Page 47 - Blues Festival Guide Magazine 2019
P. 47

The Mammoth Husky Club Ukulele Kids opened the 23rd Annual Mammoth Festival of Beers & Bluesaplooza.  Photo courtesy of the Infinite Music Foundation
        guest artists into public schools and gives students free tickets   support the Infinite Music Foundation, whose goal is to get
        to concerts in the community. This year, the festival is proud   children thinking musically at a young age so they’ll carry that
        to feature a performance by a 14-year-old piano player who   appreciation throughout their lifetimes.
        attended one of its piano workshops last year.           The Playing with Fire Free Summer Music Festivals series
           Several  festivals  include  young  artists  on  the  schedule.   in  Omaha,  NE,  supports  the  local  blues  society’s  BluesEd
        At  the  2018  Mammoth  Festival  of  Beers  &  Bluesapalooza   Youth Artist Development Program. Jeff Davis, organizer and
        in  Mammoth  Lakes,  CA,  the  Ukulele  Kids,  all  third  and   producer, neatly summed up how important it is to provide
        fourth  graders,  opened  the  festival.  The  resulting  video  on   performance opportunities for students. “Every Playing with
        YouTube  proves  that  nothing  opens  a  blues  festival  quite   Fire  show  has  been  opened  by  a  BluesEd  youth  band.  If
        like 12 adorable kids and their teacher, all strumming their   you want to have young people play the blues, you need to
        four-stringed instruments and singing. The festival’s proceeds   present opportunities for them to do so.”
                                                                 The  Playing  with  Fire  series  supports  a  wide  variety  of
                                                              organizations in addition to youth musical education. Donate
                                                              Life Nebraska was chosen as a partner specifically as a result
                                                              of the festival’s friendship with Walter Trout, whose life was
                                                              saved four years ago by the liver transplant he received at
                                                              the Nebraska Medical Center. Curtis Salgado also had a life-
                                                              saving liver transplant there in 2006. Thanks to the presence
                                                              of Donate Life Nebraska’s information booth at the festival,
                                                              countless people have been educated about the intense need,
                                                              inspiring hundreds of new donors to sign up.
                                                                 Blues festivals benefit a wide array of worthy causes. They
                                                              include the Clarksdale (Mississippi) Downtown Development
                                                              Association,  which  receives  proceeds  from  the  Juke  Joint
                                                              Festival, and the Killer Blues Headstone Project, a beneficiary
                                                              of  the  White  Lake  Blues  Festival  in  Michigan.  Steve  Salter,
                                                              founder  of  the  Headstone  Project,  says  that,  thanks  to  the
                                                              money  raised  by  the  festival,  104  headstones  have  been
        Donate Life Nebraska Coordinator Lisa Carmichael (lt) with Marie and Walter Trout   placed at previously unmarked graves of blues artists. “These
        (ctr, rt) after a Playing with Fire concert.  Photo courtesy of Playing with Fire    people are the architects and creators of the blues, soul and



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