McComb, MS: Nelsen Adelard to Headline Camellia City Festival

McComb resident Nelsen Adelard will be headlining the second annual Camellia City Festival, sponsored by the McComb Community Relations and Tourism Bureau, on November 1, 2008, at Edgewood Park in McComb. The festival began last year when McComb native Bo Diddley visited the town and was honored with a Mississippi Blues Trail marker. This year promises to be a great event, as there many terrific musical performances scheduled.

Nelsen is a superb singer/songwriter and is an immense talent on the guitar, piano, and harmonica. Nelsen's upcoming performance at the Camellia City Festival comes on the heels of the release of his fifth solo album, South by Southwest, which describes Nelsen's musical journey from Los Angeles to McComb. The CD debuted a few weeks ago at number 39 on the Roots Blues Chart.

Adelard released his latest CD on his own new label: Blue Track Records. He tells of how he came up with the name: "Well, I wanted to start my own label. Right when we were thinking of moving down here, I was thinking, okay, we'll base it down in Mississippi, so I started thinking of, you know, my life, wanting to be on the right track, being in a positive direction. I'm thinking, well, Blues-I'm on a Blue Track. Because it's McComb, and it's got that [railroad] theme, all of a sudden it just came together for me." As to his plans for further recordings on Blue Track, Adelard says, "My next concept album that I'd like to do is to find a Blues guy from Mississippi that's never been recorded, or either a native who hasn't been recorded in thirty years, or something like that, and do an album with that person. Right now I'm doing research on it."

At the Camellia City Festival Nelsen will be accompanied by Baton Rouge musicians who recorded with him on his latest CD, Greg Worley on drums and James Slaughter on bass, and he will also have a guitar player who plays with all of them regularly, Elvin Killerbee from Big Al and the Heavyweights. "He's a really, really good guitar player. It's gonna add a nice flavor to the gig," Adelard says.

Adelard, a Connecticut native, was born into a musical family. "My mom was a singer. Her mother was a singer in vaudeville, and on my dad's side, both his parents were jazz dancers, so I grew up with music all the time. My mom taught me to sing harmony when I was five years old." His parents always played a lot of different music, including Louis Armstrong, "but a lot of Southern music, I grew up thinking was just music," Adelard said. "I didn't think of it in terms of being North or South or whatever. My mom used to have a 45 of Hank Williams doing ‘Jambalaya,' and I can remember singing it when I was barely able to stand up and sing! So I grew up with a mixture of Southern Roots."

Adelard began his professional musical career playing in nightclubs as a teenager. "I was very fortunate," he said. "When I turned eighteen, the drinking age turned eighteen. I started playing guitar when I was fourteen, so I had played for four years--and I was in a professional band, playing three or four nights a week when I was eighteen. Part of the scene at that time was Blues. The major guys from Chicago, like Muddy, Buddy Guy, James Cotton, Junior Wells-all those cats were traveling on campus at the time. Blues was very big. A generation before--if I talk to someone who's in their sixties--they'll tell you what was on the campus at that time, in maybe the early sixties, was jazz. A lot of those cats are into jazz. Anyone who went to college between the early to late seventies listened to the Blues. We would do openers at a college mixer in Connecticut [Yale, U Conn, and others]. You'd pay four bucks to get in, and The Nelsen Adelard Band would open for Muddy Waters. So we'd play-I'm talking like a gymnasium!

"My first epiphany, as far as the Blues--I was probably fourteen or fifteen- and a friend of mine had B.B. King's Live in Cook County Jail, and he said ‘You need to hear this guy.' He put those first couple of songs on, and I got shivers up my spine. Although his guitar playing was great, it was his voice, and how earnest he sang. It wasn't like anything I'd ever heard. He was really telling people, instead of just singing a song. He lived the blues-he still does."

Speaking of shivers up your spine, that's just you'll get when you put on Nelsen's latest CD, South by Southwest, and listen to the track "Sweet Home in McComb." Nelsen tells of how that song came to be: "I moved down here, and I bought a beat-up old upright piano, and I started to write songs on that. When I write, I write on different instruments, like I'll pick up an acoustic guitar, and I'll play for a couple of days on that instrument, and it inspires me to write different tunes-same thing with an electric guitar. But piano inspires me in a different way, so there are several songs on the new album that were really inspired by playing this beat-up old piano, and one of them was ‘Sweet Home McComb.' I'll tell you how I got the idea for that: I was heading up North to play some gigs up there-I had been here maybe about a year-and as I'm driving up and I hit what was probably the Mason-Dixon line, I tell you-I swear to you-I started to feel a pain-now I know . . . because I started to feel a twinge in my heart, like ‘What am I doing? Why am I leaving?' I know I had business to do up North, but it was the weirdest thing. When I came back down through Pennsylvania, and I started coming back down South, I started feeling better, and when I crossed the Mississippi line, I was like ‘All right!' I've lived all over the place, and I've never felt that kind of emotion connected to a home."

Nelsen is indeed a great salesman for the city of McComb. "I want to get involved with the local people here, because I think this is a great town. Personally I think it's a great place for tourists to come down and see what the real South is like. It's a very hospitable place-really friendly people. Anybody that I have come down here-I had a lot of friends come down from LA, and they wanted to spend a weekend or whatever-they loved it, man! I'd drive them around town and show them the downtown area, and they fall in love with it--everybody. Even my band members from Baton Rouge, when I had them come up for a rehearsal one time, my bass player and drummer, they were like ‘Oh, man, this is the kind of place I want to retire in.' So everybody admires the town when they come for a visit, and I want to draw more and more people to the town, at least as tourists."

Nelsen has his own vision for the Camellia City Festival, as well: "I'd like to see it be a two-day festival, and make it into a Blues Festival, so that people from Europe come, or people from up North come down and spend two or three days in McComb to see the different acts. They do this up in the Delta, you know." Nelsen emphasizes how a major musical event like this would draw people in, and they will stay at our hotels, eat at our restaurants, take in the scenery, and check the place out. "A two-day Blues and Jazz Festival, even if it's just like Jazz Fest is down in New Orleans-it's not just jazz-it's everything. I would like to see [the Camellia City Festival] build, and after a number of years, start to get some headliners that used to live here, like Kent Dykes [of Omar and the Howlers], and maybe bring in somebody like Buddy Guy. I think it's something that we can shoot for--maybe we have to crawl before we walk--but I think that would be a great idea. And I'd love to try to help-anything I can do to help put that together."

To learn more about Nelsen Adelard and his music (and to see full-length video performances!), please visit www.nelsenadelard.com . To see the lineup for this year's Camellia City Festival, go to www.discovermccomb.com .

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