Where the Blues Still Live

Six years after a handful of musicians planted the seed, Talbotton BluesFEST is growing into a regional celebration of music, history and the people determined to preserve both.

By Monica Jones

There is a moment along the drive from Columbus to Talbotton when the traffic thins, the sky opens and West Georgia really begins showing off.

The roads curve through farmland and tall pines. Small towns appear and disappear. Less than an hour from Columbus, the pace changes—and on Saturday, Oct. 24, those roads will lead to Historic Zion Church, where a festival begun during one of the strangest moments in recent history is preparing for its biggest year yet.

Now in its sixth year, Talbotton BluesFEST has grown from a small gathering built on little more than faith, friendship and a love of the blues into a daylong celebration bringing together musicians, dancers, historians and visitors from across the region.

This year’s festival will spread across the grounds of Zion Church and neighboring Straus-LeVert Hall, with music and programming taking place inside both historic buildings and on the outdoor stage. The day begins with Sacred Harp singing and moves through gospel, acoustic traditions, harmonica, fiddle, electric blues, Louisiana rhythms, dance and cultural conversations before saxophonist Vanessa Collier closes the night.

It is an ambitious program, but its roots are remarkably simple.

Before there was a festival, there were four musicians inside an old church.

West Georgia blues musician Jontavious Willis first heard about Zion from his friend Connie Guy, who described it as one of the most remarkable small churches she had ever visited, with acoustics that deserved to be heard.

Willis was intrigued. His family had connections to Talbotton, but he had never visited the church. He traveled there with fellow musicians Jayy Hopp, Stephen Hull and Dylan Triplett—then performing as Little Dylan—and they recorded several videos inside the building as part of what became known as the Talbotton Sessions. The response online was strong enough to stir a larger idea.

“We should do a festival,” Willis remembers thinking.

The sessions took place in fall 2020, when COVID had limited opportunities for musicians and audiences to gather. By the following year, as people began emerging from isolation and outdoor events offered one of the safest ways to come together, Willis and others were working with the people behind Zion’s restoration to create the first BluesFEST.

That inaugural festival was originally scheduled for May, but severe weather forced organizers to postpone it until June 26. When the day finally arrived, so did the people.

“It was just this huge crowd,” Katherine Johnson remembers. “It was fantastic.”

She and her late husband, David, first became involved with Zion in the late 1980s, when the church’s interior was restored. Their more active preservation work began around 2008, driven in large part by David’s deep appreciation for historic buildings and the labor, craftsmanship and community memory held within them.

“The more we got involved with it, the more we loved it,” she says. “The more we got involved with it, the more people we knew in Talbotton. It just becomes family.”

After years of inconsistent use and mounting preservation needs, Zion was transferred from the Episcopal Diocese of Atlanta to the Georgia Trust for Historic Preservation. Supporters began the long work of securing public involvement and funding for the building’s exterior restoration.

“You just said to yourself, ‘We don’t fail,’” Johnson recalls. “‘We’re not going to fail these people.’”

BluesFEST became one of the first major events to welcome the public back to Zion following the restoration. Since then, the festival has grown alongside a broader vision for the church, Straus-LeVert Hall and Talbotton itself.

Johnson sees the two buildings as living spaces capable of bringing music, weddings, receptions, theatrical performances, lectures, tours, retreats and film productions into the community.

“Talbotton is proud of those two places now,” she says. “They’re all fixed up, they’re being used, and it is energizing them to do more.”

Growing the Seed

Willis has served as artistic director since BluesFEST began, helping shape the festival from its earliest days. This year, both the festival and his role behind the scenes have grown considerably as the program expands in scale and scope.

He has shaped an ambitious program that reaches beyond a traditional succession of stage performances. He wanted classes. He wanted conversations. He wanted visitors to encounter the history carried inside the music—and perhaps learn enough to join in.

Throughout the day, the Atlanta Blues Dance Society will offer lessons designed for experienced dancers as well as people still negotiating with their two left feet. Harmonica player Andrew Alli will lead a class, while Lamont Pearley and Tafara Muhammad will host cultural conversations inside Straus-LeVert Hall.

“I wanted to incorporate other elements, not just the music,” Willis says. “I wanted to have some classes and some talks like I’m used to going to at other festivals.”

The expanded programming has been made possible in part through a collaboration with the Smithsonian Institution as the nation approaches its 250th anniversary. Willis’s existing relationships with Smithsonian staff helped connect Talbotton BluesFEST with the initiative, bringing new resources and national attention to a festival grounded firmly in a small Georgia town.

Despite that growing reach, Willis deliberately built most of the lineup close to home. More than 70 percent of the participating artists are regional performers.

The result is not one narrow definition of blues, but a portrait of the music as it has moved through churches, front porches, family gatherings, dance floors, juke joints and generations.

“It’s old-fashioned music, but it’s new-fashioned people bringing it,” Willis says.

The day will begin inside Zion with Sacred Harp singing, an unaccompanied vocal tradition built around shape-note music and communal harmony. The “harp” is not an instrument but the human voice.

Willis’s connection to the singers began with a rare recording he discovered in Biloxi, Mississippi. The collection of acetate discs contained Sacred Harp singing credited to Lois Livingston. After Willis shared the recording online, a woman responded that Livingston was her grandmother—and that she had never heard her grandmother sing. Willis sent her the audio. That unexpected exchange eventually led him to the singers who will open BluesFEST. “It’s kind of a full-circle situation,” he says.

That spirit of preservation continues with the Piney Woods Session Revue, made up largely of musicians Willis recorded earlier this year at Piney Woods Farm in LaGrange.

Willis understood what could be lost if no one captured their voices. He had heard too many stories—some from within his own family—about extraordinary musicians whose music survives only in the memories of people who once heard them play.

The revue brings together Gussie and Robert Parks, Eddie Hinton, fiddler Callie Hammond, Gary Waters and Alabama Mike, supported by additional musicians. For Willis, the group’s appearance in Talbotton is both a debut and an opportunity to give these artists something capable of continuing beyond a single festival.

Robert Parks was the first guitarist Willis remembers seeing perform live. Parks still plays at the church where Willis grew up, and Willis will join him for a song during the revue before stepping into his own set.

The larger lineup moves fluidly between generations and styles.

Columbus vocalist Alia Torres, whose voice Willis describes as angelic, returns to BluesFEST as one of the region’s brightest musical treasures. Alabama Annie brings piano, guitar and the unvarnished energy that has recently earned her hundreds of thousands of views from performances posted from her front porch.

Atlanta guitarist Albert White arrives carrying decades of musical history. The nephew of noted blues pianists Piano Red and Speckled Red, White has built his own life in blues and R&B and remains, in his 80s, a powerful connection to the music’s past.

As evening settles over Talbotton, the energy rises.

Bruce “Sunpie” Barnes and the Louisiana Sunspots will bring harmonica, accordion and the pulse of New Orleans to the outdoor stage. A former professional football player and longtime park ranger, Barnes is, in Willis’s words, “like a modern-day John Henry.”

“He holds that big old accordion, and he holds court when he plays,” Willis says. “Sunpie is going to make you sweat.”

Stephen Hull follows with a full band and the high-energy electric blues he has carried from his Wisconsin home to stages around the world.

Then comes Vanessa Collier.

A singer, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist known for turning the saxophone into a commanding lead voice, Collier moves easily through blues, soul, funk, rock and jazz. Willis first encountered her on the festival circuit nearly a decade ago and knew she could close Talbotton’s biggest BluesFEST with the force it deserved.

“She has such a variety of songs,” he says. “Some of it is blues, some of it is jazz, and some of it is just an array of good feeling and good sound—and so much high energy.”

Close to the Heart

Willis knows what it is to arrive at a festival, play his scheduled set and leave knowing little about what it took to build the day around him.

Here, he knows the people. He knows the obstacles. He knows how many conversations, favors, donations, meetings and acts of stubborn faith were required to move the festival from an idea into its sixth year.

“When you perform in a show versus being behind the scenes—knowing the people and seeing what it takes to actually grow that seed—it brings you much closer to the heart of it,” he says.

That connection reaches into his own history. Born in LaGrange and raised in Greenville, Willis attended school in Troup County before studying at Columbus State University. He now lives in Luthersville, almost directly between Atlanta and Columbus, in the same broad stretch of West Georgia his family has called home for generations.

“The Georgia sky and those pines—they kiss so pretty, like nowhere else,” he says. “The sky looks different at home than it does anywhere else.”

That love of place can be heard throughout the festival he has curated. Although BluesFEST is growing—and although this year’s lineup and Smithsonian collaboration may introduce Talbotton to an entirely new audience—its value does not rest on becoming bigger simply for the sake of being big. It rests on bringing good people together.

Willis speaks of the musicians as “honest,” “cool” and “down home”—artists whose humanity is present in the music regardless of the style they play. He is less interested in hierarchy than in creating a complete experience and giving audiences an opportunity to encounter performers they may not otherwise know.

“What matters is putting on a good festival,” he says, “and letting people see the different talents from around.”

You do not need to arrive knowing every artist. You do not need to understand the difference between Piedmont blues, electric blues and Sacred Harp singing. You do not need to consider yourself a blues scholar—or even a blues fan.

Come Curious

Take the drive through the pines. Walk inside Zion and hear voices fill a church saved by people who refused to let it disappear. Cross the grounds to Straus-LeVert Hall. Learn a dance step. Listen to a story. Discover a musician whose name you did not know that morning.

Then stay as the sun goes down and the whole thing begins to shake loose.

Talbotton BluesFEST takes place Saturday, Oct. 24, at Historic Zion Church and Straus-LeVert Hall in Talbotton, Georgia. Programming begins at 10 a.m., with Vanessa Collier closing the outdoor stage from 8:30–9:30 p.m. Attendees should bring their own lawn chairs or picnic blankets. Tickets and complete festival information are available at ZionChurchTalbotton.org.