In 1956, Horst Lippmann and Fritz Rau, two passionate jazz and blues fans, merged their love of music and founded Lippmann + Rau, a concert promotional agency that would ultimately become the largest in Europe. Lippmann, who as a teenager in 1941 under the Nazi regime helped form the illegal Frankfurter Hot Club (a jazz group) in the back of his parents’ restaurant, and had organized his first official jazz concert in Frankfurt in 1949, had been working with the designer Günther Kieser since 1952. By tapping into their already robust network within the jazz community, Lippmann + Rau expanded their promotional interests and orchestrated the first American Folk Blues Festival, a large musical event featuring some of the biggest stars in the Blues and Folk scenes abroad. These concerts toured Europe, introducing audiences to performers who had never played outside the United States and creating a robust following for these particularly American genres. Lippmann + Rau toured this festival annually from 1962 until 1972, and then again from 1980 to 1985. As they offered some of the only opportunities for Europeans to hear this type of music live, many British and European musicians who went on to have illustrious careers, including Mick Jagger, Eric Clapton, Keith Richards, and Jimmy Page, have described these festivals as having a significant influence on their work. Kieser (often with Hans Michel) created the posters, programs, stage sets, and occasionally the album-cover art for each edition of the American Folk Blues Festival. All of the posters in the series feature an acoustic guitar decorated with or enhanced by various symbols of American culture. Here, the facade of a Victorian porch is obscured by a target reminiscent of a Jasper Johns painting. Remnants of torn flyers reveal the words “Chicago,” “ragtime,” “blues,” and “war”—possibly a reference to the ongoing conflict in Vietnam. The only figurative images in the design are two vintage photographs of Black Americans, one posing for a studio portrait and the other playing a banjo.