The 7th Annual Baton Rouge Blues Festival & Foundation’s Blues Awards will air on Thursday, October 22 at 8 p.m. on the organization’s social media channels, including Facebook and YouTube. The program will also be posted to the organization’s website for future viewing.
This year’s honorees include Sippie Wallace, the late Johnny Adams, blues advocate Raoul Breaux, Oscar “Harpo” Davis, and Luther Kent.
Fans of Bonnie Raitt may recognize recipient of the Blues Original Award, presented to “those who shaped the blues sound and whose music flourished during the height of the blues era as well as became well known for their influence on other musicians across time and places.” According to the foundation, Blues legend Sippie Wallace was born Beulah Thomas in 1898 and acquired her nickname while in grade school because, as she later recalled, “My teeth were so far apart I had to sip everything.” She sang and played the organ in her father’s church, and on summer nights sneaked out with her brothers to hear blues singers at the traveling tent shows that came through Houston. She moved to New Orleans with her brother, musician George Thomas, and performed with many jazz and blue legends. While in New Orleans, she married Matt Wallace. By the early 1920s, Wallace moved to Chicago and recorded an album that featured many of her own songs, including “Mighty Tight Woman” and “Women be Wise,” both later popularized for a new generation by blues singer Bonnie Raitt in the 1960s. Nominated for a Grammy in 1985, Sippie died less than a year later, on her birthday.
Blues Original recipient, Sippie Wallace; fair use photo
Johnny Adams spoke to OffBeat’s John Sinclair in 1993, speaking of his career, “I keep telling myself that when the time comes when I can’t enjoy what I’m doing, I’ll stop. Because I don’t want to be out here, 75 or 80 years old, you know, still trying to get somebody to feel something that you don’t feel anymore. Lots of guys just go until they can’t go anymore, but people remember me from when I sang with a lot of inner soul and feeling and spirit. I say give me my flowers now, because I don’t want to go on with this after it stops happening for me.”
Founded in 2002, the Baton Rouge Blues Foundation is a non-profit organization striving to promote, preserve and celebrate the Baton Rouge blues culture and bring the best of Louisiana swamp blues music to the world. Find out more at brblues.org.