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2 2013 MISSISSIPPI VALLEY BLUES FESTIVAL Welcome Ticket Information Advance Tickets (through June 30) Available at: from the • Hy-Vee stores in the Quad Cities, Clinton, and Muscatine ($15.50) • Rascals (1414 15th Street, Moline, $15) • The Muddy Waters (1708 State Street, Bettendorf, $15) MVBS • Mississippi Valley Blues Society office (102 South Harrison Street, Davenport, $15); Call first: (563)322-5837 • MVBS.org ($15 plus $2 service fee per order) At the Gate President $20 each day reetings from the offices of the Mis- Children 14 and under are free if accompanied by an adult. sissippi Valley Blues Society, and Gwelcome to our 29th-annual blues festival! This year yours truly happens to be one of the folks who’s 2013 Mississippi Valley Blues Festival • July 4 - 6 • LeClaire Park, Davenport, Iowa • MVBS.org | • MVBS.org Davenport, Iowa Park, • July 4 - 6 LeClaire Blues Festival Valley 2013 Mississippi been here for all of the 28 other festivals and, yeah, as with my children, I Photo by Dennis Fretty can’t believe how the time passes so quickly. My two daughters even worked this festival as volunteers when they were so little that we sat them on phone books so they could see over the counter and sell beer tokens. One of those daughters, in California now for several years, treasures dearly her autograph from John Hammond, one of the many legends who have come to play here at the Mississippi Valley Blues Festival. In those early years, we also had John Lee Hooker and Memphis Slim. In the middle years Joe Bonamassa and Susan Tedeschi. And I could go on and on. My point is that when you see one of our T-shirts proclaiming “Where Legends Come to Play,” it’s more than just a slogan. We here at the Mississippi Valley Blues Society have worked hard over the years to bring you a topnotch blues festival annually, and I hope you agree with that this year. So stroll the grounds at beautiful LeClaire Park, take in the river view, patronize our vendors, visit the free workshops, take a look at our photo exhibit, and even take time to thank a volunteer – one of those people who help to make this festival not only possible but affordable. And take in as many artists as you can – for there’s sure to be a future legend or two in there somewhere. Steve Brundies President, Mississippi Valley Blues Society | 2013 Mississippi Valley Blues Festival • July 4 - 6 • LeClaire Park, Davenport, Iowa • MVBS.org Davenport, Iowa Park, • July 4 - 6 LeClaire Blues Festival Valley | 2013 Mississippi 3 4 2013 MISSISSIPPI VALLEY BLUES FESTIVAL The Business Behind the Luck by Jeff Ignatius Selwyn Birchwood Band: Thursday, July 4, 3 p.m., Bandshell elwyn Birchwood’s e-mail signature he discovered Jimi Hendrix: “The first time I doesn’t note that his band took the top heard him, it just sounded so bizarre – some Sprize in the 2013 International Blues of the sounds that he was getting, some of the Challenge. It doesn’t say that he won the Albert chords, and everything he was doing. So I was King award as the Nashville event’s top guitarist. really curious where he got that from, because Instead, it says: “Selwyn Birchwood, MBA.” it just sounded completely different to me. So And, yes, that is a Master of Business when I looked at his bio, he just had nothing Administration degree. Suffice to say that but the old-school blues guys as his influences,” Birchwood – also a singer and songwriter – is including Buddy Guy. not your father’s (or grandfather’s) bluesman. Birchwood was 17, and it just so happened “That’s always been a big part of my life is the that Guy was playing a gig that week at the scholastic part of it,” he said in a recent phone House of Blues in Orlando. “It just floored me,” interview. “My family has always pushed me to he recalled. “that kind of emotion and feeling do schoolwork and do well in school. ... A lot of and energy he has in his playing. ... That’s what I people say that you don’t need school because want to do.” 2013 Mississippi Valley Blues Festival • July 4 - 6 • LeClaire Park, Davenport, Iowa • MVBS.org | • MVBS.org Davenport, Iowa Park, • July 4 - 6 LeClaire Blues Festival Valley 2013 Mississippi you’re playing music. I looked at it the other The next happy accident was meeting Sonny way: I think if you’re playing music, you need Rhodes. A high-school friend, he said, “would it even more, because if, Lord forbid, gigs dried always tell me that his neighbor had a blues up and you have to get a job in a pinch, it’s a band. I thought it was just a bunch of drunk lot easier to get a job if you’ve got a degree or a guys in a garage on weekends.” graduate degree ... I always saw it as a challenge But the friend gave Birchwood a Sonny as well. I always wanted to see if I could do it.” Rhodes CD, and he was hooked “pretty much So he got his undergraduate degree in from the first note. ... ‘I don’t know who this is, business marketing, and in December earned his but you have to introduce me to this person.’” MBA. “I was ... kind of seeing how it can apply It took six months for that meeting to happen, to my music,” he said. always a lot different when you’re face-to-face but it involved Birchwood playing for Rhodes: For example, the Wednesday before we talked, with somebody. ... “I got about halfway through a song ... and he and his band were in Lincoln, Nebraska, “A lot of times people will look at me and say, he looked over to his bass player and kinda with a gig scheduled for two days later. “Instead ‘Man, you got lucky’ to do this or that or the smiled and looked back at me and didn’t even of laying around the hotel room, I went and other thing. I don’t think a lot of it’s luck.” let me finish the song and just asked if I had a printed up about 60 flyers or so and I went [to While he’s undoubtedly put in his work, some passport,” he said. Within a month, Rhodes took the club] and shook hands with everybody and good fortune has played a role. him on the road. just introduced myself,” he said. “I ended up Now in his late 20s (but with a singing voice Rhodes encouraged Birchwood to focus on sitting in with the band, so people got to hear that sounds like it has a couple extra decades college but would gig with him during breaks. me. ... I know the necessity of getting your name of experience), Birchwood started guitar at age After college, he said, they did more-extensive out there if you want people to show up. ... It’s 13, playing things from the radio. Eventually, touring. Birchwood eventually formed his own band, releasing FL Boy in 2011. He’s planning on releasing a new CD, titled Hoodoo Stew, early next year. The band originally planned to release the album early this year, but it was delayed in part because of discussions with record labels – and, Birchwood admits, because the money he’d set aside to finish it dried up. In the past year, he said, “it’s just been kind of tough trying to stay busy and stay booked.” Clubs are cutting back on live music, he said, and that’s made it difficult for an emerging band trying to extend its reach beyond its Florida home. His band’s International Blues Challenge wins, he said, were especially helpful in combating that. “Just by winning, they get you on about seven festivals throughout the country that are more kinda A-list festivals,” he said. “It was really nice to get some recognition.” | 2013 Mississippi Valley Blues Festival • July 4 - 6 • LeClaire Park, Davenport, Iowa • MVBS.org Davenport, Iowa Park, 5 • July 4 - 6 LeClaire Blues Festival Valley | 2013 Mississippi 2013 MISSISSIPPI VALLEY BLUES FESTIVAL The Road to World Domination, Via Minnesota by Mike Schulz Davina & the Vagabonds: Thursday, July 4, 8 p.m., Tent oward the end of our recent phone inter- Tview, I ask Davina Sowers – the lead vocalist, pianist, and bandleader for her five-person outfit Davina & the Vagabonds – what her plans for the future are, say, five or 10 years down the road. She answers with her own question: “You mean, aside from world domination?” I’m fairly certain she’s kidding. But considering Sowers’ rise to professional and popular acclaim over the past eight years, there’s plenty of evidence to the contrary. A Pennsylvania native now residing in St. Paul, Minnesota, Sowers’ career in music, as she tells it, began rather inconspicuously, when the singer/songwriter was performing as a street musician in Key West, Florida. Yet since we’re meeting, and just getting our music Orleans kind of throw to the blues. And relocating north in 2005, Sowers has not- out there. That’s my ultimate goal. It’s always there was Big Joe Turner, and Pinetop so-slowly and surely emerged as one of been my goal.” Perkins, and Sonny Boy Williamson ... Minnesota’s – and the country’s – most Sowers says that as a child, her interest in “You know, I think a lot of girls stand in exciting and accomplished blues artists, music originated both with piano lessons, front of their mirror with a hairbrush and touring extensively with her ensemble of which she began at age six, and with her sing like it’s a microphone, and that was Vagabonds and earning much critical praise mother’s record collection.

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