‘I love the blues’: Fans flock to Joliet’s Bicentennial Park for annual music festival

Billie Limacher Bicentennial Park on Saturday hosted the Joliet Blues Festival, not the most spectacular blues event in the city of recent years but the most persistent.

It was the seventh year for the event, which was first staged in 2018 and missed only one year because of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The festival competed for attention in two of those years with the larger Blues Brothers Con held at the Old Joliet Prison, which featured celebrity appearances by Dan Aykroyd and Jim Belushi.

There is no Blues Brothers Con this year, and the Joliet Blues Festival goes on with a loyal following including some who have interesting connections with the performers on stage.

About 500 people were expected at the festival on Saturday.

Al Howard of Joliet has been to four of the Joliet Blues Festivals, and this year he was eager to see Mondo Cortez and the Chicago Blues Angels perform.

“Years ago, I used to work with him (Cortez) at Exelon Nuclear,” Howard said, recalling their days at the LaSalle power station.

Cortez, a Rockdale native who now lives in Joliet, said he spent many days and nights balancing his love of the blues with his work at the nuclear plant and later with Carpenters Local 174 in Joliet.

“I always played (the blues) even if I was working 12 hours,” Cortez said. “I’d go play a gig, come back and change clothes in the parking lot, and go to work. I didn’t miss much work.”

It’s the kind of real-life experience that appeals to blues fans.

Samantha Dykstra of Richton Park, making her first trip to the Joliet Blues Festival, said blues is the only music she listens to.

“I love the blues. I’ve loved it all my life,” Dykstra said. “Most of the times when they sing, it’s about experience that they’ve had. You can relate to that. You hear that, and you feel that you’re not the only one.”

Dykstra was at Joliet Blues Festival with friend Karyn DeCuir of Park Forest.

DeCuir was there to support her friend Sheryl Youngblood, who heads the Sheryl Youngblood Blues Band that would perform later in the show.

“I’ve followed her to New York,” DeCuir said. “She’s been a lot of places.”

The bands and artists who performed Saturday each had their own stories of accomplishments in their music.

Guitarist Jon Shain, the opening act, lives in North Carolina and appeared at the Joliet festival mainly because he was invited by Karl Maurer.

Maurer of New Lenox, a blues musician himself who plays with the band The Hepkats Blues Revue, has been booking bands for Joliet Blues Festival since it started.

He also helps fund the festival.

Maurer is interested in starting a Joliet Blues Society that would support blues musicians and the annual festival at Billie Limacher Bicentennial Park.

He has seen blues and the park as a winning combination since getting involved in the first Joliet Blues Festival in 2018.

“I thought to myself, ‘Look at this beautiful park,’” he said. “It’s gorgeous. The idea of holding a blues festival that would not only feature the bands but the beautiful park was irresistible.”