Becky’s Bash for
Education is back for our annual fall event in Tampa, FL raising money for the
Becky Walker Scholarship for Outstanding Achievement.
The event brings
together the community for a night of live music plus food & beverages from
a number of notable restaurants and vendors.
For our third year, we
are hoping to continue to grow even larger with more attendees and provide
additional scholarships to more students in need. Please join us!
This year’s Becky’s Bash
headliner is Neal Francis, with openers George Pennington and Lou’s Lips!
If you’re interested in being a Corporate Sponsor, CLICK HERE
To learn more about our Foundation, CLICK HERE
Neal Francis:
Neal Francis’ sophomore
album ‘In Plain Sight’ offers up a body of work both enchanting and painfully
self-aware, recorded entirely on tape with his bandmates. Mixed by Grammy
Award-winner Dave Fridmann (Spoon, Tame Impala, Flaming Lips), the album
spotlights Francis’s refined yet free-spirited performance on piano, an
instrument he took up at the age of four. The album came to life over the
course of a tumultuous year spent living in a possibly haunted church in
Chicago. The result: a portrait of profound upheaval and weary resilience, presented
in a kaleidoscopic sound that’s endlessly absorbing. ‘In Plain Sight’
ultimately reveals the possibility of redemption and transformation even as
your world falls apart. “When I started the process of writing these
songs, I was so emotionally out-of-sorts and really kind of hopeless that I’d
be able to come up with anything,” says Francis. “But then I sat down and
started working, and embraced whatever inspiration came my way. Sometimes it
felt like beating my head against a wall, but I tried to trust that it would
lead somewhere. The whole thing was like a weird dream—this very strange time
of terrible, wonderful isolation.”
George Pennington:
George
got his first guitar at about ten years old, and it wasn’t long before he was
summoned into a lifelong love affair with the mercurial dark magic that is the
blues guitar. Artists such as Stevie Ray Vaughan and Jimi Hendrix were two
early influences who inspired George to delve deeper into both the classic rock
and traditional blues lexicons. As a young teen, George would go to blues jams
at local bars with his dad and hang in the far corner with his Strat until it
was time to sit-in. As George developed as a musician, he became more
interested in incorporating the musical vocabulary and style of other genres of
music into his own personal musicianship and began studying music theory,
singing in choirs, acting in both straight plays and musical theatre
productions, and began performing his original music with his bandmates around
Tampa Bay.
George has performed at
many music festivals and iconic music venues around the United States such as
Gasparilla Music Festival, Suwannee Hulaween, Brainquility Music and Arts
Festival, Rockwood Music Hall in New York City, and the legendary Whisky A Go
Go in Los Angeles. George has released two albums, “Daydream
Sequence” and “GPIII”. The former is on Spotify.
Lou’s Lips:
Lou’s Lips is a former
New York City music collective known for their fusion of rock, soul and blues.
The band consists of Pierce Kline, Tim Cotilla, Austin Johansen, Cole
DeThomasis and Thompson Brandes—Becky’s oldest son. Lou’s Lips put on
incredible performances at the Bash in 2021 and 2022 and can still be caught
performing at NYC venues like Bitter End, Piano’s, Arlene’s Grocery and The
Delancey.
*The Becky Walker
Scholarship Foundation was founded in memory of Becky Walker - our mother,
wife, sister, daughter and friend - who passed away from Pancreatic Cancer in
February of 2019. We are a non-profit 501C3* organization providing
scholarships to graduating seniors at Title 1 schools in Tampa, FL. Becky was
the science department head at one of our participating Schools, Spoto High
School.
