Upstate New York will host one of the longest-running U.S. blues festivals when the 17th Annual Chenango Blues Festival takes place in Chenango, New York on Friday, August 21 and Saturday, August 22, 2009. The event is sponsored by the non-profit Chenango Blues Association, which strives to promote an appreciation of uniquely American music forms such as the blues, jazz, zydeco, and gospel music.
The yearly festival draws thousands of people from across the Northeast for a weekend of music, workshops, and art exhibits, and this year's event can boast of a robust line-up that includes a recent Blues Music Award winner, a bona-fide blues legend, and the founder and leading proponent of the style of acoustic blues known as "folk funk."Find out who's playing at this year's festival....
There have been a lot of musical siblings through the years and some of them immediately come to mind, but it's difficult to imagine a group of brothers and sisters quite like the Dinnings. Over a period of several decades, they covered just about every aspect of music; including songwriting, bandleading, recording, and performing on stage and screen. And those doing the performing included a popular all-girl singing group, and a young crooner who thrilled teens with a chart-topping hit that was banned in Great Britain. (And if that wasn't enough, the family's next generation included a member of a popular modern rock group -- but more later about that.) Of course, there were nine Dinning siblings so that gave them a leg up but it's still a fascinating story, one that began with a musical childhood in Oklahoma encouraged by their father, the musical director of a
