Yuba hills, Gulf Coast link up
The dry, grassy foothills of Yuba County would seem to share little with the steamy towns of Mississippi's Gulf Coast. But on Saturday afternoon, organizers of a benefit concert in Loma Rica sought to tie them together - in music and in aid for a region savaged by Hurricane Katrina a year ago.
The Foothill Lions Club played host to Blues for Biloxi, a mini-festival of blues, rock and country bands arranged to raise money for Biloxi and Gulfport residents who lost their homes to the massive flooding Katrina triggered in August 2005. Proceeds will go toward not only basic food and clothing relief but also to underwrite area youth clubs damaged by Katrina, according to Lions members.
The easygoing melange of meaty guitar-playing, ballcap-wearing fans in lawn chairs, and barbecue and T-shirt stalls entertained several hundred spectators from afternoon to evening. But it barely hinted at the unhealed wounds the concert was meant to help salve: those who saw homes and businesses and livelihoods smashed by rain, wind and flood.
“We wanted to do something long-term to help those people, to keep it alive in people's minds,” said Linda Saala, president of the Foothill Lions Club, as the first of several dozen songs resonated from the stage.
Seven months in the planning, Blues for Biloxi grew out of the Foothill Lions Club's first effort to aid hurricane victims, according to Saala.
To make last Christmas a little more bearable for Mississippians who lost their homes, the Loma Rica club donated and sent gift cards for the few chain stores that still had branches standing in the Gulf Coast.
With federal relief slow to reach victims who increasingly were falling into financial problems, Saala remembered, local Lions resolved to do something more - while also bringing coastal Mississippi's plight home to a public that had been presented with wall-to-wall coverage of New Orleans' agony.
“In January, we thought about what we could do to make them a lot of money,” she said. “We decided we needed an all-day (concert) to make it work - blues, country music, anything that represented the South.”
To drive home the needs of the Mississippi victims, Blues for Biloxi was opened with a speech from a Yuba-Sutter resident victimized by Katrina - Air Force Maj. Jeff C. Wright, a U-2 pilot based at Beale Air Force Base.
The century-old house near the Biloxi waterfront where Wright spent seven years was among those that Katrina's floods swamped under 25 feet of water, which he said left just one residence intact in his three-mile-long neighborhood.
Mississippi's suffering has received less publicity than Louisiana's, Wright said later Saturday, and that makes any relief campaigns for the state all the more crucial.
“It's out of sight, out of mind,” he said. “But people still live in tents there and probably will for some time. They're still paying mortgages (on destroyed homes) that insurance will not cover.”
Despite the somber occasion for the concert, a ray of optimism seemed to break through at its beginning. Leaving aside its usual muscular bass chords, the opening band, Morning Wood Blues, put down guitars and drumsticks for a moment as its wavy-haired lead singer, Yvonne “Pinkie” Rideau, let out a softer, plaintive lyric, alone.
It was the first verse of “Amazing Grace.”
Appeal-Democrat reporter Howard Yune can be reached at 749-4708. You may e-mail him at hyune@appeal-democrat.com.
