Elvin Bishop digs blues in his old-school shoes

July 31, 2023 in The Artists

Elvin Bishop wasn’t fooling around when he fell in love with the blues. Growing up in Tulsa on his family’s farm, the blues came to him in the night on radio stations from such far-flung locales as Nashville, Mexico, and Coffeeville, KS. “Out on the prairie, in those days, the local stations would shut down at midnight, and then you could pick up the 50,000-watt stations,” Bishop told Ravinia in a phone interview in anticipation of his festival debut with virtuoso harp player Charlie Musselwhite.

Bless the Child: Shemekia Copeland has got her bold

June 05, 2019 in Ravinia Magazine, Artist News

These days, “Your Mama’s Talkin’,” a song from Chicago-based blues scion Shemekia Copeland’s 1998 debut album, Turnin’ Up the Heat, has taken on a whole new meaning. Copeland became a parent in 2016, and when she isn’t wrangling her “little man,” she says she’s thinking about “the type of world I brought him into, and my concerns for him and what he will have to face.”

Something In The Way He Blues: Buddy Guy Keeps Chicago's Blues Electrifying

July 14, 2016 in Ravinia Magazine, Artist News

The first time Buddy Guy came to Ravinia, it was as an audience member to see George Benson. “I got there and they looked at me and said, ‘Buddy, we’ve been trying to get you for years!’” Guy recalled in a recent exchange for Ravinia magazine.

In 1999, the festival got him. “It took me a long time to get to a venue like that,” Guy reflected. “I’d play with Junior [Wells] in the early days at Navy Pier, or over by the lake with Stevie [Ray Vaughan], and I imagined those were the biggest places I’d ever play. But they finally got me and I’ve done quite a few shows there since then. I love playing Ravinia, man.”