Festival History
The Old Town BluesFest was started by the Old Town Business and Art Development Association in 1994 under the name OctoberFest and without the specific focus on blues music. Lansing's alternative radio station, 92.1 WWDX, signed on as media sponsor; Message Makers, a local media company, became the founding business sponsor. In its early years, the festival welcomed such renowned artists as Marcy Playground, Kid Rock, Duncan Sheik and 19 Wheels, as well as local artists Powerface, Knee Deep Shag, The Lash, and The Weepers. In its early years, the festival had 2,000-3,000 attendees.
In 2003, the festival committee changed the focus of the festival to blues music and welcomed local radio station 94.9 WMMQ as its new primary media sponsor.
Read more about this topic: Old Town Blues Fest
Famous quotes containing the words festival and/or history:
“The surest guide to the correctness of the path that women take is joy in the struggle. Revolution is the festival of the oppressed.”
—Germaine Greer (b. 1939)
“The visual is sorely undervalued in modern scholarship. Art history has attained only a fraction of the conceptual sophistication of literary criticism.... Drunk with self-love, criticism has hugely overestimated the centrality of language to western culture. It has failed to see the electrifying sign language of images.”
—Camille Paglia (b. 1947)