This weekend the Winter Park’s Rendezvous Event Center plays host to the 24th annual Blues from the Top Festival — a showcase of top blues and rock musicians organized by the nonprofit Grand County Blues Society.

The festival, June 26-28, marks a “bucket-list” achievement for singer-saxophonist Vanessa Collier — a four-time winner of the Blues Music Award for Horn Player of the Year — making her Blues from the Top debut.

Collier’s “high-energy shows” are “even more challenging at altitude, which I love,” she told The Denver Gazette. She moves interchangeably from singing to saxophone and back again, without pause.

“You only have one breath to get right back in,” she said. “So, there’s a little bit more resistance when you take that breath.”

Collier — whose 2024 album, “Do It My Own Way,” bridges disparate genres with the blues — is part of a diverse 11-act lineup.

The festival kicks off Friday with headliners The Wood Brothers and Marc Broussard.

Saturday’s headliner Kenny Wayne Shepherd follows blues guitar legend Jimmie Vaughan and the Tilt-A-Whirl Band, North Mississippi Allstars, Bywater Call and the Tyron Benoit Band.

Sunday’s grand finale delivers Collier alongside headliner Los Lobos, Blind Boys of Alabama and the blues supergroup Southern Hospitality, featuring Damon Fowler, J.P. Soars and Victor Wainwright.

“I love it, man,” Shepherd told The Denver Gazette. “It’s so beautiful and the audience is so receptive. It’s one of the things that when I see it on the tour schedule, I’m very much looking forward to it.”

Shepherd returns to Winter Park for the third time with a set built around his 2026 release, “Ledbetter Heights: The 30th Anniversary Sessions.” The record reworks the 1995 debut he cut as a teenager in Shreveport, La.

“He’s always a crowd favorite for us. I think one of our biggest attendance days was a Kenny Wayne Shepherd Saturday,” said Grand County Blues Society board member and festival producer Tim Hubbard.

“This is one of the best grassroots festivals in Colorado all summer. It’s designed for people who just want to get out of the city and probably don’t want to be overrun with 10 or 15,000 other people,” Hubbard added, touting the “amazing setting and mountain weather in the summer.”

For Vaughan, another first-timer at Blues from the Top, the mountain setting adds to the draw.

“We love playing at festivals,” he said. “We do all the stuff that makes us feel happy, so we’re loaded for bear so we have a good time.”

While artists like Collier represent a newer generation of blues musicians, Vaughan has spent more than 60 years playing the blues.

“Jimmie is a blues legend, been around forever,” Hubbard said. “Obviously super excited to have him in the lineup.”

Vaughan’s story is forever linked to his younger brother, Stevie Ray Vaughan, who died in a helicopter crash in 1990. The recent documentary “Brothers in Blues” traces the brothers’ musical journey and Vaughan’s own career, which includes cofounding The Fabulous Thunderbirds in 1974 and serving as the band’s lead guitarist until 1989.

“I would put the guitar down and from the beginning say, ‘Stevie, don’t fool with my guitar.’ And so as soon as I would leave or go to do something, you know, he would pick it up,” Vaughan recalled with a laugh. “So, you know, it was typical brothers.”

More than six decades after first learning guitar, Vaughan’s draw to perform live hasn’t diminished. Following Blues from the Top, he will tour with Bob Dylan before returning to Eric Clapton’s annual Crossroads Guitar Festival in September.

“I always have a great time, and I’m just trying to get over it — just like the first time I started playing,” Vaughan said. “I can’t believe it.”

The festival’s multigenerational appeal exemplifies the charitable purpose of the Grand County Blues Society.

“We do blues music education in the schools to teach kids the roots of (American music),” Hubbard said. “A lot of them don’t understand that today’s rock ‘n’ roll and today’s music really originated in the blues.”

The festival embodies that educational mission by showcasing young and up-and-coming artists — in their own bands or pickup groups — on the Check Out the Music side stage during main-stage breaks.

This year, those groups include the youth band Candy Cigarettes, hailing from the Midwest and returning for the fifth time; Garrett James and the Wanderers, part of the International Blues Challenge in Memphis, Tenn.; and kids from the Fort Collins School of Rock on Saturday.

The youth stage is named after the society’s Check Out the Music program, which provides schools with musical instruments and lessons and stocks Grand County libraries with instruments residents can borrow for free.

“Kids can go in and get keyboards and bass guitars and electric guitars and amps and learn to play them for free in the community,” Hubbard said.

Collier shares that passion.

“I love doing the Blues in the Schools kind of stuff, any chance to talk to a younger generation,” Collier said. “Any generation would love blues music, would love the roots of it. It is everything that everybody loves, but they just don’t know the root of it.”

She stressed another level to those programs.

“It’s important not only to go in and to talk about the history of the music or the connection to whatever they’re going through in life at that point, but also to really just reiterate that you are worthy,” Collier added. “You have a purpose here.”

Providing hope is a key objective of Blue Star Connection, a national program outfitting some 120 children’s hospitals and music therapy programs across the country with musical instruments and gear.

Maria Chavez, the society’s president and festival producer, said Blue Star’s mission to “help ease their pain through the sound of music” has been around for 24 years. It was established by the late John Catt, founder of Blues from the Top and a driving force for spreading the genre throughout Colorado.

“Knowing that music is so special to everybody, and it’s using it as a healing tool, John really knew that was so important,” Chavez said.

Shepherd’s contribution extends beyond the stage to a signed guitar headlining this year’s silent auction, one of at least six guitars available.

The auction includes a custom guitar built by luthier Mike Delaney — one of this year’s festival sponsors — for blues guitarist Mike Zito, a past performer at the festival. Zito played the instrument for a time before returning it to Delaney, who is now donating the signed guitar for the auction.

Still, any festival comes down to the performers on stage. For Collier, that means “you play what you feel.” For Shepherd, it means pouring your “heart and soul into your playing.”

“There’s something about that everyone can connect with,” Shepherd said.

Tickets to Blues from the Top can be purchased from the Grand County Blues Society’s website, with all proceeds benefiting their nonprofit programs.

Jimmy Sengenberger is a weekly columnist for The Denver Gazette, host of the “Blues Business” podcast and leader of the Jimmy Junior Blues Band, where he plays harmonica under the moniker Jimmy Junior.