The blues and Bradenton are getting along better than ever

Johnette Isham can give you a lot of facts and figures that show just how successful the 2016 Bradenton Blues Festival was.

The last of the 3,000 tickets were sold right around the time the first notes of music sounded, at 11 a.m. Saturday. The four previous festivals all sold out, but not until much later in the day.

People came to Bradenton from 32 states, nine foreign countries and 247 zip codes from around Florida. A lot of them came to Bradenton specifically for the festival.

Isham is the executive director of Realize Bradenton, the organization behind the blues festival. Realize Bradenton’s mission, or at least a large part of it, is to let the world know how cool downtown Bradenton is, so all those numbers make her really happy.

But when you ask her about her reaction to this year’s festival, those aren’t the statistics she talks about first.

“It was a fabulous festival, because the Bradenton Blues Festival is truly an an event that the community puts together,” Isham said. “One hundred seventy-five volunteers, 65 sponsors, 20 vendors and five exhausted but happy Realize Bradenton staffers. It’s truly a community effort.”

Realize Bradenton doesn’t do that thing where they hire someone to come up with some dollar figure about the festival’s economic impact, but Isham said the impact was palpable. A lot of people come to Bradenton specifically for the blues festival, and they stay in local hotels and eat in local restaurants.

“To the best of my knowledge,” she said, “the hotels, certainly the ones downtown, were all booked.”

There were also some less quantifiable reasons for Isham, her staff and everyone who cares about the blues festival to be enthused about 2016.

People who were making return trips to the festival seemed pretty much in agreement that this year’s lineup was the best in the event’s five-year history. The late afternoon-early evening acts — Victor Wainwright and the WildRoots, the Golden State-Lone Star Revue and Ronnie Baker Brooks — all put on fiery sets. Blues fiddle player Ilana Katz Katz provided distinctive sounds from the side stage between sets. And for the fifth straight year, the weather was just about perfect.

And while the festival itself gets all the attention, Isham points out that it’s the centerpiece of several days of events, including the free Blues Appetizer Concert on Friday night and the Blues in the Schools program that helps cultivate a new generation of blues lovers.

Katz performed for area students for this year’s Blues in the Schools. Both she and Isham noted that students who didn’t know much about the blues came away understanding how it formed the basis for rock, R&B and hip-hop. Student violinists saw new possibilities for their instruments that might make them more enthusiastic about lessons and practice.

Musicians from the festival turned up for parties and shows at the Blue Rooster in Sarasota and at Motorworks and Ace’s in Bradenton on Saturday and Sunday.

It was a great few days, Isham said. But maybe the best thing was an email she got from a couple named Anne and Tom Goetz. They live near Rochester, N.Y., and discovered Bradenton when they came down to visit friends who live in Lakewood Ranch. They liked everything about the city, but it was when they found out about the blues festival that they decided to make Bradenton their winter home.

“I said, ‘Tom, can you imagine, there’s a blues festival just a few steps from where we are now,’ ” Anne Goetz told the Bradenton Herald. “We could buy a house and we could invite all our friends down for the festival.’ ”

They attended the 2015 festival and loved it. They bought a house in Bradenton in September, and they had a house full of guests for this year’s Bradenton Blues Festival. This year’s festival let the Goetzes know they had made the right decision.

“Last year the music was great,” Anne Goetz said. “But this year, oh my god.”

This story was originally published December 9, 2016 at 1:31 PM with the headline "The blues and Bradenton are getting along better than ever."