Staples, Hornsby join Tedeschi-Trucks at Sunshine Festival

The Tedeschi-Trucks Band will be back in the area for its annual St. Petersburg concert this weekend, and some prestigious musical guests are coming along.

Every year, TTB headlines the Sunshine Musical Festival at Vinoy Park in downtown St. Petersburg. The festival features 10 hours of nonstop music from two stages. The lineup, other than Tedeschi-Trucks, varies from year to year, but always includes some great well-known artists and some up-and-comers and cult acts that are worth taking a look at.

The festival gets going at noon Saturday with the Texas duo Greyhounds, followed by blues-rockers North Mississippi Allstars, jam band Railroad Earth, and classic rocker Dave Mason of Traffic and Derek and the Dominoes.

They’re all good acts but the music really gets cooking in the late afternoon when the uber-soulful Mavis Staples returns to Vinoy Park. There’s a Grateful Dead cover band called James Russo’s Almost Dead on right after after Mavis, and then Bruce Hornsby and Noisemakers close out the music on the second stage. (There’s a pronounced jam band-Grateful Dead influence to the Sunshine Music Festival every year. It’s especially pronounced this year, thanks to Russo, Railroad Earth and former Dead keyboardist Hornsby, but you don’t have to be jam-band fan to love the festival.)

Tedeschi-Trucks, led by vocalist nonpareil Susan Tedeschi and guitar wiz Derek Trucks are slated to take the main stage at 7:30 p.m. and play a two-and-a-half hour set.

Details: Noon-10 p.m. Jan. 14, Vinoy Park, 701 Bay Shore Drive NE, St. Petersburg. $56.45 plus service charge general, $96.45 plus service charge reserved. sunshinemusicfestival.com.

This story was originally published January 11, 2017 at 4:43 PM with the headline "Staples, Hornsby join Tedeschi-Trucks at Sunshine Festival."