In 1992, Eric Larsen threw a backyard barbecue with a hired band somewhere in Chenango County. The music was good. The crowd was into it. And from that unremarkable beginning — no mission statement, no board of directors, no five-year plan — grew one of the most respected blues festivals in the Northeast.
The Chenango Blues Festival has been running for more than three decades now, held each August at the Chenango County Fairgrounds in Norwich, a Southern Tier town of about seven thousand people that sits comfortably in the kind of rolling, rural country that does not immediately suggest a blues destination. That is precisely what makes it one. The blues has always been music that thrives in unlikely places, carried by people who care enough to build something from nothing. Chenango is that story in miniature.
The Keeping the Blues Alive Award
In 2016, the Blues Foundation — the Memphis-based institution that serves as the genre’s closest thing to a governing body — awarded the Chenango Blues Festival its Keeping the Blues Alive Award. The honor recognizes significant contributions to the blues community, and it placed a festival in rural New York alongside the genre’s most established institutions. It was not a surprise to anyone who had been paying attention.
The festival is run by the Chenango Blues Association, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit with a volunteer board of thirteen community members. There are no paid staff. There are no office expenses. Every dollar raised goes directly into programming. That structural lean-ness has been the festival’s survival strategy: by keeping overhead almost nonexistent, the organization can put its money where it matters — on the stage.
Thirty Years of Heavyweight Bookings
The performer history tells the story. In 1997, Koko Taylor headlined. Luther Allison played in 1996. Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings came through in 2009. Robert Randolph and the Family Band in 2014. Jimmie Vaughan in 2022. Christone “Kingfish” Ingram in 2021. Tab Benoit, Shemekia Copeland, Charlie Musselwhite, Canned Heat, North Mississippi Allstars, Los Lobos — the list reads like a blues hall of fame ballot, and it keeps growing.
The 2025 edition featured Los Lobos, Joanne Shaw Taylor, Chris Thomas King, and Nick Moss Band, among others. The 2024 festival brought Devon Allman Project with Jimmy Hall and Ghalia Volt, alongside Ruthie Foster, Robert Finley, and Coco Montoya. These are not regional acts filling a community stage. These are artists with international reputations choosing to play a fairground in a town you need a map to find.
What draws them is what draws the audience: a festival that takes the music seriously. The Chenango Blues Association’s mission — to foster appreciation of uniquely American music forms including blues, jazz, zydeco, and gospel — is not marketing language. It is an operating principle that has guided booking decisions for three decades.
The Format
Chenango Blues runs Thursday through Saturday in mid-August. Thursday and Friday shows are free — an on-ramp for the curious, the casual, and the families who might not commit to a ticketed event but will walk into a fairground if the music is good enough. Saturday is the main event, with ticketed admission. The fairgrounds provide the infrastructure: open-air stages, vendor areas, and enough room for a crowd that has grown from a couple hundred in the early years to several thousand.
The festival also operates a free Summer Concert Series in East Park in downtown Norwich throughout the warmer months, featuring zydeco, jazz, bluegrass, swing, Americana, and reggae — a year-round commitment to live music that extends well beyond the August weekend.
2026
The thirty-third Chenango Blues Festival runs August 20 through 22, 2026 at the Chenango County Fairgrounds, 168 East Main Street, Norwich. The lineup has not yet been announced, but if three decades of booking are any guide, the quality will be there. It always is.
Norwich is not on the way to anywhere. You go there because you mean to. And for one weekend every August, that is exactly the point.