BETHLEHEM, Pa. — ArtsQuest’s annual Blast Furnace Blues Festival will return for an 11th year in July and will remain an entirely outdoor festival, but it will shrink to two days, the organization has confirmed.
ArtsQuest has not formally announced plans for this year’s Blast Furnace Blues, and its website has not been updated from last year’s event.
But Memphis blues harmonicist Tony Holiday lists online a show by him and his band The Velvetones at Blast Furnace Blues Festival on Friday, July 19.
ArtsQuest Communications Director Jennifer LoConte confirmed in an email that the festival will be two days — a Friday/Saturday lineup — free to public and presented outdoors at SteelStacks.
LoConte did not confirm the dates.
Performers will be announced in February, she said.
A two-day Blast Furnace Blues is a reduction from last year’s 10th festival, when it ran July 21-23 on the SteelStacks campus.
Headliners last year included Bywater Call, The Sensational Barnes Brothers and Toronzo Cannon.
Last year’s three-day fest also was entirely outdoors, on the Levitt Pavilion and Community Stage on Town Square.
Holiday describes himself as part of a soul blues revival in Memphis, and is touring to support his new album “Motel Mississippi,” which he says combines “the sounds of North Mississippi Hill Country, Delta Blues and Memphis soul” and is “equal parts hypnotic blues, driving soul and juke joint stomper.”
Holiday started his recording career with his 2019 two-volume album “Porch Sessions,” which saw him traveling across the United States and Europe recording with blues musicians “on their very own front porches, in front of juke joints, in the countryside and even on the front stoops of raucous night spots in bustling cities.”
He released his label debut, “Soul Service” in 2020.
ArtsQuest started its Blast Furnace Blues festival in 2011 as an outdoor, end-of-summer event, but two years later put it on hiatus, saying it had under-performed in crowded seasons of summer festivals.
Over the next five years, ArtsQuest groomed the festival, taking it indoors as a winter, then early-spring, event, and adding top names to headline it.
It finally returned as an outdoor festival in 2019, when it also became a free festival, but then it went on hiatus because of the coronavirus pandemic.
It returned for good last July as a three-day, outdoor festival.
