The festival was founded in 1990 by Dan Doeppel and Kevin Oxford, who staged it as a four-day blues weekend at the Arts Factory in Byron Bay. It grew quickly and restlessly, moving between venues in and around the town as the crowds outgrew each one. Peter Noble joined Oxford for the 1994 event and would become the festival's driving force; he eventually bought out his partners and now owns Bluesfest outright. In 2010 the event finally found a permanent home, settling on the 120-hectare Tyagarah Tea Tree Farm about 11 kilometres north of Byron Bay. Today it runs five days, Thursday to Monday, the Easter long weekend reliably given over to blues and roots in the subtropical heat.

Bluesfest's reputation rests on a lineup history that reads like a hall of fame. Across its decades the festival has hosted Bob Dylan, B.B. King, Santana, Robert Plant, Paul Simon, Patti Smith, Tom Jones, Lionel Richie, Erykah Badu and Mary J. Blige, alongside roots heroes such as Mavis Staples, Buddy Guy, Taj Mahal, Trombone Shorty and the Tedeschi Trucks Band. Home-grown acts share the stages, from the John Butler Trio to Tash Sultana to Kasey Chambers. The crowd is as eclectic as the bill - locals beside international visitors, all ages mixing freely - and the relaxed Byron atmosphere has long made the festival a magnet for famous faces, with the likes of Matt Damon, Jason Momoa and Chris Hemsworth spotted among the throng.

In 2014 Bluesfest introduced Boomerang, a festival within the festival devoted to Indigenous Australian performance, art and culture. It is more than a stage of music. Boomerang has gathered First Nations dancers, storytellers and artists alongside healing workshops, weaving sessions and gallery talks, giving the world's oldest living cultures a prominent place in one of the country's biggest contemporary music events. Set on Bundjalung country, the addition reflects a deliberate effort to make space for Aboriginal voices not as a token gesture but as a celebrated, recurring part of the program - an acknowledgement that the music carried to this coast from across the world is being played on land with the deepest cultural story of all.

For three decades Bluesfest had never missed a beat - and then came the pandemic. The 2020 event was cancelled outright, the first time in the festival's history. The 2021 festival was halted even more painfully: a public health order shut it down a single day before it was due to begin, after a COVID case was detected in Byron Bay, leaving a half-sized, fully seated, all-Australian program stranded at the gate. Industry figures estimated the sudden cancellation cost around ten million dollars, and one local distiller put the festival's annual value to the area at a hundred million. Bluesfest returned in 2022, drawing roughly 100,000 people back to Tyagarah - proof of how deeply the Easter ritual was woven into the region's life and economy.

Few festivals anywhere have been so consistently decorated. Bluesfest has won gold at the NSW Tourism Awards so many times it entered the state's tourism Hall of Fame, claimed multiple Helpmann Awards for Best Contemporary Music Festival, and earned a string of nominations as International Festival of the Year at the United States Pollstar Awards. Director Peter Noble received a Medal of the Order of Australia in 2016 for his service to live music, tourism and the community. The accolades confirmed what the crowds already knew. On a tea-tree farm near Byron Bay, every Easter for three and a half decades, a festival that started small had become one of the great gatherings in the contemporary music world. In 2026, rising production costs and softening ticket demand brought Bluesfest to an end: the 2026 event was cancelled three weeks before it was due to begin, and the festival company entered liquidation. Its run of nearly four decades left an indelible mark on Australian live music.