The Venue
The Return of the Joe Val Bluegrass Festival
Twenty years after the Joe Val Bluegrass Festival won the award for the International Bluegrass Music Association’s (IBMA) Event of the Year in 2006, the festival is returning to the Boston area in 2026 after having been on hiatus since the COVID pandemic. This year, the Boston Bluegrass Union’s (BBU) flagship event is not only…
2026 Festival Guide
United states Alabama Bluegrass at the Station APRIL 23-25, 2026 University Station Rv Resort 3076 Al Highway 14 W, Auburn, Alabama 36832 570-721-2760 bluegrassatthestation.com Arkansas Spring Mountain View Bluegrass Festival March 12-14, 2026 1032 Park Avenue, Mountain View, AR 72560 501-350-9676 mountainviewbluegrass.com Fall Mountain View Bluegrass Festival November 12-14, 2026 1032 Park Avenue, Mountain View, AR 72560 501-350-9676 mountainviewbluegrass.com…
Billy Strings at the IMBA Conference 2025
Introducing Billy Strings as the keynote speaker for the IBMA World of Bluegrass, Executive Director Ken White called him a “generational talent” and acknowledged the kind of “watershed moment” that comes along every twenty years or so, putting “bluegrass music in the center of popular culture.” Along with such phenomena as Will the Circle Be…
A Love Letter to Raleigh Wide Open
There is a sound that belongs to Raleigh each fall. It rises from downtown streets and echoes between brick buildings. It carries the bright ring of mandolins, the warmth of fiddles, and the rhythm of a hundred tapping feet. It is the sound of bluegrass, and it is the sound of Raleigh Wide Open. Every…
Backbone Bluegrass
Iowa’s Oldest and Largest Bluegrass Festival In Northeast Iowa, around 4 miles south of a small town called Strawberry Point (home of the World’s Largest Strawberry) and a few miles north of Backbone State Park, lies a picturesque 20-acre wooded site. During the last full weekend of July, this beautiful location is full of campers…
The Earl Scruggs Music Festival
IBMA’s 2025 Event of the Year Winners Written By Dale and Darcy Cahill Being lifelong lovers of bluegrass and thirty-year veterans of attending bluegrass festivals in New England: Grey Fox, Thomas Point, Podunk, and many others, we have never attended a festival in the southern states. When we saw the Earl Scruggs Music Festival lineup…