45th Annual Minnesota Bluegrass Festival
Making Changes to Become Much More Than Just a Main Stage Event
Tucked away in the Upper Midwest, just 90 miles from Minneapolis and due west of the massive and beautiful inland sea known as Lake Superior, the small town of Richmond has been the home of the Minnesota Bluegrass Festival for the last 23 years.
The history of the Minnesota Bluegrass Festival, however, goes back to 1980 when the event was created, and even further back to 1975 when the Minnesota Bluegrass and Old-Time Music Association was formed. Once the association began to create its yearly sanctioned events, the Minnesota Bluegrass Festival was held at various venues before finding a long-time home at the El Rancho Mañana Campground and Riding Stable located in the aforementioned Richmond.
Now, with the Minnesota Bluegrass and Old-Time Music Association under the leadership of Executive Director Ross Willits, the Minnesota Bluegrass Festival will operate in a different way than in the past. The goal of this new approach is to try and make the event more of a musician’s village where folks of all ages and skill levels can gather to jam and collaborate with each other while surrounded by instructional workshops, music contests, kid’s activities, dances, as well as a main stage that features the best nationally-touring bluegrass acts.
When the Minnesota Bluegrass Festival takes place on August 7–10, 2025, the headlining bands will include Sister Sadie, The Henhouse Prowlers, the Dry Branch Fire Squad, the very unique New Mexico-based band Lone Piñon and other acts.
With the El Rancho Mañana Campground and Riding Stable capable of hosting up to 5,000 campers, Willits and the Minnesota Bluegrass and Old-Time Music Association team have decided to not sell concert tickets for the main stage shows specifically. Instead, the shows will be included in the camping and parking fees.
In other words, the parking fee will cover everyone who is in each vehicle, therefore if some of the visitors want to spend their day exploring and participating in the many events that will take place throughout the festival grounds, they can do so while others can focus on the main stage area if they wish.
As for the festival schedule, to go along with the 30 hours of performances booked for the main stage, the events will include the Family Fun Fair, featuring games, prizes, face painting and pudding pie eating contests, and a Dance Tent featuring clogging/flat foot dancing, country two-step and Cajun two-step dancing and community square dancing.
Other events include two workshop tents offering instruction on playing bluegrass and old-time style fiddle, bluegrass and old-time style banjo, as well as guitar, mandolin and bass classes. And with room for 5,000 campers, whether you play bluegrass, old-time, Cajun, swing, old school country or more, or all of the above, the musician’s village will be ready for collaboration, fellowship and fun.
Ross Willits has been the Executive Director of the Minnesota Bluegrass and Old-Time Music Association for almost two years, yet his journey into the world of bluegrass music began about 40 years ago. “In 1980, we moved to Milwaukee when I was in high school,” said Willits. “I did not know anybody at this school so I fell in with a ‘bad crowd’ of banjo pickers and other players. I fell in love with the music and during the summer break between my sophomore and junior years, I picked up a guitar and began to learn how to play it. The banjo picker that I met was a year younger than me and yet he was just insanely good. So, we sat around and played music in his basement for about six hours every day. We learned all of the music that we liked by The Dillards, the music found on the Will The Circle Be Unbroken album by the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band and the songs from the soundtrack from the movie Deliverance, and all of that music from the 1970s. Then, we actually formed a band and toured all around Wisconsin until we graduated from high school. The name of the band was Foxfire.”
After that period of his life, Willits sat his guitar aside and went to college and eventually to graduate school where he earned a Ph.D. in Theater History at the University of Minnesota. After the turn of the century, Willits was running a children’s theater company in St. Paul and that is when he ran into an old friend who played the banjo, who was a different friend than his first band mate.
“He said to me, ‘I’m playing in this band and we need a bass player,” said Willits. “He knew that I played bluegrass when I was younger, so when he asked me if I was interested, I said, ‘Sure, but I don’t play the bass.’ He said, ‘That’s OK. I have one that you can borrow.’ By the winter of 2003, I was playing bluegrass music in a band again called The Blue Drifters. Then, three of split off to form the Whistle Pig String Band and that group lasted for about six or seven years. We even made a couple of self-produced CDs and sold them all, which was cool, and so it was a lot of fun. After that, I became a member of the Platte Valley Boys, which was a perennial Minnesota bluegrass band that I had the honor to play bass with until they decided to retire.”
Because of his participation in the bluegrass scene in his home state, Willits was connected with the Minnesota Bluegrass and Old-Time Music Association from 2003 on. “It is interesting here because there are a lot of people that migrated to Minnesota from places like the Appalachian region and the South and they brought their music with them,” said Willits. “And, there are great traditions of string music here that have roots in Scandinavia and Ireland places like that, and as humans tend to do, all of those traditions have come together and that makes the bluegrass and old-time music communities here very vibrant. Our association is 50 years old now and we have about 800 members and 67 member bands, so we have truly an impressive roots music community up here in the Upper Midwest. Overall, we produce three different festivals every year, including the Minnesota Bluegrass Festival in August, the Minnesota Bluegrass Winter Weekend in February, where over 20 Association member bands perform along with a nationally-touring bluegrass and old-time music headliners, and the third event is the Fall Jam in early November.”
With these new changes to the festival admission schedule, Willits and his team hope to bring more people out to the Minnesota Bluegrass Festival to enjoy its full slate of diverse activities. “This is an experiment that we are trying this year,” said Willits. “We have never done it this way before. In the past, we would always charge admission into the festival with your camping included in the ticket price, or you would pay for a day rate and park for free. What we realized is that people who are coming in from our region for just the day, they want a great day out of fun, and yet they may not know who the headlining bands are or the music they play. They may not be coming out because of the concerts on the main stage, but instead they want to participate in everything else we have going on, and so making them pay the main stage ticket price might discourage them.”
This ‘musician’s village’ approach will hopefully add to the overall positive atmosphere at this unique event. “So, we will say to folks, ‘We are charging $25 or so to park, so get as many people in the car as you can fit and come on out and have fun at the family stage or participate in the dancing we have going on all day and everything else,’” said Willits. “And, just like at the Clifftop Festival in West Virginia and the Winfield Festival in Kansas, many folks will just want to hang out in the campgrounds the whole time and pick some music and have a great time and stay there, so we decided to not penalize them for that by making them pay for concerts that they may not go to see. So, we now just ask them to pay for their camping spot and they’re good. They will be getting the festival experience that they want to have while paying for the space that they are occupying. And, we still get to bring in our great lineup of national performers.”
To mix things up, the Minnesota Bluegrass Festival also hosts the Island Of Misfit Toys Jam during the daylight hours. “There are a number of people that love bluegrass and old-time music that do not play the traditional bluegrass and old-time instruments, so this is the jam that they can participate in with whatever acoustic instrument they may want to bring,” said Willits. “We have a sax player that comes to the festival who is incredible when it comes to playing fiddle tunes. So, he can jam away with others who love this music but may play a different than usual instrument. We also host a kid’s talent show every day and it is fantastic as the winner gets to perform on the main stage at the start of the evening’s shows. Ari Silver, for instance, who now plays the mandolin for Dave Adkins and his Mountain Soul band, he grew up playing on the family stage and learning music as a kid at our festival. The great Becky Buller is a long-time friend of this festival as well, and she is one of five or six that have gone on to study at the East Tennessee State University Bluegrass, Old-Time and Roots Music Program.”
One last highlight of the Minnesota Bluegrass Festival is the Late Night Jam. “At the campground, there is a Ranch House Bar and Store there that has a little stage in the corner,” said Willits. “That stage becomes the center of our Open Mic Night and people sign up in advance to play and it is really fun. People that play in other bands get thrown together in new ways and then they go up there and play for their allotted 25 minutes. And, since it is happening in the bar, everybody is having a good time and it gets nice and rowdy.”
For those wanting to come to the festival and have a complete vacation experience, Minnesota is, after all, known as The Land of 10,000 Lakes, so fishing and boating is plentiful. And, the huge and majestic inland sea known as Lake Superior is within a day’s drive as well. Overall, while running a festival is never easy work, Willits and his team consider it a labor of love. “We are fortunate to have dozens and dozens of wonderful festival volunteers who help to make the work easy for us,” said Willits. “People come to this festival from all over the country and from Canada as well. They load up their RVs, trucks and cars and come in from everywhere and we gladly welcome them in.”
As a special side note to this article, and to showcase the heart of the average Minnesota bluegrass and old-time music fan, I let Willis know that I live in Avery County at the base of grandfather Mountain, which was in the middle of the 100-mile-wide bomb that went off in Western North Carolina, East Tennessee and Southwest Virginia known as Hurricane Helene, which invaded the region in late September of 2024. It is then that Willits tells me of the Minnesota Bluegrass and Old-Time Music Association’s response to the disaster. “When Hurricane Helene hit your area, my organization said, ‘We are all of the way up here in the Midwest, yet that area is in many ways the spiritual home of bluegrass and old-time music, and it got hit hard,’” said Willits. “So, at our Fall Jam we asked folks to make the usual donation to the Association and we let them know that we would donate half of the proceeds to an organization called Beloved Asheville. I have a cousin that lives there in Asheville and we have a Board Member Brett Day that grew up in Boone. And, I just want to say that the members of our Association really stepped up for the cause in an amazing way.”
Richmond, MN, is 1,138 miles and a 17-hour drive from Asheville, North Carolina, and yet it is our shared humanity and a shared love of American roots music that made the above happen, and we here in the hard-hit region appreciate it more than words.
For more information, please go to https://minnesotabluegrass.org/MinnesotaBluegrassFestival.
