Last Best News (https://montana-mint.com/lastbestnews/tag/magic-city-blues/)
The Goodridge kids have grown up with the blues. The Magic City Blues, to be precise. Their parents, Tim and Pam Goodridge, have been putting on the annual music festival in downtown Billings since 2002. One way or another, their three children—Henry, 21, Will, 18, and Jane, 16—have part of the festival for most of their lives. (more…) Continue Reading →
Never forget. Not even a week after the twin towers were struck down by two hijacked planes on Sept. 11, 2001, people were repeating this phrase everywhere around the nation, in newspapers, on TV, bumper stickers, posters, banners. Never forget. (more…) Continue Reading →
Montana doesn’t have any concert venues with the wide renown of places like the Red Rocks Amphitheatre in Colorado or the Gorge Amphitheatre in Washington state. But how many states have three venues as cool as the White Sulphur Springs cow pasture that is the home of the Red Ants Pants Music Festival; uptown Butte, with its Montana Folk Festival; and Montana Avenue, site of the Magic City Blues festival? (more…) Continue Reading →
Lindsey Jacobsen loves playing music, loves it so much that she doesn’t want it to become a job, something she’d have to leave Billings to pursue. “I care too much about the people in my community and my family and friends,” she said. “And I’ve got it really good right now.” (more…) Continue Reading →
Looking back at the summer of 2015, these are the things I’m most likely to remember. There was Sheila Kay Adams, a storyteller and musician from Sodom, N.C., giving a brief history of the past 400 years as told by her Scottish grandmother, whose people have been living in the same corner of North Carolina since 1731. (more…) Continue Reading →
Excuse me for being late on this, but I just discovered (on Facebook, the unsleeping recycler of pop culture) that the Great Falls Tribune published a Big Sky bucket list in December. The Tribune presented “100 activities every Montanan should have on a bucket list of things to do in a lifetime.” I found it impossible not to read the article from start to finish, and impossible not to keep a running tally of how many of the activities I had already done. (more…) Continue Reading →
If you’re wondering why Magic City Blues has lasted so long and has been so successful, it’s not because Tim Goodridge is a master planner or strategic thinker. He just knows a few important things, one of which is that people get bored quickly. That’s why Goodridge, who founded the downtown Billings music festival in 2002, has continued adjusting, tweaking and changing the event year after year. (more…) Continue Reading →
Robert K. Elder has 6-year-old twins, a boy and a girl, who’ve never been to Billings. So when Elder brings them to his hometown town this week and next, he’s planning to take them to all those places he visited as a kid — including Cody, Wyo., Yellowstone National Park and MontanaFair. Elder also hopes that he and his wife, Betsy Edgerton, can take in one night of the Magic City Blues festival while they’re here. (more…) Continue Reading →
