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)
“In benevolent natures the impulse to pity is so sudden, that like instruments of music which obey the touch ... you would think the will was scarce concerned, and that the mind was altogether passive in the sympathy which her own goodness has excited. The truth is,—the soul is [so] ... wholly engrossed by the object of pity, that she does not ... take leisure to examine the principles upon which she acts.”
—Laurence Sterne (1713–1768)
“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)