6. Rawa Blues Festival

The number of artists who wanted to play during the festival was still growing and the organisers had to set additional castings.    

The long festival day began at high noon with the acoustic blues concert. It was arranged in the centre of Katowice, but the scenery was really unique: the underground passage. Among the hundreds of spectators, the majority arrived from various, even the furthest parts of Poland.

Such as the year before, about seven thousand fans crowded „Spodek”. As usually, the crowd was really colourful, with the wide range of clothes and haircuts: from hippie shirts full of flowers to punk rock and heavy metal leather style.

This „unity in variety” was real phenomenon of Rawa Blues Festival. It was not only the celebration of the one music genre, but the meeting of people who want to spend time together. For  them blues was the medium and the festival – agora. Thanks to Rawa, they could fly far away from the gloomy reality who captured them every day...    

The stars of the festival were: Tadeusz Nalepa (with the famous jazz saxophonist Tomasz Szukalski – their gig was later released) and Irek Dudek with his Big Band. The festival was closed by Irek Dudek and Ryszard Riedel performing the song „Skazany na bluesa”, which was dedicated to the gifted harmonica player Ryszard „Skiba” Skibiński, who passed away before „Rawa Blues”.

The blues and bluesmen ruled the stage. That's why Rawa can be described with two adjectives: great and spectacular – summed up the newspapers.