The Mary Stokes Band to headline Women in the Blues event at Howth Roots and Blues Festival

The Mary Stokes Band will headline the Women in The Blues event on August 9 as part of the Howth Roots and Blues Festival.

Alongside the Mary Stokes Band, French blues singer Elise Frank and Kildare blues singer Niamh Strong will also perform.

The Howth Roots and Blues Festival is a multi-venue music event that features over 40 gigs across local pubs and restaurants. This year’s Women in Blues triple bill will be hosted at the Summit Inn.

Headliners for the Howth Roots and Blues Festival include Hothouse Flowers, Dublin Blues Cartel with Mik Pyro, Irish rock group Crow Black Chicken and American blues artist Silas Caldwell, among others.

Mary Stokes has played at the festival every year since its inception in 2019.

The earliest version of the Mary Stokes Band was an acoustic trio formed in the 1980s with Stokes, Brian Palm on harmonica and Sam Cloud on guitar.

Busking on Grafton Street and playing at small clubs and pubs around Dublin, the band first recorded out of a flat on Waterloo Road with homemade equipment and a single microphone. Many of the songs recorded there are re-visited on their 2002 album, Hometown Blues, which was initially only available on a run of 300 CDs.

In 1989 they self-released Tough Times, a cassette featuring six acoustic and blues tracks, marking the first addition to their catalogue.

Today, the band consists of Stokes, Palm, Sarah Michelle, Jay Oglesby and Eamonn Griffin.

In June of last year, they re-released and remastered Hometown Blues.

Tickets for the Howth Roots and Blues Festival are available here.