It's summer festival time, which means there are many opportunities for folks to get out and enjoy mostly free music and festivities in our city and neighboring towns and townships (there's a difference, right?).

Starting Friday is the free Downtown Canton Blues Festival, which began seven years ago as an all-day blues jam but has morphed into two days of local and national blues acts. Organizers boast that more than 15,000 people have found their way to Canton to enjoy the music and all the other amenities of downtown.

As is usually the case with these sorts of chamber of commerce-sponsored events, one of the points is to get folks from surrounding areas into downtown (place name of small city looking for cash infusion and attention here). This year's blues fest has a couple of good draws for folks who like their blues electric and with a healthy dose of RR&B, i.e. rock, rhythm and blues.

The main stage will be at Market Avenue between Third and Fourth streets. The event begins at 11:30 a.m. Friday with area blues harp stalwart the Colin Dussault Blues Project, who released an album called Colinized last year. Dussault knows his way around 12-bar blues but also incorporates plenty of R&B and blues-rock into the mix.

Next, at 4:30 p.m., the festival goes back to its roots with the Northeast Ohio Blues Jam that will feature whoever feels like showing up and jamming. Expect some friendly old-school head-cutting and plenty of blues standards such as Stormy Monday and pretty much anything associated with Muddy Waters.

A couple of hours later at 6:30 p.m., after you've walked around and visited the many shops and/or restaurants and parted with a bit of your discretionary income (which the Canton Regional Chamber of Commerce fully appreciates), you can head back to the stage and catch Cincinnati guitarist/singer Kelly Richey who has been described as ''Stevie Ray Vaughan trapped in a woman's body with Janis Joplin screaming to get out.''

That's quite a bit of hyperbole. I don't hear the Janis in Richey's mostly smooth vocals, but the ghost of SRV is definitely in her thick tone and chunky/funky blues-rock guitar licks in tunes such as I Want You from her most recent release, Carry the Light. Plus, her band is a power trio, so there should be plenty of room in her sturdy songs for her to stretch out and perhaps inspire some other young Ohio girls to pick up and learn to play a guitar for reasons other than setting their diary entries to music . . . not that there's anything wrong with that.

Headlining Friday night's festivities at 8:30 is relatively young blues-rock guitarist Joe Bonamassa, who received the following endorsement from none other than the Motor City Madman himself, Ted Nugent: ''This kid deserves to be in the same class with Stevie Ray [expletive] Vaughan and Jimi Hendrix and Jeff Beck.''

If that erudite assessment doesn't impress you, Bonamassa was featured on the cover of the April 2008 edition of Guitarist magazine and dubbed ''the new king of the blues.'' For the second year in a row the readers of Guitar Player Magazine named him best blues guitarist.

The 31-year-old Californian sure can play. In his solos, longtime blues fans will hear traces of facile blues rockers such as Eric Clapton and Vaughan as well as technically impressive guitar shredders such as Danny Gatton and Eric Johnson. He also does a pretty mean version of Led Zeppelin's Tea for One.

On his most recent studio album, Sloe Gin, he shows off more of his acoustic skills and less of the fleet-fingered flash.

On Saturday, the music continues at 1 p.m. with Blues in the Schools followed at 2:30 p.m. by Soul Satyr, an eight-piece horn-augmented blues rock band from Columbus that has a recent CD called No Slackin available online at http://cdbaby.com.

Anyone looking for authentic blues vocals and Sonny Boy Williamson II-inspired harp playing will want to be near at 4:30 p.m. when Cleveland harmonica player Wallace Coleman takes the stage. Coleman was a sideman of Robert Lockwood Jr. for more than a decade and has recorded several solo albums on his own, including his most recent, Repossession Blues, a duet with U.K. blues guitarist Dave Thomas.

Northeast Ohio band Jeff Poulos Blues Revue will perform at 6:30 p.m. to warm up the crowd for the evening's headliner and festival closer, the Fabulous Thunderbirds, at 8:30 p.m.

The Thunderbirds have been around for 30 years but are known by most folks for their 1980s hits Tuff Enuff and Wrap It Up back when Jimmy Vaughan was still in the band. Singer Kim Wilson is the only original member left and the band hasn't released an album since 1993's Painted On, but that won't really matter when the music starts.

Equal justice? Nope

Quickly, is anyone surprised that a world-famous R&B star, who was charged with 14 counts of child pornography, was acquitted — despite videotaped evidence showing someone who looked just like the star with an alleged underage girl?

Yeah, me neither.

When questioned afterward, some of the jurors said they believed that the R&B star, whose name I won't bother to mention because I think he is reprehensible, was the man in the video. Having seen the video (and let me be clear I do not own it or know where you can get a copy of it) I believe the star got away with a crime. Jurors said they simply couldn't convict him without the testimony of his allegedly underage sex partner who (naturally) swears it wasn't her.

Would you be surprised if the allegedly underage participant (now in her early 20s) was living somewhere quite comfortably and quietly with a magically inflating savings account?

Yeah, me neither.

It's interesting that in England even famous folk can be shamed, questioned and potentially prosecuted by police for being filmed doing a couple lines of coke at a table from a crappy camera phone 20 feet away. But here in the United States, apparently a famous person can set a camera up in his mansion and film himself performing a sex act with an alleged child. And even if that tape finds its way to the authorities, it could just become a major inconvenience rather than a career death knell or sure-fire prison term.

With the help of a team of trial-delaying lawyers, a reluctant and invisible witness and wild theories about CGI trickery to work the ''reasonable doubt'' angle, you can go free thanking Jesus on your way out the door. Now he's free and clear to walk back into the arms, ears and pocketbooks of his adoring fan base who, even if he had been convicted, would have been happy to shift the blame to the child (because you know these young girls today are so ''fast''). Some will likely even fool themselves into believing the outcome of the trial is some sort of victory for black people in America a la the early days after the O.J. trial.

Uh-uh. The only victory here is for the rich and/or famous who have been reassured that though theoretically the same laws and rules apply to us all, if one can afford it, those rules and laws can be massaged and manipulated into a favorable outcome.