en Rizzo remembers the first time he teamed with Gene Fontana to host live blues music. The pair threw a Fourth of July shindig on the grounds of the Rizzo family masonry business, the same cheerful compound near New Castle where Rizzo used to attend family picnics. They assembled a modest tent, set up a beer truck, and invited a few of their favorite blues performers, like Mark Stinger & the Swarm, and Eddie Campbell. Then their block party exploded into something else completely. “Suddenly, all these people started rolling in,” Rizzo says. “Must’ve been about 300, 400 people there. My dad looked over at me and said, ‘I don’t think I made enough food.’” The two share a laugh inside St. Georges Country Store. Jerry DiAngelo is warming up his guitar a few feet away. “Turns out blues fans will travel for the blues,” Rizzo says. Rizzo and Fontana are the ultimate blues fans. Growing up together around New Castle County, they were fixtures in the region’s strong and steady blues scene. “We’d go to anything we could go to,” Rizzo says. The pair’s enthusiasm for the blues music turned into a passion, then advocacy. In 1997, Fontana formed the Diamond State Blues Society, a nonprofit organization dedicated to preserving and presenting the blues. The 700-member society produces live concert events featuring a mix of local and national touring acts out of J.B. McGinnes Pub & Grill on Basin Road in New Castle. Additionally, for the past decade, Fontana has helped organize the Wilmington Riverfront Blues Festival. This summer, the Society turns its attention to the sleepy streets of St. Georges, the unincorporated town near the C&D Canal that harbors some cool musical history, and a growing buzz. A pair of all-day Saturday music festivals—a blues fest on June 16 and a bluegrass version on July 14—will kick off their inaugural run this summer. They hope to rejuvenate the tiny town’s music legacy, and turn it into a destination for music fans. Both events will go down on the grounds of the nine-acre Commodore Center. The first annual St. Georges Blues Festival runs from noon until 8 p.m. and will feature musicians like Garry Cogdell & the Complainers, lower case blues, Johnny Neel, Dave Fields , Brandon Santini, J.P. Soars & the Red Hots, and the headliners, the Bernard Allison Group. The subsequent St. Georges Bluegrass Festival will welcome to town Acrossthetrack Bluegrass, Mark Silver & the Stonethrowers, Danny Paisley and the Southern Grass, and headliners Valerie Smith & Liberty Pike. Tickets to either event cost just $25 in advance at bluehorizonpromotions.com, or $35 at the gate. .OAAN.
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“What we really want is to introduce everybody to St. Georges, Delaware,” Fontana says. That groundwork has already been laid by Joe Michini and his St. Georges Country Store, which Michini began renting with his wife Margi in 2001. Michini does a mean jambalaya and shrimp étouffée, but it’s been his turn as live music host that has put the 200-year-old country store back on the map. The spark from a few well-attended late-night jam sessions morphed into a regular slate of live music. Today, area artists and fans turn out twice monthly for “The Session”—an acoustic jam with local Delta-style bluesman Cogdell. Then there are the regular finger style swing and country jazz pickin’ sessions, and regular sets from well-regarded artists like Crabmeat Thompson, Charlie Hitman, and Michael Brook. The response has been overwhelming. “You’ve got to understand, it’s a small place,” Michini says. “We can seat about 40. But sometimes on a weekend, we have to turn away 50 to 60 people who want to get in and hear some music.” Michini’s raucous blues jams didn’t go unnoticed. The Diamond State Blues Society caught wind of the burgeoning scene in St. Georges, and was cognizant of the town’s hidden rock ‘n’ roll lineage. A small recording studio in town was for many years a hangout for local musicians, as well as a stepping stone for future big-name artists. Johnny Neel (of The Allman Brothers fame), George Thorogood, George Benson, Ted Nugent and many others called Kern Recording Studio home for a time. “It’s a little forgotten town,” says Rizzo, “but there’s a lot of musical history here.” And if Michini, Fontana and Rizzo have their way, St. Georges will live on once again as a musical hotbed. Proceeds from their summer festivals will fuel an ambitious expansion project for the Country Store. New construction, which the organizers hope will be complete by 2014, will transform the old storefront into a beacon for waterfront entertainment. The yet-unnamed club will hold about 300 people between its outdoor-indoor deck and a downstairs soundproof blues café (with permanent stage, sound and lighting set-up) and accompanying 150-seat bar. “It’s going to be the crown jewel of St. Georges,” Fontana says. “It’s all connected, us trying to resurrect the music in this town.” It’s what the Diamond State Blues Society (under its new, for-profit banner, Blues Horizon Promotions LLC) is bracing for. Fontana and Rizzo estimate the festivals could bring in a thousand or more people each to little St. Georges. And with some luck, the town will begin to attract even more businesses, residents and visitors. “Other towns nearby have made improvements and shown growth,” Fontana says. “We’re a little behind the eight-ball, but we’re slowly coming up. New Castle has its history, Middletown had its population double, and Delaware City has its waterside charm. Why can’t St. Georges become a blues town?” It would be only appropriate for St. Georges, whose history seems lifted straight out of a blues song. The original St. Georges Bridge was demolished by an out-of-control freighter in 1939. “The town kind of died with it,” Rizzo says. “St. Georges sold its town charter back to the county, and local businesses and gas stations uprooted, too.” And just like the blues, the town’s sad story can be uplifting too. “People think that the blues is slow and depressing,” Fontana says. “But the music is supposed to make you feel better. There ain’t nothing like the blues, man.”
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