Mike Dougherty's Blog

A concert worth heat, humidity

A concert trip that began as a couples outing has turned into a road trip for the guys. With forecasters promising temperatures in the mid-90s for Friday evening, the wives have decided to stay in Little Rock and enjoy the air-conditioning without us.
So John and I will head for Fort Smith and the 20th annual Riverfront Blues Festival at Harry E. Kelley Park.

We’ve been friends since 1969, but I think it’s the first trip we’ve taken together since we decided to travel to Memphis on Aug. 16, 1977, about an hour before we heard that Elvis Presley had died. We didn’t try to go to Graceland, but we did cross Elvis Presley Boulevard several blocks up from where the huge crowd had started to gather. We also met in Kansas City in 1979 when I was living in northwest Missouri and he was living in Little Rock. John and I had a good time, but that set of wives didn’t get along.

We’re making the trip to see Grace Potter & the Nocturals, a Vermont band we discovered after seeing them listed as a featured act at the same festival a year ago.

I attend few live concerts any more, but this bluesy rock band fronted by the woman with the huge voice and rousing Hammond B3 organ seems worth the effort — and sweating with all the other fans on an early-summer Arkansas night on the river.