Schedule
Saturday, September 13, 2025 from 2:30-3:30 pm (Blues Stage)
Sunday, September 14, 2025 (blues for breakfast - elks lodge)
The first thing that strikes the listener about Irish artist Muireann Bradley’s music is that she seems impossibly young to be playing blues from a century before she was born with such heartfelt authenticity. And her guitar playing — seemingly effortless fingerpicking — is impeccable.
It’s important to Muireann to keep the music of her influences before modern audiences. She counts among them Memphis Minnie, Rev. Gary Davis, Blind Blake, Ellizabeth Cotton, Robert Johnson and John Fahey. "It's important to keep the songs going. These musicians are so amazing, we should keep their memory alive.”
Muireann’s father, a musician, taught her guitar and shared his love of authentic blues and ragtime, speaking of the artists as if he’d just seen them at the pub. “My father could play all this stuff on guitar, and I remember watching him when I was very young and thinking, 'I want to be able to do that’.” She got her first guitar at age 9 and took up her learning in earnest during the Covid lockdown. What emerged from those years, is an artist wise beyond her years, and a new-old voice in the blues music world that does, indeed, breathe life into songs first recorded more than 100 years ago.