On Friday three Blues panel discussions will be held at the University Museum. The panels are a part of the fourth annual Oxford Blues Festival, running from June 18-20. These panels are free to the general public.
T. DeWayne Moore, University of Mississippi doctoral candidate of history and a musician, organized and will be moderating these discussions.
“We started thinking about these panels after last year’s festival, which only had one panel and it had a group of people that weren’t all working in the same field,” Moore said. “What I wanted to do this year was change the format of the panel discussions. Instead of just having a hodge-podge of different professionals on one panel, I decided to have three different focuses.”
The first panel, which lasts from noon to 1 p.m., is the Promotion and Tourism Panel which will include C. Sade Turnipseed, Vera Johnson Collins, Billy Johnson and Ricky Stevens.
Stevens, an Ole Miss alumnus as well as musician, songwriter, manager and promoter, is a member of the Board of Directors of the Blues Foundation and organizer of the International Blues Challenge.
Stevens said he is excited to bring his perspective to the panel.
“One of the things I can contribute that is a little different from other people is that I have a music business background, that I have worked in music,” he said. “I also have a master’s in history from Ole Miss so I have experienced both the academic side of blues and the music industry side. I think that’s probably one of the things that will make my perspective a little different from other people that might be on the panel this year.”
Vera Johnson Collins said she will bring her family experiences to the discussion. As the niece of Tommy Johnson, famous Copiah County blues musician, she said, “My passion is indescribable when it comes to the family history.”
Johnson Collins is the founder of the Tommy Johnson Blues Foundation and worked for more than 11 years to reopen Warm Springs Cemetery, where her uncle Tommy is buried so that a headstone could be placed at his grave.
Later his grave was defaced. “I was heartbroken and to this day nothing has been done about it,” she said.
Moore said she hopes the multiple perspectives will help bring more attention to the Mississippi blues as well as provide an interesting panel for the audience.
“So for the Promotion and Tourism panel I’m hoping that all the perspectives from different places will provide people insight into how they can do their job better in doing what they’re doing to promote the blues in Mississippi while also having an interesting discussion for the audience,” Moore said.
The second panel is the Scholar’s panel, which runs from 1:15 p.m. until 2:15 p.m., and will include David Evans, professor of music at the University of Memphis, as well as Greg Johnson, curator of the Blues Archive at the University of Mississippi, and Gayle Dean Wardlow, one of the most well-known and widely published blues scholars. Wardlow is the first Mississippian to extensively research the lives and music of blues musicians.
The last panel will start at 2:30 p.m. and will run until 3:30 p.m., and includes musicians Andrew “Cadillac” Yurkow, Anthony “Big A” Sherrod, Alphonso Sanders, and Big George Brock, all of whom will be performing in the festival.
Although the panels are free, oxfordbluesfest.com suggests that those who wish to attend reserve their seat online in advance through the website because there will be limited seating. Moore also added there will be a chance for attendees to ask the musicians questions themselves.
