2026 Blues Fest

4:00-5:30
Bubble City Playboys
6:00-8:00
Andrew Duncanson and Take a Ride
featuring Michael Peloquin with special guests Gerry Hundt and Lee Kanehira
8:30-10:00
Alligator Records recording artists:
LIL' ED AND THE BLUES IMPERIALS
"Outrageous Chicago blues slide-guitar… Piping hot energy… forceful… A star of the first magnitude." — DownBeat

Our 2026 Sponsors

Your donations enable PCBS to plan a Fest featuring great local, regional and national touring acts.

Remember: 10% of any profits from the Fest goes directly into our Blues In The Schools (BITS) Education Fund.

Prairie Crossroads Blues Society has been producing our annual weekend blowouts since 2018. Revisit all the good times below:

Prior to 2018, two other series of Blues Festivals were annual events in Champaign-Urbana:

In the late 1980s, the Urbana Park District produced an annual BLUES AND BLUEGRASS weekend in which they featured national Blues acts on one night, and featured Bluegrass music on the other night. These events took place on Cannonball Hill in Crystal Lake Park.
Later, in the early 2000s, several blues festivals were produced by Fluid Events in downtown Urbana and downtown Champaign before they eventually went bankrupt. There were no blues festivals in 2016 or 2017, and that's when Prairie Crossroads Blues Society decided to start up our own annual Blues Fest... and the rest is history!