Ben Prestage

Ben Prestage's own brand of Deep South Swamp Music has been featured at some of the world's premier Blues, Jazz, Americana, and Folk festivals. Armed with self-crafted instruments made from roasting pans, alligator heads, and even a closet door Prestage creates a unique sound that has earned him numerous awards and nominations including:

Lyon/Pitchford Award for "Best Diddley-Bow Player"

"Most Unique Performer Award" at Songwriters' Showcase of America

Blues Music Award nominee "Best Instrumentalist"

Independent Music Award nominee 

2nd, 3rd, 4th place at International Blues Challenge

Growing up in rural Florida near the headwaters of the Everglades in gator and panther territory helped shape Prestage's spanish-moss-covered sound, but he had music in his blood before birth.

Ben's maternal great-grandmother was the leader of an all-girls band (at a time  when that was unheard-of) that toured the popular vaudeville circuit and performed with one of the most famous and highest paid stars of the 1920's- Al Jolson. Her daughter was an accomplished boogie-woogie piano player.

On his father's side, Ben's grandfather played Blues and Country guitar in a Mississippi string band, when he wasn't sharecropping cotton and sweet potatoes or cutting timber.

Prestage cut his teeth performing in Florida fish camps, biker bars and tourist traps. After a stint as busker/street performer on historic Beale Street in Memphis, TN Ben emerged as one of world's top one-man-bands. After a releasing a dozen albums, and touring across the US and more than a dozen countries, Ben Prestage continues to create music that "soars like a swamp hawk and wallows like an old bull gator."