhythmic strumming of the roots of American music, one of the festival’s organizers, Rob Lytle, said.

With several new artists and many returning musicians, this year’s festival is no different than the others, except that the anticipated 8,000 to 10,000 audience members will have to squeeze in a little tighter and get to know each other a little better at the Antioch College Amphitheater, he said.

Getting people together and allowing them to see their similarities as well as their differences is what AACW and Blues Fest founder Faith Patterson likes to do best.

Celebrating diversity through her motto “everybody counts” is what has driven the festival’s success and attracted so many people from the village as well as Springfield, Dayton, Cincinnati, Toledo and outside the state, said Patterson, who believes people come to Yellow Springs to be part of a crowd-pleasing show that features a diversity of musical styles.

The best way Patterson has found to bring people together is to give them a job to do, and one that requires coordinating with a lot of other people to make the whole thing work. This year’s volunteer roster for the Blues Fest will total nearly 250 local and area people, Patterson said.

“The more our paths mix up and cross in our community, the stronger the community becomes,” Patterson said. “When we celebrate diversity we find out we’re really not that different. That’s the joy, that’s the ‘v’ in vegetable soup.”

Beginning at the heart of the African-American musical experience, the Gospel Fest on Wednesday night, Sept. 7, at Central Chapel AME Church, will go back to the spiritual work songs and field hollers that influenced the blues. The festival’s program committee hopes to include the Central Chapel gospel choir as well as visiting choirs from churches in Xenia, Springfield, Wright State, Wittenberg and Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, some of whom must still be confirmed, Patterson said.

Patterson’s daughter, Karen Patterson, a classical and jazz cellist, runs the festival’s Innovation Stage and organizes the youth workshop, “8 to 80,” for people of all ages and musical abilities, on Thursday, Sept. 8.

The jazz education department at Lincoln Center in New York City donated instructional CDs, narrated by Wynton Marsalis, with recordings of different musical styles for participants to listen to and try to imitate with whatever instrument they choose to bring, Karen Patterson said. And, as is tradition at the Blue Fest, if you don’t have anything to play, the workshop will provide a kazoo to play.

“If you know nothing about music, we want you there. If you don’t have an instrument, we want you there,” she said. “I want people around the region to come and say ‘I know I’m going to have a good time, and I’m going to learn something too.’ ”

Karen Patterson also coordinates the Innovation Stage, meant as an experimental, cross-disciplinary collaboration between various performing artists to experience “Paths Crossing Paths,” as Saturday afternoon, Sept. 10, is called.

“That’s what happens a lot of times on these stages when you’re swinging with some of the best, and you each come there ready with what you do to produce a new work,” Patterson said. “That’s innovative, that’s the Antiochian mind going beyond boundaries.”

Patterson said she can “smell out” combinations that work and produce talented groups who then go on to form lasting relationships with each other.

Well-known blues artist Guy Davis, a loyal mainstay of the festival who has performed at nearly every Blues Fest, will give an Innovation Stage workshop on old timey music featuring banjos, mandolins and, in true inclusive style, “whatever you play.” Davis plays an acoustic guitar in the traditional on-the-cabin-porch style “where you’re stomping on the floor and going out there and getting it done,” program committee member and musician Gerry Greene said.

Rap will also be represented on the Innovation Stage in hopes of attracting youth to the festival. Yellow Springs native Anthony Wishart, who operates New Breed Entertainment, a management agency, is bringing three of his groups from Florida and California, including I–C, a hip-hop duo called the Flo-ridas and rap artist Cairo. While they are here, the groups will also conduct a workshop on Friday, Sept. 9, at Yellow Springs High School, where they will talk about the history of hip-hop and rap and show students how to take a poem and turn it into a rap.

The festival’s performers on Friday, Sept. 9, and Saturday, Sept. 10, include returning artists Mark Laurens and Zydeco Fire, W.G. Blues Unit, Nerak Roth Patterson Band, Karen Patterson, Piney Brown & the Swift Blues Band and Davis. Closing for Friday will be Corey Harris and the 5X5 Band, who is returning after several years. New to the festival this year is the Deborah Coleman Band, which will close the festival Saturday night.

Members of the AACW and a bevy of other volunteers begin in January of each year to start coordinating the event’s various components, from the financial supporters to the food and merchandise vendors to scheduling the performers and their workshops, Faith Patterson said. Ali Thomas and Rick Walkey are the volunteer coordinators, and Rob Lytle and Taylor Rhone organized the 40 vendors expected this year.

Jo Wilson, the festival’s grant writer, said she expects commitments of over $10,000 this year from local and area organizations and individual donors. The Ohio Arts Council, Yellow Springs Community Foundation, Antioch College, Wittenberg, Yellow Springs Community Council, Hyundai in Springfield, The Antioch Company, Culture Works, YSI Incorporated, Winds Cafe, Yellow Springs Travel, Springs Motel and over a dozen private donors have all given their support this year, Wilson said.

Visti the AACW website at http://www.aacw.org