Mystic Blues Fest on hiatus for 2017

The group plans on a series of fundraisers and hopes to be able to stage the festival again

Fans and practitioners of blues music will tell you it’s an incredibly healing and therapeutic art form. But sometimes even the blues get the blues.

After a hellish weekend of heat and humidity severely affected crowds last August at the fourth annual Mystic Blues Festival — held for the first time in the North Stonington Fairgrounds after three years at the Mystic Shipyard — president and co-founder Chris Leigh announced the festival is taking a hiatus in 2017.

“We’ve got to take a step back,” Leigh said in a phone interview Friday. “We can’t continue going on with old debt. We were hoping to reach a new plateau last year with the new venue and increased parking and a great lineup of artists, but Mother Nature, or karma or whatever, was too much. You can’t force people to go out in the heat and, frankly, we were worried about the musicians performing in those conditions. It was like the Serengeti. The last thing we wanted was to have the musicians and fans be in any danger.”

The first Mystic Blues Festival took place in 2013 with a fine mix of regional acts and international stars, including James Cotton, Roomful of Blues and the James Montgomery Band. The subsequent two festivals upped the ante with headliners like Johnny Winter, Al Kooper, the Spin Doctors and The Weight — a group comprising ex-members of The Band.

But, despite the lovely setting of the Mystic Shipyard, logistical difficulties like parking caused the festival to move last year to the North Stonington Fairgrounds where, with

a best-ever bill including Dr. John, Dumpstafunk and the Ronnie Earl Band, the event seemed poised to become an established and looked-forward-to annual event.

Then the heat and humidity arrived.

“It was frankly surreal,” Leigh said. “We'd worried in the past about rain, maybe, but never guessed it would be like the seventh ring of hell. People were standing in the little bits of shade they could find under some trees or on the perimeter of the buildings. It was dangerous, and of course the merchandise and beer and wine sales we depend on to do so much financial work for us just didn't happen. It's going to take some time to pay this down.”

This is particularly difficult since Leigh, who started the festival with his wife, Amy, has never thought of the event as a possible career or a pathway to wealth.

“It's basically a labor of love, and something like this has to be a labor of love,' Leigh said. “We started with a group of people who loved the idea of doing a blues festival. This area has a great legacy of blues and roots music from South County in Rhode Island and southeastern Connecticut and the idea of a festival seemed natural.”

“The payback for us has always been in the music and getting to work with the musicians and have an opportunity to pay honor to a lot of artists we admire a lot,” he said. “And, to do this, we had a lot of support from volunteers and donations from people and organization who have been very patient and understanding.”

Leigh said the focus in the next year will be to hold a number of fundraisers and “try to work out some payment plans and reassess where things stand for 2018. The big priority is to look at the bottom line and take care of our past, present and future obligations.”

The first fundraiser was held last week at the Knickerbocker Music Center in Westerly — one of the most renowned blues clubs in the country.

“We were pleasantly surprised at how many people came out,” Leigh said. “It reminds you that it's music; it's something that makes people want to get together and play and listen, and we're going to see what happens.”

One of the lessons of the blues always has been about survival and resilience, and Leigh — who is also one of the finest guitarists in the area — knows this.

“The North Stonington people were really, really good to us — as were the folks at Mystic Shipyard. One of my big disappointments is that we were going in the right direction,” he said. “But we'll continue to stay positive and look forward. We just can't make any promises about the how and the when.”

The hope was to slowly build a reputation as a fun blues/ roots festival in a beautiful part of southeastern Connecticut — one where they could establish a reputation that would draw increasingly large stars to perform.