Centrum is excited to welcome back Michael Jerome Browne to the faculty of the 2015 Port Townsend Acoustic Blues Festival. A multi-instrumentalist, equally comfortable on guitars, banjos, fiddle, mandolin and harmonica, Browne gave the late Long John Baldry “that kind of tingle like when I first heard Lead Belly and Big Bill Broonzy.”

Browne’s taste for early American roots music was fostered early in life. Born in South Bend, Indiana in 1960, he is the son of English professors whose love of music and poetry inspired them to take their nine-year-old son to the great jazz, blues and folk clubs in their adopted home of Montreal. It was there that Browne first heard the likes of Sonny Terry, Brownie McGhee and Lightnin’ Hopkins. By the age of fourteen he was performing professionally on the seventies coffeehouse scene, playing guitar, banjo and harmonica and singing.

Today, Michael Jerome Browne tours frequently in Canada, the U.K., Australia, Europe and the United States. He’s performed at Carnegie Hall with Kate and Anna McGarrigle, in the studio with Taj Mahal and Eric Bibb, and on tour with Guy Davis. He’s been honoured with a Maple Blues Award for Acoustic Artist of the Year and a Real Blues magazine award for Best Acoustic Blues Artist. Sing Out magazine calls him “one of today’s most accomplished interpreters of traditional musical styles.”

You can spend  a week hanging out with Michael Jerome Browne – and the rest of the faculty by registering for the weeklong workshop that is the heart of the Festival.