Sonny Hess, a longtime Portland blues and R&B guitarist and vocalist, is celebrating 20 years of being cancer-free by throwing a party she calls her very own Boob Ball. The bash is set for the Blue Diamond, a Portland music venue she co-owns on Northeast Sandy Boulevard.
According to KOIN, the celebration was scheduled for Friday, October 2, 2026, timed to the start of Breast Cancer Awareness Month. Hess joined the station's AM Extra program to share her story and explain why she wants the community to join her cancer-free milestone celebration, the station reported. The Boob Ball is upcoming.
A Guitarist Who Started Young
Hess picked up her first guitar at age 8, and by her teenage years she was already landing gigs with Portland's top bands of the era, per Columbia Gorge News. Those early bands included The Koffee Band and Margo Tufo's Blues Sisters, according to Hess's own website. She went on to become the first woman nominated for Best Lead Guitar by the Cascade Blues Association, the outlet's report noted.
Hess has also built a platform for other women in the genre. Her NW Women R&B Show has been seen by hundreds of thousands of festivalgoers over 15 years at the Safeway Waterfront Blues Festival, according to her website.
Music as Part of the Fight
Hess has described herself as a cancer survivor who leaned on her craft rather than stepping away from it during treatment. “I never missed a gig, I put myself in my music,” she said, per the same Columbia Gorge News report. That approach to healing threads through the story now being marked with two decades of being cancer-free.
The timing lines up with Breast Cancer Awareness Month, which falls each October in the United States, KOIN noted. The American Cancer Society has estimated that about 321,910 new cases of invasive breast cancer will be diagnosed in women nationwide in 2026, a scale that frames why survivorship milestones like Hess's resonate well beyond one venue on Sandy Boulevard.
