Muddy Award Nomination Ballots

Your first round Muddy Award ballots for nominating your favorite acts, performers, performances, and venues should have arrived at every members’ home by the time you read this. Remember, this is your opportunity to decide who ends up on the final ballot. If you do not nominate, do not complain about who is on that final ballot. This is a majority result of all the ballots received to select the top three vote getters. If there is a tie in any category that results in more than three, we will include all. The Board of Directors does not make the call, it is totally up to our members.

A few notes to help you determine who you may want to select and to avoid some confusion.

In the category Contemporary Blues, this refers to modern electric blues or blues rock.

Traditional Blues means acoustic or those artists playing in the classic electric style that harkens back to the early years in Chicago, Detroit, St Louis, etc from the 1940s-early 1960s.

Regional Blues Act are those that reside in the Pacific Northwest: Oregon, Washington or Idaho. This does not include artists living within the Portland Metro area.

Northwest Recording are also for those acts within Oregon, Washington and Idaho.

National Recording are for those releases from artists across the country or internationally. Northwest recordings may be included in the National selections, too.

There is a list on the back of the ballot of all the past Lifetime Achievement recipients. You only live once, so those on this list are not eligible to be nominated again.

As we did last year, we have compiled a list of performances and Northwest releases and posted them on the CBA website, under the heading Cascade Blues Notes use the drop down menu to Muddy Awards. These lists are by no means inclusive of all, so let us know if you see something missing and we will enter those (do not send in a list of all gigs local musicians played, there is no way we could possibly list them all). Performances are meant for individual acts. Events are for special shows including multiple artists or festivals and have been separated on the list.

A few awards have been named after certain artists meaning that they are retired from those categories and not eligible to be nominated. This includes Curtis Salgado for Male Vocalist, Duffy Bishop for Female Vocalist and Terry Robb for Acoustic Guitar. The Lifetime Achievement award is named in honor of Paul deLay by a decision of the Board of Directors. In order for a category to be named after an artist, they must have received the award in that respective category no less than twelve times. The Waterfront Blues Festival has been retired from the Northwest Blues Event category on their request, in order for other events to merit the same recognition.

You do not have to select three choices in each category, but do not write in more than three or all will be voided.

Ballots must be returned either by bringing them to the next CBA membership meeting on September 3rd or by mail to 2014 Muddy Awards, c/o Cascade Blues Association, PO Box 14493, Portland, Oregon 97293, postmarked no later than September 12th in order for us to be able to compile the results for the final ballot. Any ballot received postmarked after that date will not be counted.

Keep the date Wednesday, November 5th open for the 2014 Muddy Awards at The Melody Ballroom, starting at 6:30 pm. We will have performances from our Journey to Memphis winners The Rae Gordon Band and David Pinsky & Phil Newton, and a Muddy All Star Band put together this year by Dave Fleschner.