John Jackson Piedmont Blues Festival returns

After a two-year COVID hiatus, the John Jackson Piedmont Blues Festival returns later this month, featuring a lineup of artists known for keeping alive the music the Rappahannock native helped make famous.

The event on Saturday, September 24, will again be held at Eldon Farms in Woodville, VA, not far from where Jackson was born into a family of tenant farmers before his mastery of the country guitar style brought him international fame.

Celebrated blues harmonica player Phil Wiggins, a headliner at the upcoming festival, remembers the first time he saw Jackson play. Wiggins was still in high school, but his band was on the same bill as Jackson at a club in Alexandria.

“Immediately, I realized this was someone really special. An amazing musician,” said Wiggins, who, like Jackson, has been named a National Heritage Fellow, the country’s highest honor bestowed on traditional and folk artists. Wiggins remembers that he was dumbfounded when Jackson invited him to join him at a future show. “Here was this world-class player, and he didn’t know me from Adam. Then he invited me out to his house. He was incredibly generous and open-hearted.”

A fairy tale twist

No one who knew Jackson during his days in Rappahannock could have imagined him as an internationally-acclaimed performer. Born in Woodville as the seventh of 14 children, he never made it past the first grade because he had to help on the family’s farm. But at a young age, he taught himself to play on his father’s guitar the songs he heard on the family’s old record player.

In 1949, he moved with his own family to Fairfax Station and kept playing for friends and neighbors until a violent confrontation at a house party convinced him to stop performing in public.

That all changed one night in 1964 when Jackson gave a guitar lesson to a mailman friend in the backroom of a Fairfax gas station. Chuck Perdue, then president of the Folklore Society of Greater He Washington, happened to stop for gas, but then he heard Jackson playing.

Perdue eventually convinced a dubious Jackson to record all the songs he knew–he covered 90 in a 12-hour session–and encouraged him to start performing at clubs and coffeehouses in the region. Ultimately, as Jackson’s reputation grew, he was invited to do shows at folk and blues festivals worldwide. He even performed for Presidents Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan. But he never gave up his day job as a cemetery caretaker.

Piedmont style

Although he could play many types of music, Jackson is most closely associated with what’s become known as Piedmont blues—country music built around challenging but sweet-sounding acoustic guitar licks.

“Piedmont Blues is definitely different from other blues,” said Erin Harpe, another one of the festival’s headliners. “It isn’t so down and dirty. It’s more refined, “You’re playing a syncopated melody with your fingers while you’re playing the alternating baseline with your thumb.

“It’s more intricate. It’s more danceable, too,” added Harpe, whose latest album, “Meet Me in the Middle,” was named “Album of the Year” at the 2021 New England Music Awards. “But it’s also more relaxed, a perfect description is the title of John Jackson’s album, “Front Porch Blues.”

Phil Wiggins would agree. “I heard someone say this music was born in an era when people made their own music at home like they baked their own bread and grew their own vegetables,” he said. It’s a style, he pointed out, that evolved in rural communities from ragtime.

“If you listen to Piedmont guitar style, it sounds a lot like ragtime piano,” Wiggins said, “It was really trying to make the guitar function like a piano. Back in the day, it was music to make people move. Your job was to make people get off their butts and dance.”

Filling out the lineup at the show will be Rick Franklin, one of the region’s leading blues guitarists, Jeffrey Scott, a blues artist who’s also Jackson’s grand nephew, blues singer Bobby Glasker and Friends, the Rappahannock Unity Choir, and Rev. Williams & the Praise Team. The emcee will be Frank Matheis, an author, radio producer, and regular contributor to Living Blues magazine.

The event is a collaboration between the Virginia Cooperative Extension and Eldon Farms, with additional support from the PATH Foundation. Funding has been provided by the William and Mary Greve Foundation, the Virginia Commission for the Arts, the Rappahannock Association for Arts and Community (RAAC), the Richard Lykes Fund, administered by the Northern Piedmont Community Foundation, the Charles T. Akre Family, and Ed Robinson.

For more information and to purchase $10 tickets in advance, go to https://www.eventbrite.com/e/john-jackson-piedmont-blues-festival-tickets-392583085577. Tickets can also be purchased at the gate, and food and drinks will be available for sale. The gate opens at 11 am, and the music runs until 8 p.m.