Blues Festival makes its return on the Ranch

 Sarasota-Manatee can’t quit the blues. 

Perhaps it’s more accurate to say the region can’t quit blues festivals. There has been at least one every year since 1991, with various organizations and producers effectively passing the baton to keep them going. The current incarnation, the Lakewood Ranch Blues Festival, debuted last year and is back again on Saturday, Dec. 6. The 11-hour event showcases eight acts that cut a broad swath across the blues spectrum.

The area’s festival streak has been partly based on an old riff claiming the region is a fertile place for the blues. “No!,” says Barbara Strauss, who produced the Sarasota Blues Festival from 1992 to 2010. “We’re not Kansas City.” Or Chicago or Memphis or New Orleans or the Mississippi Delta, for that matter.

No, the 35-year legacy of blues festivals in Sarasota-Manatee can be credited to a series of dogged promoters, producers, musicians and boosters — among them Jack Sullivan, the late Johnette Isham of Realize Bradenton, Strauss, Paul Benjamin and, most recently, Independent Jones, a Bradenton-based event production company. The latter two are collaborating on the 2025 version of the Lakewood Ranch fest. 

Ramblin’ man 

Another contributor was the late Gregg Allman, who lived in the area for a good portion of his adult life. The ’91 fest was produced by the Sarasota Blues Society, which promptly went defunct. Strauss stepped in, just scraped by her first year and was ready to call it quits. She was friendly with Allman, and one night found herself in the Telstar (now Baysound) recording studio in Sarasota, where he was rehearsing. Allman spotted one of the first blues festival posters on the wall. “He said, ‘Who had a blues fest and didn’t invite me?’” Strauss recalls. “I said, ‘Me.’ He said, ‘Why didn’t you invite me?’ I said, ‘I can’t afford you.’”

They worked it out. Gregg Allman & Friends headlined Bluesfest ’94 at the Sarasota County Fairgrounds. (It’s worth noting a 15-year-old Derek Trucks opened the festival.) That show, Strauss says, drew 10,000 paying concertgoers, and put her event on solid footing. The subsequent two-decade span represented the glory days of area festivals. Strauss presented a who’s who of blues (and blues-adjacent) stars at the Fairgrounds and Ed Smith Stadium: Buddy Guy, Solomon Burke, Dr. John, Jimmie Vaughan, Bobby “Blue” Bland, Maria Muldaur, Little Feat and others. Allman headlined four times. 

After Strauss sold her interest to a Texas-based company called ExtremeTix, the fest struggled for a few years. Then it shut down. In 2012, Isham and Realize Bradenton took the baton and unveiled the Bradenton Blues Festival to shine a spotlight on the new Bradenton Riverwalk. The event had a strong 12-year run, drawing more than 2,000 fans each year, even though the star power of the acts had dimmed. In February 2024, organizers announced the event’s permanent cancellation. 

Pull the strings

That could’ve been curtains, but Paul Benjamin — who was the artistic director for the Bradenton fest — joined with Independent Jones to keep the music playing. They scouted for new venues, settling on Lakewood Ranch’s 8-acre Waterside Park, which includes a colorful splash pad, sand volleyball courts, an event lawn and other amenities. The venue looks out over Kingfisher Lake and the condos beyond. 

Photo by Jay Heater

Grizzled veterans of local blues fests, who sometimes traipsed through muddy fields to take in the music, might snicker that the current incarnation takes place in a neat-and-tidy park in a planned community like Lakewood Ranch. Benjamin doesn’t see it that way. He cites a few advantages: more orderly ingress and egress over a bridge linked to Waterside Pavilion, which alleviates the need for temporary fencing; “actual, real restrooms” (his words), augmented by some port-a-lets; easy access to vendors, which are right on the festival grounds (unlike the Bradenton Riverwalk).

“We had a couple of bands that played last year that had played Bradenton,” Benjamin adds. “And they said, ‘Wow, we like this new venue so much better.’”

He says that the inaugural Lakewood Ranch Blues Festival drew a crowd of roughly 1,000, a solid start. He hopes to draw 1,200 to 1,500 this year and “by year three, we’ll get it up to 2,000 people like we were getting in Bradenton.”

Benjamin is confident the fest pulls in committed blues fans, but is also counting on Lakewood Ranch residents to turn out due to curiosity and “to support something that’s in [their] backyard.” 

He put together a diverse program to keep people entertained over several hours in a laid-back environment. “We’re trying to get new people to come out and say, ‘I didn’t realize this music was so good,’” he says. “They don’t realize there are so many different aspects to the blues. My thought is, if I can get ‘em here once, I’m gonna get them hooked.”

General admission tickets are $75. Visit LakewoodRanchBluesFestival.com.