Blues Music Award

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:

    The blues women had a commanding presence and a refreshing robustness. They were nurturers, taking the yeast of experience, kneading it into dough, molding it and letting it grow in their minds to bring the listener bread for sustenance, shaped by their sensibilities.
    Rosetta Reitz, U.S. author. As quoted in The Political Palate, ch. 10, by Betsey Beaven et al. (1980)

    The average educated man in America has about as much knowledge of what a political idea is as he has of the principles of counterpoint. Each is a thing used in politics or music which those fellows who practise politics or music manipulate somehow. Show him one and he will deny that it is politics at all. It must be corrupt or he will not recognize it. He has only seen dried figs. He has only thought dried thoughts. A live thought or a real idea is against the rules of his mind.
    John Jay Chapman (1862–1933)

    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)