Waterfront Blues Festival
annual event in Portland, Oregon, US
The Waterfront Blues Festival is an annual event in Portland, Oregon, United States, featuring four days of performances by blues musicians. The festival takes place in Tom McCall Waterfront Park, along the west bank of the Willamette River in downtown Portland.
History
The event was established as the Rose City Blues Festival in 1988. It later became known as the Safeway Waterfront Blues Festival.
Approximately 50,000 people attended the 1991 event. Tickets were required for admission starting in 2016.
The 2020 event was cancelled because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Subsequently festivals were shortened to save costs. The 2021 event was held at Zidell Yards. Approximately 17,000 people attended the two-day festival in 2025.
“Waterfront Blues Festival” enters the record as annual event in Portland, Oregon, US. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Waterfront, Blues and Festival can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Contemporary correspondence, administrative files and participant testimony can test how later narratives organized the event or institution. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 12, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q2552550. Authority coordinates are 45.516, -122.673. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1988, 1991, 2016 and 2020.
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This entry incorporates text from “Waterfront Blues Festival” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.