Inaugural BBQ and Blues festival brings together smokin' riffs and smoked meat

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Jim Byrnes

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JOE BRYKSA / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS Romi Mayes

HOW’S this for truth in advertising: the Winnipeg BBQ and Blues Festival.

Barbecue, blues, Winnipeg.

That's it, that's everything, the name just says it all. This here is a celebration of the holy matrimony of meat and music, laid out on the grounds of the Red River Exhibition Park. From Friday to Sunday, the grills will be hot, the licks will be cookin', and fans? Well, they get one last chance to crack a cold one and watch the summer sizzle down.

Yeah, it sounds a little bit glorious and very Deep South. Indeed, the idea sprang from the heart of America's soul country. For years, festival artistic director Rick Fenton has traipsed through music festivals in Tennessee and Louisiana, where the food and the music are inextricably entwined; one day, at the W.C. Handy Blues Awards festival, he had an epiphany.

"I was standing on the banks of the Mississippi, watching the Black Crowes with a pulled pork sandwich and an ice-cold beer in my hand," Fenton recalls. "And I thought... well, this is really good. I have to get it to Winnipeg."

Now, after years of percolating, the first annual BBQ and Blues festival is ready to roll out the smokers. On Friday night: a Meat Ball with burgers and blues, courtesy of Little Miss Higgins. On Saturday, a full day of riffs, including guitar and harmonica workshops, a full-on blues jam and a headlining turn by blues icon Jimmie Vaughan.

On Sunday, vocal dynamos the Sojourners kick off a day of tunes with a gospel breakfast; the rest of that day features performances from Canadian bluesman Jim Byrnes and rockin' local roots warrior Romi Mayes.

Finally, the festival closes with local legend Big Dave McLean. That scheduling is very deliberate.

"From the very beginning we wanted to embrace local artists," Fenton says. "We're calling Big Dave our ambassador of the blues. As far as I'm concerned, he'll finish every year on Sunday if he's able."

And through it all, the smell of smoking meat will waft through the air, as champion cooks strut their stuff: a "turkey chili throwdown" on Saturday; a firefighters' cook-off for charity on Sunday.

And of course, the main event: the Winnipeg Free Press Pit Masters Championship, a big ol' barbecue battle with a $10,000 prize and qualification to the Jack Daniel's World Championship cook-off in Tennessee. Barbecuing may not fit the traditional definition of a spectator spor, but that doesn't mean there isn't much to see.

"You won't have anyone racing barbecues on a track or anything, there's not much action," chuckles Perry Hopkins, the festival's director of BBQ events (how's that for a job title, eh?). "But if you are interested in barbecue, you're going to be able to talk to fellows who are passionate, very passionate about what they do."

Around it all, a bevy of other activities: while fans can't eat the competition meat -- health regulations, y'understand -- there will be plenty of barbecue vendors cooking up food for public consumption, as well as a display of big-rig trucks and other various delights and distractions.

OK, so that's a lot of stuff going on. But hey, putting a passel of first-rate blues musicians in the same space as 25 of North America's top competition barbecuers just makes sense.

"This form of cooking is the people's food, and blues and country music is the people's music," Hopkins says.

Specifically, it was poor people's music once, and poor people's food. The sounds of the blues sprang from the rickety corners of the American South, born from the throats and fingers of black families who sang and played into the night; the classic slow barbecue grew up in much the same manner, as families found new ways to savour the cheapest cuts of meat.

It's not cheap anymore, of course, or at least not always. In the last five years, barbecue culture has become a big-time sensation, driven by competitions, books and the TLC reality show BBQ Pitmasters, which features professional cookers who call their mobile meat dens things like "Battlewagon."

In fact, Iowa's Moe Cason, a popular barbecuer on the show's second and third seasons, will be among the competitors this weekend -- Hopkins, who got into the biz in 2007 when he launched the Manitoba Open BBQ Championships, calls Cason a "rock star."

And maybe with a little luck, Manitoba will make its own barbecue-and-blues rock star this weekend.

"I think (local barbecue) culture's been waiting for someone to give them something to come to, to gather around," Hopkins says. "We've always known that there was a lot of interest in Winnipeg, but it took us actually moving the competition to Winnipeg for me to really got a ton of people coming out of the closet as barbecuers."

Need more information on events, details, performers, tickets? Check 'em out at www.winnipegBBQandblues.ca.

melissa.martin@freepress.mb.ca

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition August 16, 2012 E8