Long Beach Blues Festival 2009

The Long Beach Blues Festival was a real and well-documented annual event, and 2009 marked its 30th and, as it turned out, final full-scale edition before the festival went on indefinite hiatus the following year. It was founded in 1980 by Long Beach jazz radio station KLON (later renamed KKJZ) under the direction of Bernie Pearl, host of the station's blues program; the first event was a one-day "KLON Blues & Gospel Festival" at Veterans Stadium that drew roughly 700 people and lost the station about $7,000. From that modest start it grew into one of the largest and longest-running blues festivals on the West Coast, second in longevity only to the San Francisco Blues Festival.

Over nearly three decades the festival moved between venues: the North Athletic Field at California State University, Long Beach was its home for most of the 1980s and 1990s, with a one-year detour to Shoreline Aquatic Park in 1992. By 2008 the festival had relocated to Rainbow Lagoon Park in downtown Long Beach, and it stayed there for its 2009 edition. The 2009 festival ran September 5-6, 2009, with a lineup that reflected both traditional and contemporary blues: Kenny Wayne Shepherd, the Funky Meters, Johnny Winter, Bettye LaVette, the Hill Country Revue, the Homemade Jamz Blues Band, Laurie Morvan Band, and Flattop Tom and His Jump Cats on the first day, and Bobby Womack, Mavis Staples, the Blind Boys of Alabama, Sonny Landreth, Diunna Greenleaf, and Andy Walo on the second.

The festival did not return in 2010. Organizers cited the economic downturn of the period, and the event was effectively replaced by a smaller, one-day "Blues Bash" at the Carpenter Performing Arts Center on the CSULB campus; the full outdoor Long Beach Blues Festival format has not been revived since. That makes the 2009 edition a genuine closing chapter for a festival that, at its peak in the 1980s through 2000s, had hosted an extraordinary run of blues and soul royalty, including B.B. King, Etta James, John Lee Hooker, Buddy Guy, Koko Taylor, Albert Collins, Bo Diddley, and Chuck Berry across its various years.

Local blues organizations, including the Southern California Blues Society, were part of the broader Southern California scene that a festival of this scale naturally drew in. For a look at how this festival connected to other local blues happenings that same season, see New Year's Eve Blues Celebration 2009: Part 1; for the surviving photo index tied to this archive, see photos; and for a different kind of grassroots blues gathering from the same scene, see our juke joint coverage from March 2010.