Singer Stephanie Fogg.

The Concerts on the Quad series at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College concludes with Maine jazz and soul artist Stephanie Fogg and her band at 6:30 p.m. Thursday, Aug. 13, on the Coram Library porch on ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½’ Historic Quad, College Street and Campus Avenue. (The rain site is the nearby Peter J. Gomes Chapel, 275 College St.).

Admission to this family-friendly series is free, and audience members are encouraged to bring picnics and chairs or blankets. For more information, please call 207-753-6953.

Hailing from Portland, Maine, Fogg is an experienced vocalist and an instructor at the Midcoast School of Music. Growing up listening to jazz and soul artists like Aretha Franklin, Otis Redding, and Etta James inspired Fogg’s love of singing from a young age.

Fogg has toured widely throughout New England. The Stephanie Fogg Band’s recent gigs have included performances of Back to Black, the second and final album by the late and lamented Amy Winehouse, in its entirety. Supporting Fogg are guitarists Mike Derosier and Seth Warner, drummer Chris Marro, bassist Duane Edwards, keyboardist Matt Fogg, and saxophonist David Wells.

The great Buckwheat Zydeco performs at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ on July 30.

Dom Flemons, former Carolina Chocolate Drop;  crowd-rousing zydeco artist Buckwheat Zydeco; and the Maine soul and jazz band led by Stephanie Fogg are featured in this summer’s Concerts on the Quad at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College.

The 2015 series comprises outdoor shows at 6:30 p.m. on three Thursdays: July 16, Flemons; July 30, Zydeco; and Aug. 13, Fogg.

The concerts are held on the Coram Library porch on the college’s Historic Quad, at College Street and Campus Avenue (rain site is the nearby Peter J. Gomes Chapel, 275 College St.).

Admission to this family-friendly series is free, and audience members are encouraged to bring picnics and chairs or blankets. For more information, please call 207-753-6953.

Dom Flemons

Flemons draws deeply from the rich American folk tradition — ragtime, early blues, Southern folk, spiritual, string, and jug band music — and revives it for contemporary audiences. His work has been praised for its gritty, intimate style, which, as The Guardian writes, “sounds as if he’s sitting on the front porch enjoying himself.”

Roots musician Dom Flemons opens ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½’ Concerts on the Quad on July 16.

Flemons self-released his first solo recording, Prospect Hill, last summer. “Flemons’ talents are best-suited to intimate settings,” wrote Mark Segal Kemp in a review of the CD in Acoustic Guitar magazine, “where he can sit with his banjo, guitar, and percussion, jam a little, tell stories and talk about the rich history of African-American folk traditions.”

A co-founder of the Carolina Chocolate Drops, in 2005, Flemons started his solo career in 2013.

Buckwheat Zydeco

Widely regarded as the biggest contemporary zydeco artist in the world, accordionist-keyboardist Buckwheat Zydeco has introduced this upbeat blend of blues and traditional Creole music to audiences far away from its birthplace in Lafayette, La.

His energetic style has revitalized zydeco by drawing from mainstream genres like rock and R&B. Zydeco released the first-ever major label zydeco album in 1987, Island Records’ On A Night Like This, and has issued more than two dozen recordings since. Over the course of Zydeco’s career, he has gigged with everyone from Eric Clapton (with whom Zydeco also recorded) and U2 to the Boston Pops.

Stephanie Fogg Band

Singer Stephanie Fogg.

Hailing from Portland, Maine, Fogg is an experienced vocalist and an instructor at the Midcoast School of Music. Growing up listening to jazz and soul artists like Aretha Franklin, Otis Redding, and Etta James inspired Fogg’s love of singing from a young age.

Fogg has toured widely throughout New England. The Stephanie Fogg Band’s recent gigs have included performances of Back to Black, the second and final album by the late and lamented Amy Winehouse, in its entirety. Supporting Fogg are guitarists Mike Derosier and Seth Warner, drummer Chris Marro, bassist Duane Edwards, keyboardist Matt Fogg, and saxophonist David Wells.

Fingerstyle guitarist Jonathan Brown opens the 2014 Concerts on the Quad series.

ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½’ summer music series, Concerts on the Quad, returns for 2014 with music ranging from fingerstyle guitar to folk-rock.

Taking place at 6:30 on the Coram Library porch on the Historic Quad, at College Street and Campus Avenue, these concerts are open to the public at no cost.

Audience members are encouraged to bring picnics and chairs or blankets. The rain site is the nearby Peter J. Gomes Chapel, also on the Quad at 275 College St. For more information, please call 207-753-6953.

Here’s the lineup:

July 17: A fingerstyle guitar virtuoso and singer, Jonathan Brown brings a little Tennessee twang wherever he goes, be it his hometown Nashville or the TV series of the same name. This unique style shines through in both original compositions and his re-imagining of classics.

• Learn more about Jonathan Brown.

July 31: Soulful and eclectic, The Holmes Brothers deliver a three-part harmony combining elements of the blues, soul, gospel, R&B, rock and country. Having gigged all over the world, they now travel to ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ for their latest performance.

• Learn more about The Holmes Brothers.

Aug. 14: A longtime favorite of the Portland music scene, Lady Lamb the Beekeeper is known for her one-of-a-kind songs and arrangements. Her starkly personal music is described as both “folk-twinged” and “unabashed rock,” garnering praise from such institutions as and .

• Learn more about Lady Lamb the Beekeeper.

Portland-based blues musician Samuel James. Photograph by Jon Reece.

Enjoy the blues of acclaimed Maine singer-songwriter Samuel James at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College’s new outdoor music series, Concerts on the Quad.

Samuel James will perform solo at 6:30 p.m. Thursday, Aug. 1, on ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½’ Historic Quad, at College Street and Campus Avenue. Admission to the series is free, and audience members are encouraged to bring picnics and chairs or blankets.

Taking the place of the college’s Midsummer Lakeside Concerts, the new series continues ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½’ long and popular tradition of presenting outdoor music for the whole family. For more information, please call 207-786-6400.

The series concludes for the summer on Aug. 15 with Francine Reed and her band.

Winner of the R&B, soul and blues category in the Portland Phoenix’s 2012 Best Music Awards, James was described by the French edition of Rolling Stone magazine as a “guardian of lightning.” He has also been called “part Bill Withers, part Tom Waits, part James Brown, part Leo Kottke and part P.T. Barnum.” .

A deeply soulful singer, virtuoso instrumentalist and captivating storyteller, James has spent recent years touring North America and Europe. He comes from a line of performers dating back to the 1890s, including dancers, storytellers, a session jazz pianist and porch-stomping guitar thumpers. His songwriting encompasses themes from the heavenly flights and evil depths of love to tales of true and bizarre folk heroes.

James played Guitar Man in the Penobscot Theatre Company’s 2010 production of Spunk, the Maine premiere of a critically acclaimed play adapted from stories by Zora Neale Hurston.

He has released three recordings conceived as a trilogy, all on the Northern Blues label. Of his debut, 2008’s Songs Famed for Sorrow and Joy, Allmusic Guide wrote, “In an era when popular music is becoming increasingly perfect-sounding, and robotic, [James] provides a much needed alternative.”

For Rosa, Maeve and Noreen followed in 2009. Completing the trilogy is 2012’s And for the Dark Road Ahead, praised for transposing a mid-20th-century country-blues aesthetic into the high-tech present.

James has performed at music festivals from New Mexico to Ottawa to Poland, and at venues including San Francisco’s Biscuits & Blues, Montreal’s Club Soda, the Green Note in London and Johnny D’s in Somerville, Mass.

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Blues in the night is no fun. But blues in the evening can be a very good time indeed, as proven July 18 by musician Corey Harris ’91.

Harris visited ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ to kick off the college’s brand-new Concerts on the Quad summer music series, dedicated to the blues in all its myriad forms.

The setting was the front porch of Coram Library, where the public presentations usually involve academic regalia, sunshine and some degree of heat.

Spotlighted by the last rays of the setting sun, Harris skipped the cap and gown but generated plenty of musical heat with an 80-minute set given largely to country blues.

ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ President Clayton Spencer introduced Harris. A casual Spencer, obviously pleased to be presenting the musician, had some fun with her introduction. Describing Harris as “a brilliant musician and ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ alumnus,” she added, “I love having those two things in the same sentence.”

What makes the country blues aesthetic so cool, writes Doug Hubley, “is how big, complex and captivating a sound one player can wring from one guitar.” Phyllis Graber Jensen/ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College.

She also offered a helpful amendment to his career bio, indicating that the “old Quad” should be added to his impressive list of career venues. Speaking of which, Harris came to ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ fresh from a short Maine tour that brought him to the highly regarded Stone Mountain Arts Center, Brownfield, and Rockland’s North Atlantic Blues Festival.

As Harris recently told a Portland Press Herald reporter, “I think roots music is a good name for what I do, because I play the whole tree, you know?” His ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ show did reflect his wide interests within music of the African diaspora, sparkling with sounds of the Caribbean, West Africa and Memphis R&B.

But blues, and really the acoustic country blues of the Deep South, was the heart of the show — perhaps necessarily, since additional musicians are often integral to Harris’ ventures into other genres. In fact, the country blues aesthetic rests in part on the notion of solo performance: What makes it so cool is how big, complex and captivating a sound one player can wring from one guitar.

Crackling energy and fresh invention into the old Delta playbook.

Harris showed complete command in that realm. Switching between fretted acoustic guitar and a wooden resonator instrument played with a slide, he dazzled his audience with moves that infused crackling energy and fresh invention into the old Delta playbook. Late in the show, he revealed different facets of his virtuosity with a few instrumentals that explored “prettier” precincts of the musical scale.

As Corey Harris recently told a Portland Press Herald reporter, “I think roots music is a good name for what I do, because I play the whole tree, you know?” Phyllis Graber Jensen/ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College.

As a singer, Harris was equally fluent and rangy, moving easily from deep growl to plaintive wail and creating vocal personas to suit a shifting panoply of characters and points of view.

The singer drew heavily on his latest album, this year’s Fulton Blues, whose overall theme is the destruction of Fulton, a middle-class, historically black neighborhood that fell victim to “urban renewal” planning in the 1970s in Richmond, Va. Selections included the title number and “Lynch Blues,” which was especially compelling.

Blues is about laughing just to keep from crying, right?

But Harris ranged all over his catalog. He looked all the way back to his 1995 debut, Between Midnight and Day, for “Pony Blues” and “61 Highway,” and touched down in the 2000s for the spirituals “Daily Bread” and “Keep Your Lamp Trimmed and Burning.” There was humor, too (blues is about laughing just to keep from crying, right?), in songs like the rag “That Will Never Happen No More” and the classic double entendre “Diddy Wah Diddy,” which puts the blue in blues.

Coram Library made a nice concert stage. Photograph by Phyllis Graber Jensen/ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College.

For this writer, there were two particular standouts in an overall strong performance: the reggae-flavored “Watching You,” a Harris composition about technology and surveillance that got even edgier with the recent news about National Security Agency activities; and an excellent cover of Skip James’ haunting “Devil Got My Woman.”

The Quad audience, numbering about 100, blended young families — “there’s my opening act,” Harris said as two little girls raced back and forth in front of him — and folks who’d been around for the great rediscovery of the blues in the 1960s and ’70s.

ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ staff and faculty were well-represented, among them members of the faculty in anthropology, Harris’ major.

Rain started to fall along with the night a little before 8 o’clock, and after a generous set that numbered nearly two dozen songs, Harris wrapped up the evening with a short and sweet “Pony Blues.”

Held at 6:30 p.m. Thursdays, Concerts on the Quad continue Aug. 1 with Portland artist Samuel James and conclude Aug. 15 with ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ favorite Francine Reed.

Corey Harris performs in 2008 at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College, where he is a member of the class of 1991. Photograph by Phyllis Graber Jensen/ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College.

Enjoy three distinctly different approaches to that quintessential American music, the blues, as ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College presents its new outdoor music series, Concerts on the Quad.

Concerts on the Quad performances take place at 6:30 on three summer Thursdays on ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½’ Historic Quad, at College Street and Campus Avenue. Admission to the series is free, and audience members are encouraged to bring picnics and chairs or blankets.

Blues, gospel and jazz singer Francine Reed returns to ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ Aug. 15.

Taking the place of the college’s Midsummer Lakeside Concerts, the new series continues ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½’ long and popular tradition of presenting outdoor music for the whole family. For more information, please call 207-786-6400.

Here are the Concerts on the Quad performers:

• Corey Harris, a singer-songwriter featured in the Martin Scorsese blues documentary Feel Like Going Home, opens the series with a solo show on July 18.
• A Portland bluesman praised as a “guardian of lightning,” Samuel James offers a solo performance on Aug. 1.
• In her third visit to ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½, veteran blues, gospel and jazz singer Francine Reed performs with her band on Aug. 15.