The Long Beach Blues Festival, in Long Beach, California, was established in full in 1980, and is one of the largest Blues festivals and is the second oldest on the West Coast (first being the San Francisco Blues Festival). It is held on Saturday and Sunday of Labor Day weekend. For many years it was held on the athletic field on the California State University, Long Beach campus. The 2009 festival, the 30th annual, was held at Rainbow Lagoon in downtown Long Beach. The Festival went on hiatus in 2010, and has not been held since.
The festival is organized and used as a fund raiser by KKJZ, a publicly supported radio station on the CSULB campus broadcasting blues and jazz in Southern California.
Read more about Long Beach Blues Festival: History, Past Festival Lineups
Famous quotes containing the words long, beach, blues and/or festival:
“I am the long world’s gentleman, he said,
And share my bed with Capricorn and Cancer.”
—Dylan Thomas (1914–1953)
“The seashore is a sort of neutral ground, a most advantageous point from which to contemplate this world. It is even a trivial place. The waves forever rolling to the land are too far-traveled and untamable to be familiar. Creeping along the endless beach amid the sun-squall and the foam, it occurs to us that we, too, are the product of sea-slime.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“It is from the blues that all that may be called American music derives its most distinctive character.”
—James Weldon Johnson (1871–1938)
“Sabbath. A weekly festival having its origin in the fact that God made the world in six days and was arrested on the seventh.”
—Ambrose Bierce (1842–1914)