Waterfront Blues Festival

The “largest blues festival west of the Mississippi” WaterFront Blues drew roughly 110,000 into Portland’s waterfront park over the 2017 Fourth of July weekend. Yet, even at a festival of blues headliners, only about 50 of 150 performers were black.

“There just aren't a lot of young black men playing the blues – like they should,” says performer Christone “Kingfish” Ingram, a guitarist freshly graduated from high school in Clarksdale, Mississippi Blues BirthPlace — a town known for its blues clubs, thriving black culture and acclaimed Delta Blues and Rock & Blues museums.

Christone @kingfish is known as the “kid phenom” who “plays guitar like B.B. King.” But Christone says he didn’t even know blues existed until age 6 and didn’t pick up lead guitar until 11. He made his first appearance at Oregon’s Waterfront Blues Festival three years ago at the age of 15 — backed by former B.B. King drummer Tony T.C. Coleman, now living in Portland.

“I’m just happy to see a young black man playing blues for the world,” says T.C., working now with Willie Nelson collaborator Jamie Johnson. “It is validating.”

This year marks the 30th anniversary for the Waterfront Blues Festival, coordinated by the Oregon Food Bank to showcase American blues and feed away the hunger blues. Comprising five days of blues and jazz, on four Columbia Riverfront stages, this event has become one of the largest and longest-running nonprofit music festivals in the world.

"The festival grew out of people who knew what hunger was like,"Hunger Relief Oregon Food Bank CEO Susannah Morgan says.

Thanks to sponsors, and $10 advance ticket sales, the festival cleared nearly $1.3 million this July. Those funds are expected to feed nearly 800,000 people in Oregon over the next year. Likely, many will be black — given that 21.5% of black Americans studied by the US Department of Agriculture's Economic Research Service report “food insecurity.”

“The blues grew up out of the African American tradition in this country,” Morgan told KOIN-TV in June. This tradition included “living in poverty, the challenges of living in poverty and what it can do for someone’s soul and resilience.

“Beautiful music,” she says, “came out of these difficult times.”

Living proof is Donna Angelle@FB, a gravelly voiced songstress who captured the crowd with her video-cast rendition of “In the Darkness of September.”

Donna's set included a call-out for Portland’s homeless community: “We lost people … who froze to death this winter,” Donna said. “[Portland] is where I was born and raised. This is where I’m raising my son. I believe it is our moral duty to take care of one another.”

Giving back is what drew Michael Bates, watching from the crowd at Donna's show. Michael has been coming to the Waterfront Blues Festival for “the music and the cause” since 1991. A transplant from Houston, he's seen performances at “a lot of great blues clubs in Houston, New Orleans, and here in Oregon.”

Another patron is Gary Houston, an illustrator and founder of Voodoo Catbox @voodoo catbox. For 17 years running, Gary draws the festival theme art that Oregon Food Bank uses for its festival promotions and merchandise. Gary then creates printing-press plates for each color layer, and hand-prints each plate onto signed and numbered festival posters.

This year’s poster inspiration came from the late Muddy Waters, aka McKinley Morganfield, the "father of modern Chicago blues."

“I just love the way he electrified Delta music; his slide was magic,” Gary says. “[Yet], we as dopey white people have to be reintroduced to the things that really matter… People think of Portland as a weird little paradox, in that it hosts this amazing blues festival.”

Portland is perhaps an unlikely place to find one of the largest nonprofit blues festivals in the world. Oregon's constitution made it illegal for blacks to live in the state until the 1920s. The ill-conceived law was meant to thwart slave ownership, but instead it kept freemen from owning homes and putting down permanent roots. Even into the 1950s, Portland Realty Board bylaws reportedly allowed it to penalize Realtors who sold homes to black buyers in areas outside of Portland's inner north and northeast “Albina district.”

“From Portland’s redlined properties (homes in areas home-insurance companies once would not insure), to locking up people of color in record numbers nationwide… there is a correlation between our mission of eliminating hunger and racism,” says the Oregon Food Bank CEO.

●     See redlined neighborhoods nationwide

Oakland musician Xavier “Fantastic Negrito” Dphrepaulezz, who headlined the festival's Friday night lineup, has seen the highs and lows.

“We’re [all] going through different things,” Xavier said in a press interview. “And I think these things all color your life and personality.”

When Xavier won the Grammy for Best Contemporary Blues Album, earlier this year, he told The Cyprus Weekly that he “took the Grammy [to the train station], put it on the ground, and I just played music.”

Indeed, the Waterfront Blues Festival itself offers a place to forget about the world and “just enjoy yourself,” says 55-year-old Oregon-native Gerald. As one of a number of black attendees, he's mixing up the sets with R&B and “Old School Classics” piped into headphones. “Here you have a variety of music, and – if you like to watch people – you get lots of that.”

The lesson, says blues drummer T.C. Coleman, is to “stop focusing on being black, and white, and red and green. We all have cultures. Respect those cultures.

“When it comes to the color of your skin, as a human being, we need to start saying ‘That ain’t what we’re about,'” Coleman said. Instead, he says, just love being in America.

SIDEBAR:
Over the past 30 years, three Waterfront Blues Festival sponsors have given more than $1 million each, says Oregon Food Bank CEO Susannah Morgan.

●       Safeway, a mostly western and central U.S. grocery chain

●       First Tech Credit Union, a national credit union serving high-tech employees and their family members

●       Columbia Distribution, one of the nation’s largest malt, wine and non-alcoholic beverage distributors