Nine pitmasters will battle for a $2,000 prize this Saturday as West Palm Beach's BBQ, Brews and Blues festival returns to Heart & Soul Park for its 11th year, bringing live blues, a kids' zone, and free admission to the heart of the city's Historic Northwest district. The free celebration runs from 5 to 9 p.m. at 825 N. Rosemary Avenue, directly across from the newly restored Sunset Lounge.
According to WLRN, the festival celebrates the culture of the Historic Northwest district, a predominantly Black residential neighborhood that has thrived since the late 1920s. West Palm Beach Mayor Keith James described the event as an evening celebrating the flavors, sounds, spirit and community heritage of the neighborhood, and said BBQ, Brews and Blues has brought the community together for great food, music and family-friendly memories for 10 years. Angela Poco called it one of the city's most anticipated events of the year, per the same report.
A Cook-Off With Nine Contenders and a $2,000 Purse
The barbecue cooking competition anchoring the festival features nine vendors: Ga's Smokin, Earl's Slow and Low, Simmer Down Bar & Grill, Clark's BBQ & More, Twisted Smoke, Da King of BBQ, A&A Roadside, Eat Da Bone, and Third's and Foster's. Whichever team wins takes home the $2,000 prize, the outlet reports. Beyond the grills, organizers have built out a kids' zone and youth crafts from Rohi's Readery, a social-justice children's bookstore founded in 2021 by educator Pranati “Pranoo” Kumar Skomra to promote critical literacy and represent historically marginalized communities, according to Palm Beach Illustrated.
Blues Headliner Selwyn Birchwood Leads the Music Lineup
Live music headlines the evening with performances by internationally known blues artist Selwyn Birchwood, hometown favorite the Derek Mack Band, and Miami-based performer Kat Riggins. Birchwood, known for his self-described “Electric Swamp Funkin' Blues,” released his sixth studio album on Alligator Records in late March, and the Florida guitarist is known for playing lap steel guitar and performing barefoot, per Blues Matters Magazine. Festivalgoers wanting an elevated view can buy tickets to a VIP experience inside the Sunset Lounge itself, the historic venue that reopened in November after years of renovation.
A Neighborhood Built and Rebuilt Across a Century
Holding the festival across from the Sunset Lounge carries weight beyond convenience. The lounge operated in the 1940s and 1950s as a premier African American jazz venue that hosted legends including Ella Fitzgerald, Count Basie, and Louis Armstrong during the Jim Crow era, when segregation restricted Black artists from mainstream venues, according to WLRN's earlier reporting. The West Palm Beach Community Redevelopment Agency invested more than $12.5 million acquiring and expanding the building into a 20,000-square-foot cultural hub with a restaurant, ballroom, and rooftop bar, and Hoodline previously reported on the venue's grand reopening celebration.
The Historic Northwest neighborhood traces back to 1894, when it began with Black railway workers, and expanded in 1910 after residents of The Styx, a Black settlement on Palm Beach island, were forced out and their community burned down, per See Great Art. Black laborers who had built Palm Beach's resorts were relocated across the lake into what became this district. Covering roughly 700 acres, the neighborhood was officially added to the National Register of Historic Places on January 22, 1992, after community activists organized under Save Our Neighborhood to petition for the listing, as Modern Cities has documented.
Public Art and New Storefronts Frame the Festival Grounds
Heart & Soul Park itself, the 0.9-acre outdoor concert space hosting the festival, officially opened on Juneteenth in 2021 as part of the same redevelopment push. The park is home to Genius Loci, a public sculpture installed in December 2023 that honors the history of the Sunset Lounge and the displaced residents of The Styx, a project Hoodline covered when it was unveiled at the park. Nearby, the CRA has built the Styx Promenade using shotgun-style buildings designed to echo early neighborhood architecture while housing local small business startups, giving Black entrepreneurs access to lower-cost retail space.
Together, the festival, the park, the sculpture, and the promenade form a single stretch of the Historic Northwest where the neighborhood's past and its present redevelopment sit side by side. For festivalgoers arriving this Saturday for barbecue and blues, that history is written into the ground beneath the tents.
