Blues-loving Poulsbo couple bringing a New Orleans concept to Little Norway

Growing up, Mary Gorman’s family would travel from Kitsap County to Alaska each summer for her father’s job as a fisherman. The trips introduced the young woman to a lot of new experiences — including music.

“I got turned on to the blues when I was about 18 years old in Alaska by a commercial fisherman named Jack. And he told me who Taj Mahal was, and about Van Morrison and BB King and Bonnie Raitt,” Gorman explains. “I just fell in love.”

Years later, Gorman and her husband, Joe Hulsey, share a love for the blues. Throughout their relationship, they have been to hundreds of music festivals. Hulsey mused that it would be funny to bring one to their hometown of Poulsbo, even coining a name for an event-centered blues-and-jazz: “PB&J.”

“I said, Yeah, it is (funny), but I’m never doing that. I’m not making a festival. That’s not in my wheelhouse,” Gorman, a real estate agent, remembers saying at the time.

Years passed, and the two didn’t speak of it again. But after a four-month stay in New Orleans in 2022, where Gorman and Hulsey attended a whopping 43 concerts, Hulsey decided to pitch the idea of a blues and jazz festival in Poulsbo to the Poulsbo Rotary Club, who agreed to fund and produce it as a community event.

“He came home one night and said, ‘Well, we’re doing it.’ And I’m like, ‘Doing what?” Gorman said. “He said, ‘We’re doing PB&J.”

Gorman admitted telling Hulsey that she “felt like they should have had a conversation before.” And then she took a breath and started reaching out to bands and sound engineers and venues.

And so PB&J was born. The festival, happening on Saturday, February 24, will feature 13 bands performing over seven hours in four different venues in downtown Poulsbo: Western Red Brewing, the Slippery Pig, 110 Lounge, and Brass Kraken. Headliners include some local acts, like Bremerton-based vocalist Eugenie Jones or Poulsbo's Front Street Revue. It is unique for the area to host a blues and jazz festival — outside of Centrum’s jazz festival in Port Townsend, Gorman and Hulsey knew there could be demand for events for jazz and blues lovers in West Sound.

“There are so many (blues) bands that I just love so much that almost never get past the Mississippi River…they don’t get up here to our little corner of the country,” Gorman said. She seems to be proven correct: the festival's 500 tickets quickly sold out.

Although Gorman expects the festival to bring a lot of out-of-towners and tourists to Front Street, she also wants to make sure that locals are highlighted and get to experience the music. An early bird sale was directed at Poulsbo residents at a cheaper price, and local bands were included to feature Poulsbo’s music scene.

The festival is based on the famed South by Southwest festival, Gorman said, and a lesser-known, short-lived festival in Seattle’s Pioneer Square called Upstream, which happened in 2018 and 2019. Both are multi-venue events with a spirit Gorman and Hulsey seek to recreate.

“They’re the ones that would work for our town. We want to do this festival in the winter when nothing else is happening. And we want to do it inside little clubs,” Gorman said.

Gorman and Hulsey worked directly with sound producers and found the bands themselves. They spent several months going to bars four nights a week, asking the ones they were particularly drawn to if they would be interested in performing. According to Gorman, everyone said yes when they first asked. Just over two months out, after 1,500 hours of work and “a lot of blood, sweat, and tears,” the festival is pretty much ready. At this point, “the goal is to make sure we deliver in February, because we have a lot of people that have really put their faith in us, and said things like, ‘thank you so much our town definitely needs this.”

Gorman says with all the support from community members and the Poulsbo Rotary Club’s involvement, it’s going better than she could have imagined. For her, what matters is that PB&J will play a part in keeping the blues alive.

“Everybody’s got the blues. And I think the roots of the blues is much deeper than I’ll ever be…it came around in a time of post-slavery, Black men singing their truth. I don’t want to lose that," she said. “It doesn’t apply to me, but once you get in you can’t get out. I just want to share that with other people.”

This article originally appeared on Kitsap Sun: The Poulsbo Blues and Jazz Festival is coming in February