Norway blues musician Knut Roppestad, a regular at the Rentiesville Dusk Til Dawn Blues Festival, will appear virtually this year, as will all other acts.
File photo
Dusk Til Dawn Blues Festival moves from Rentiesville to home computers this weekend.
Concern over the spread of COVID-19 prompted cancelation of the live festival, which has drawn crowds to Rentiesville each Labor Day weekend.
“It would be irresponsible to invite 2,000 or more people to D.C. Minner’s old home place and the festival in Rentiesville this year,” said blues musician Selby Minner, festival organizer. “We’re going to make a little lemonade out of these lemons. The Oklahoma Arts Council is still funding several thousand dollars and we’re doing it virtually.”
Blues fans can access the festival at 6 p.m. Friday, Saturday and Sunday on the festival website, dcminnerblues.com. They then choose to see the shows via Facebook or YouTube. The virtual festival will feature 35 acts performing through three six-hour shows, Minner said.
“You go into YouTube or to Facebook, then it will play in order, just like a show, first the first set, then the second set, all the way through,” Minner said.
Minner said she used money from the Oklahoma Arts Council to make high-quality videos of all the Oklahoma blues acts.
“For two days in a row, I had two $6,000 cameras set up,” she said. “It was like making a music video. We had seven or eight microphones on the stage in order to get that quality of sound.”
Sixteen bands were videoed at Rentiesville and five others were videoed in Bartlesville, she said. Out-of-state headliners — such as the Blackwell Brothers of Dunsmuir, California, and Johnny Rawls of Purvis, Mississippi — sent their own videos, Minner said.
There also will be a slide show featuring and celebrating the music of festival founder D.C. Minner, as well as slides of past festivals, she said.
Videos will remain online after the festival, Selby Minner said.
“People will be able to put it on as background music when they’re having a party or if they just want to have some blues festival any time,” she said.
Acts include local favorites such as the Checotah High School Jazz band with Jim Davis, Roger Hurricane Wilson and Selby Minner.