We’re excited to announce that New Orleans bassist and multi-instrumentalist Ben Fox will be part of the artist faculty at the 2017 Port Townsend Acoustic Blues Workshop.

Ben became enamored with jug band music when he got to play with some traveling hobos who had stopped in his college town of New York City. He took it upon himself then to learn pop tunes from the beginning of the 20th century from source recordings as they had, through a fascination with how we got the musical landscape we have today.

Instead of attending graduate school, he moved to New Orleans to learn the styles of his musical heroes in their natural habitat. He likes to think of himself as attending the Free University of the Streets of New Orleans, which first taught him to play jug band music and rags, blues, american old time, music from the balkans, manouche jazz, cajun music, and is presently giving him a traditional New Orleans jazz intensive. Ben is a style junkie, though, and has no interest in stopping there. His summers generally involve traveling between fiddle festivals, Shapenote conventions, renaissance fairs, or Greek music camps, trying to soak up more of the social language of music.