Due to the pandemic COVID-19, we at The Birthplace of American Music Festival LLC have made the decision to postpone this year’s BAM Fest. We were really hoping that this virus would eventually subside and our June 20, 2020 event would still be on, but we have been affected. This crisis has caused unexpected financial hardship and loss of resources. If you will, please donate and help support BAM Fest. We will greatly appreciate it! Your contributions will ensure the continuation of BAM Fest – Birthplace of American Music Festival. Peruse the website and learn more about BAM Fest.
Click here to donate or you can donate on the website. Thank you for your support.
The Juneteenth INVEST Fest is an non profit community enrichment initiative that gives the local community, and tourist from a far, an opportunity to enjoy a homegrown music festival rooted in the culture of American music while empowering the American community.
The INVEST Fest stand for ‘ Invoking New Visions Ever Since Today ‘ with a goal of initiating a positive turning point in lives of crowd goer with a community fair. This event is designed to do what we call Edu – Tain, educate will entertaining our guest. We consider BAM FEST the Icing, & INVEST Fest the cake During the INVEST Fest our focus is 13 -25 yr old youth & young adults, parents & children, and concerned citizens of the community.
It gives attendees a chance to participate in community driven activities promoting community service, health and wellness, early college enrollment, dropout prevention, legal services, voter registration, political action, military recruitment, community organization, job recruitment and many more valuable tools provided to the public. It also is just a fun day of community togetherness design to showcase unity in the community & civility in our citizenship. We need the help of all community organization, such as local religious groups, community leaders, neighborhood residents, sororities, fraternities, clubs, local businesses, and all other community partners & possible partnerships. The business plan is plain & clear. We are investing our efforts & taking small but needed steps in this event, to see the positive gains & profitable returns in a better Clarksdale, MS, the Birthplace of American Music, as a whole.
Can You Help us INVEST in OUR HOMETOWN?
While Celebrating the Culture to Empower the Community?
This story takes us to the 1930s and the Deep South.
Legend has it that Robert Johnson, the King of the Delta Blues and the very first rock star, did just such a thing. As a young man from Mississippi, aspiring to be humanity’s greatest ever guitar player, and desperate because he didn’t feel he was even close, Johnson apparently met Satan at a crossroad where he offered his soul in exchange for extraordinary talent, and ultimately an exit from his pitiful lifeHis talent was indeed extraordinary, as his legacy of 29 songs recorded in no more than a year attest, as well as the high praise he earned years later from names such as Eric Clapton, Muddy Watters, Bob Dylan, and Keith Richards among the many others. With his life shrouded in mystery, his early death at the age of 27, and the content of the songs he wrote, the myth of Johnsons’ alleged deal has only grown.
Johnson was one of 11 children. At a young age, he was fascinated by music and perhaps saw it as a potential way out of his hard life as a lonely adolescent African-American living in the South in the very thick of the Great Depression. His death brought intriguing questions as to exactly how he managed to write one of the most influential blues songs in music history and become an icon for decades after. With a lack of facts regarding his life, his story was mostly joined together by fascinated individuals collecting hearsay stories from the cities in which he performed and through the subjective interpretations of his lyrics. The lyric “I went to the crossroad, fell down on my knees, I went to the crossroad, fell down on my knees, Asked the Lord above ‘Have mercy now, save poor Bob if you please’” — over time, has become a symbolic representation of a sinful man asking forgiveness for selling his soul to the devil.
It certainly makes sense, doesn’t it? How could he possess such a talent? How could a boy attract such vast crowds from all around, on every street corner from his home town Hazlehurst in Mississippi, through to Chicago and all the way to the border of Canada? Only by moving his fingers and slightly opening his lips? How? Surely, it couldn’t be hard work and dedication? it must be something else! It must be the devil’s work. These must have been the first thoughts that came to the minds of many when they witnessed the shy and often times withdrawn boy playing out of nowhere like that.
Thus, a legend was born. A legend about a boy with a harmonica as his only friend and a guitar he was unable to play, a boy so fed up with his lonely life, he took his guitar to the intersection of Highways 49 (“The Blues Highway”) and 61 in Clarksdale, Mississippi, to ask the Devil to fine-tune it and give him a way out of his misery and American Music was Born.
– Martin Chalakoski
