Raw States
Jefferson Street Jazz & Blues Festival
Nashville, TN · Music
- When
- June 18–19, 2027
- Where
- Jefferson Street corridor & Bicentennial Capitol Mall State Park · Nashville · TN
- Cost
- Not confirmed
- Status
- Approximate: based on past editions, not announced yet
The Jefferson Street Jazz and Blues Festival celebrates the historic jazz and blues corridor of Jefferson Street with a Friday mixer and a Saturday festival at Bicentennial Capitol Mall State Park. It is organized by the Jefferson Street United Merchants Partnership and has run since 2001.
The history within reach
A divinity student who had studied Gandhi's methods in India ran weekly workshops in a church basement, drilling students in how to be spat on, burned with cigarettes and dragged from a stool without responding.
Fisk University, Nashville's first university and a historically Black institution in North Nashville, holds a homecoming week each fall built around a royal coronation, a parade and campus wide festivities.
Fisk was nearly broke when its student singers went on tour to raise money, and what they brought back paid for this building, the first permanent structure in the country built for the education of Black students.
Students at a school for freed people toured to save it from closure, singing spirituals to audiences who had never heard them performed as concert music.
Georgia O'Keeffe gave a historically Black university 101 works from Alfred Stieglitz's estate, her own paintings plus Picasso, Cézanne, Renoir and Diego Rivera, on condition the collection never be broken up.