Roots N Blues Festival Celebrates Historic Attendance in 2022 & Announces Dates for 2023

The Roots N Blues Festival, the only entirely women-owned major music festival in the United States, recently wrapped up another successful year.

From October 7-9, a historic number of music fans turned out for the 15th annual festival at Stephens Lake Park in Columbia, Missouri with headline sets from Wilco, Jon Batiste, Bleachers, Chaka Khan, Tanya, Tucker, and Old Crow Medicine Show. The three-day festival, which took place on two stages, was once again presented by Veterans United Home Loans. During the event, it was announced that next year's festival will take place September 30 - October 2, 2023.

The attendance for Roots N Blues this year nearly doubled last year, and Saturday was the largest attendance day in the event's history, since it became a ticketed event, with 10,000+ attendees. Friday and Sunday each saw about 8,000+ attendees per day. Guests came from all over the country, from as far as Texas, Florida, and California, to attend the festival.

"Over 10,000 people participated in a collective celebration of American Roots Music and wholeheartedly supported live music in mid-Missouri throughout the weekend," said Shay Jasper, Co-owner and Co-producer of Roots N Blues. "In hearing the accounts of our patrons and looking at the data collected, we are providing a more inclusive, safe and positive experience for the community and its visitors. Tracy, myself and our incredible team are looking forward to further expanding our featured genres in 2023 while continuing an evolution into the best version of ourselves."

On the first night of Roots N Blues, Grammy Award-winning vocalist and guitarist Jeff Tweedy was presented with the 2021 Missouri Roots Songbook honor before his band Wilco took the stage. The honor was presented by festival Co-owners and Co-producers, Tracy Lane and Jasper, who founded the Missouri Roots Songbook in 2018 to encourage the young people of Missouri to take pride in the incredibly rich musical heritage of their home state. Previous honorees were Chuck Berry (2018), the "father" of rock and roll; John "Blind" Boone (2019), one of the first composers of Ragtime music; and Grammy Award-winning singer-songwriter Sheryl Crow (2021).

"The Missouri Roots Songbook tradition, now in its fourth year, is a celebration of musicians with Missouri roots who have altered music history and culture on a global scale," says Lane. "Chuck Berry, our inaugural honoree in 2018, is as synonymous with Rock 'n' Roll as Jeff Tweedy is with Alt Country. John 'Blind' Boone, our 2019 honoree, is cited by some music historians as the earliest composer of Ragtime music. Sheryl Crow, our 2021 recipient, blazed the trail for creating gender balance in the live music industry as one of the performers and founding members of the Lillith Fair Festival in the late 1990s.

Jeff Tweedy is a Midwesterner whose childhood was spent just across the river from St. Louis, listening to a broad array of musical influences spanning from The Carter Family to The Replacements, and some of us stood alongside him in our teenage years, seeing heavy metal bands on The Landing in the summer. Jeff Tweedy's compelling and communal storytelling combined with his songwriting genius has resulted in more than 30 years of songs that sound and feel like us."

Making Roots N Blues accessible to everyone is important to Lane and Jasper. To accommodate music fans with mobility issues, there was a fleet of dedicated golf carts running along a route of ADA stops throughout festival grounds. And to ensure that lower-income local families had an opportunity to attend, Roots N Blues distributed community vouchers to 500 Columbia residents.

More than 70% of those vouchers were redeemed. As with last year's festival, children 14 and younger were admitted for free with an accompanying parent or guardian. To welcome the youngest music fans, Roots N Blues once again set up a Lactation Station tent for nursing families, sponsored by University of Missouri Health Care.

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