Blues Music Award
The Blues Music Awards are presented by the Blues Foundation, a non-profit organization set up to foster blues heritage. The awards were started in 1980, and are widely regarded as the highest honor for blues artists in the United States.
The awards were formerly known as the W. C. Handy Awards (or "The Handys"), however, they were renamed in 2006 in an effort to increase public appreciation of the significance of the awards.
The Awards had been presented annually in Memphis, Tennessee, where the Blues Foundation is located, but the 2008 award ceremony was held in Tunica, Mississippi.
Read more about Blues Music Award: Blues Music Awards 2011
Famous quotes containing the words blues, music and/or award:
“It is from the blues that all that may be called American music derives its most distinctive character.”
—James Weldon Johnson (1871–1938)
“We often love to think now of the life of men on beaches,—at least in midsummer, when the weather is serene; their sunny lives on the sand, amid the beach-grass and bayberries, their companion a cow, their wealth a jag of driftwood or a few beach plums, and their music the surf and the peep of the beech-bird.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The award of a pure gold medal for poetry would flatter the recipient unduly: no poem ever attains such carat purity.”
—Robert Graves (1895–1985)