The August Blues Festival (originally called Augustibluus) is a blues music festival in Haapsalu, Estonia. The festival takes place inside the walls of Haapsalu Castle and since its inception in 1993 has become the biggest blues festival in Estonia.
Besides hosting Estonian blues musicians, there have been guests from Finland, Sweden and the United States of America, including Jimmie "Bluesman" Lawson from Oklahoma.
In 1998, the festival introduced the first American car convention in Estonia.
Famous quotes containing the words august, blues and/or festival:
“Until, on Vinegar Hill, the fatal conclave.
Terraced thousands died, shaking scythes at cannon.
The hillside blushed, soaked in our broken wave.
They buried us without shroud or coffin
And in August the barley grew up out of the grave.”
—Seamus Heaney (b. 1939)
“It is from the blues that all that may be called American music derives its most distinctive character.”
—James Weldon Johnson (1871–1938)
“Marry, I cannot show it in rhyme, I have tried; I can find no rhyme to “lady” but “baby”Man innocent rhyme; for “scorn,” “horn”Ma hard rhyme; for “school,” “fool”Ma babbling rhyme; very ominous endings. No, I was not born under a rhyming planet, nor I cannot woo in festival terms.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)