Billy Strings and Tommy Emmanuel at Grey Fox 2019 – photo © Tara Linhardt
Saturday at the Grey Fox Bluegrass Festival was, of course, full of many activities with music all over the park. It was a hot day with equally hot tunes and line ups. Folks were shopping at the vendors, and buying raffle tickets, as well as listening to or pickin’ music. The raffles at Grey Fox go to benefit the very popular Kids Academy as well as supporting the Scholarships toward college that they award every year. The scholarships are known as the Bill Vernon Memorial Scholarships. This year’s recipients were Lucy Singleton and Andrew Vogts. Here is Andrew jammin’ with last year’s scholarship recipient Victor Furtado. The first tune was written by Victor and the second tune by Andrew.
A fun surprise for those of us who like to watch the young kids as they appear at the festivals in the campground, and eventually make their way onto stages, was getting to see young Sam Acus. He got to sit in with Man About a Horse on his 12th birthday at Grey Fox on the High Meadow Stage.
Billy Strings continued tirelessly sitting in with almost every band at the festival in his position as Grey Fox’s 2019 Artist in residence, sounding great on stage after stage.
Leftover Salmon gets bonus points in my book for showing up and dressing the stage for their acoustic style afternoon set with homey furniture and artwork, and stuffed animals. The audience started giving pondering and curious glances to the stage as the crew started placing the photos up of people like Bill Monroe, and setting up the lamps and lamp shades and so forth. Their music of course was stellar as always as well. So they both looked and sounded good. Hard to get better than that.
In terms of unplanned surprises… There was a sudden thunder storm just after Tommy Emmanuel melted the faces of the crowds mesmerized by his playing, and just before I’m With Her was to start. After a brief delay for a torrential downpour, I’m With Her (Sara Watkins, Sarah Jarosz, and Aoife O’Donovan) took the stage with a one mic system saving the time for setting up all the various mics and acoutrements they had planned to do. The set was so beautiful just on that one mic, and was a real treat.
Enough of my descriptions of the day. You can check out some of the sights and sounds for yourself below.
Here is a snippet from Sierra Hull and Eddie Barbash jamming Gold Rush…
… and Tommy Emmanuel with Artist in Residence Billy Strings.
