Programs & Projects
The Foundation is involved in a variety of music-related programs, projects and events taking place within the Fox Valley River area. From organizing, promoting and sponsoring the Blues on Water Street festival in Batavia, to providing Songwriter Workshops and Performances in a variety of locations throughout the Fox Valley, the Foundation is dedicated to its mission: to Preserve, Promote, Protect, and Educate.
Songwriters Workshops
And Performance Series
The Fox Valley Music Foundation teamed up with two local libraries to offer insight into what makes a songwriter create a song. The 2016 Summer Songwriter Workshop and Performance Series featured six local professional songwriters who described their craft and performed before an audience at the local library. Each show in this free series featured a one-hour songwriting workshop led by the artist and was directly followed by a sixty-minute live performance. The West Branch of the Aurora Public Library and The Batavia Public Library are co-sponsoring the events with the Fox Valley Music Foundation. Learn more about the biographies of the artists.
The Leland Bluebird
Recording Sessions
The Leland Bluebird Sessionsis a recording project instigated and brought about by Waterloo Sunset Records and inspired by the work of the Fox Valley Blues Society, Blues on The Fox Festival Committee and the Fox Valley Music Foundation. This project was sponsored in part by a National Endowment of the Arts grant awarded to the FVMF, with assistance from the City of Aurora. It is a tribute to the records that were produced on the top floor of the Leland Hotel in Aurora, Illinois during a period in time beginning on May 4, 1937, and ending on December 19,1938.
The Leland Bluebird Sessions
Record Release Show
On February 19, 2017, top Chicago area musical artists gathered to perform the Leland Bluebird songs that are part of a new take on historic Blues recordings made in Aurora’s Leland Tower in the late 1930’s. The strong musical cast for this performance featured bandleader Scott Tipping and core band members Scott Stevenson, Matt Thompson, Chuck Lacy and Rick Sherry. Artists Robbie Fulks, Nora O’Connor, Mae Koen, Mick Ducker, Mary Lou O’Brien, Dave Nelson and Chicago Farmer were also featured throughout the evening’s performance.
Blues on the Fox
Workshops & Performances
A sincere and abiding love of blues music was the common denominator and impetus for the formation of what is now known as the Fox Valley Music Foundation and the Foundation’s live performance room, The Venue. The Blues On The Fox Festival was truly the cornerstone of the Fox Valley’s blues music scene.
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The festival has grown from its origins as a downtown intimate closed street festival of years gone by, to becoming a premier national Blues festival rivaling larger city fests in existence before Blues on the Fox was even born.
