12th Annual
HAMPTON ACOUSTIC BLUES REVIVAL:
A Tribute to John Cephas
Saturday, March 9, 2013 • 4:00p-9:30p
Mary T. Christian Auditorium • Thomas Nelson Community College, Hampton, VA

“More than anything else, I would like to see a revival of country blues by more young people. More people going to concerts, learning to play the music. That’s why I stay in the field of traditional music. I don’t want it to do die.”
~John Cephas

John Cephas was born in Washington D.C. in 1930 into a deeply religious family and was raised in Bowling Green, Virginia. His first taste of music was gospel, but blues soon became his calling.  After learning to play the finger-style of alternating thumb picking which defines the Piedmont blues, John began emulating the records he heard by Blind Boy Fuller, Blind Blake, Rev. Gary Davis and other early Piedmont artists. Aside from playing the blues, he worked early on as a professional gospel singer, a carpenter, and as an Atlantic fisherman.

Among some of John’s many endeavors, he served on the Executive Committee of the National Council for the Traditional Arts, and he testified before congressional committees in support of the music he deeply loved. John Cephas also founded the Washington, D.C. Blues Society.  In 1987, he and harp player Phil Wiggins won the Handy Award, now the BMA (Blues Music Awards) for Blues Entertainer Of The Year -- an unheard-of honor for a traditional blues act.

The Washington-bred, Virginia-rooted Cephas, is one of 13 recipients of National Heritage Fellowships, bestowed today by the National Endowment for the Arts, considered a living treasure award for American folk artists. John Cephas is an icon in the blues world -- one of the very last exponents of true, traditional acoustic blues.

SLIDE GUITAR
WORKSHOP
by Larry Berwald

GUITAR RAFFLE
One lucky raffle winner will receive an Epiphone FT570BL (made in the mid ‘70s),
Donated by the family of Susan Cothran