Blues Festival
The Chicago Blues Festival takes place Friday through Sunday from 11:00 am till 9:30 pm on 5 stages. Lydia's List, is an essential guide to great bands playing the fest. Lydia is essentially our live music curator here in Chicago. We're lucky to have someone who is so tapped into the live music scene. She chooses the bands based both on our experience having heard them live and by how they sound online. Even when we've danced to a band before, sometimes a band will change their style for a show, and even if an artist sounds great online they can sound different in person, so we will not always stick to the List. It will therefore be essential that you sign up to follow us on Twitter, because we sometimes decide suddenly to move to another stage if we aren't feeling it, if it's too crowded to dance – or we might also decide not to move to the next stage if the current one is just too good. If you are receving our text messages, you will be apprised our movement at the Fest. The List does try and anticipate the decisions we may make, for example noting whereever possible that we might decide to stay longer at a show.
When you arrive at the Fest, you can pick up the Festival schedule at the info booths, which lists all shows, not just those on Lydia's List. However, only the shows for 4 of the stages (Crossroads, Mississippi Juke Joint, Front Porch, and Petrillo) will be listed. The Windy City Blues Society (WCBS) Street Stage is not operated by the City and is on a separate schedule that you can find near the area of that stage. However, it is still shown on the Chicago Blues Festival Map provided by the city. We will be dancing at shows at all stages, because in our experience, WCBS operated shows are just as good as the City's. Some portions of Lydia's List are quite tightly scheduled, occasionally only seeing a show for 20 minutes before moving on to the next, if the stages are close enough to each other. We have done this when it is too difficult to choose between 2 amazing bands and sometimes in order to fill a blank 15 minutes. We have found that dancers cannot stand to be without dancing for even 15 minutes so we have done our best to keep the schedule full! Also of note, this year the end times for most of the shows have not been given to us, so we have had to do some guesswork.
