What’s dominating your Spotify lately? I’ve been queuing up the Annapolis Baygrass playlist multiple times this week – and it does not disappoint.
Bluegrass today sounds very different. Depending on the band or even the song, you can hear folk, acoustic rock, gospel, country, funk, and soul elements. And the musicians producing these sounds are increasingly nothing like the genre’s early pioneers of white Appalachian families of Irish and Scottish ancestry.
I lived in Appalachia for 12 years, and bluegrass grew on me. I was eagerly anticipating the inaugural Annapolis Baygrass Festival in 2022. Imagine my disappointment when the festival was canceled just hours before the bands were set to take the stage due to an impending hurricane. But my dismay was nothing compared to co-founder and CEO Ron Peremel’s feelings that week.
“It was the most gut-wrenching and emotionally difficult thing to go through,” says Peremel. It had taken much of the year to plan the festival, and organizers had poured a part of themselves into organizing it. But the deadly Category 5 Hurricane Ian didn’t care.
“We were ready to go,” Peremel recalls. “We were freaking out, trying to find a way to save the festival. But in the end, we said, you know, ‘we’ve got to pull this, we will never recover if something goes wrong. Once we heard that Oceans Calling had canceled, we knew it was the right decision.”
Peremel had teamed up with seasoned festival promoter John Way to tackle the monumental task of launching a new outdoor festival at Sandy Point State Park.
Although the festival didn’t happen, organizers threw together a “hurricane party” at Pherm Brewing within five hours, serving the food chefs had already prepared and shucking oysters in a back room. “People ate like kings and queens that day,” says Peremel. “We convinced five bands to perform at the brewery and brought along all our nonprofit partners. All the love and emotion that had been building was unleashed in that room, and it was magical.”
Peremel had witnessed that the hard work, done for a virtuous purpose, meant that this very wet makeshift dry-run of the festival could rise again and be bigger and better.
“We are 100% ready for this year,” he says. “It’s been twice as much work, but we wanted to go bigger and better, and all the little loose ends from the first year? We have them solved… and we can really make this a national festival.”
Annapolis Baygrass returns this year (Sept. 30 and Oct. 1) to bring music, conservation, food, kid activities, and a family-friendly vibe to the park’s beachfront.
Peremel is a festival fanatic, discovering a love for bluegrass during Colorado’s annual Telluride festival. A Maryland native, he dreamed up a way to combine his passion for music with his love for the Chesapeake Bay.
“Our motto is ‘every jam saves the Bay,’ and we will have lots of conservation groups here with activities, games and demonstrations,” says Peremel. (Read more here.)
As a dad, Peremel knows that having a good time with the whole family in tow can be challenging. This festival aims to be a good time for all ages.
“We will have a whole fenced-in area for our kids zone, so parents can know their kids are playing in a safe and secure area,” he adds.
The festival plans on providing a wide range of activities for children—beach games, yard games, mini-golf, sand tables, water tables, crafts, and workshops. Severna Park’s bluegrass musician and Garrett Park School of Music teacher Sarah Larsen will host a fiddle workshop for kids. Larsen is also a recent addition to Geraldine, who will serve as the festival’s house band (listen to the song they wrote for the festival with Baltimore’s Cris Jacobs here).
The lineup is impressive, with prominent international stars such as Keller Williams performing with Larry and Jenny Keel, Railroad Earth, Melvin Seals & JGB (the Jerry Garcia Band), Fruition, Lindsay Lou, Cabinet, and a grab bag of regional favorites such as Cris Jacobs, the High and Wides, the Dirty Grass Players and the all-female trio of Wicked Sycamore.
Two members of Wicked Sycamore are Marylanders. Guitarist Juliette Bell grew up in Howard County and proudly calls herself a Terp, and cellist Madeline Waters is from Damascus. Lainie Gray, who plays mandolin, hails from upstate New York.
The group won the 2019 Charm City Bluegrass Band competition and has been part of the regional music scene for years. If you didn’t consider this side of Maryland an important part of the bluegrass circuit, think again.
“The scene for local artists is so supportive—that can be any style of music. People want to support live music and these festivals help keep the scene active and have been excellent door openers for us,” says Bell. “Baltimore in particular, the thing our band has found, is that the audience—even if it’s smaller than others—they are just so supportive and they are engaged. It’s that way across the state. A lot of our songs are about nature, the mountains, the beach. Our state is so small but is it so packed with every type of landscape, and that breeds its own type of art scene.”
The women also echo how welcoming the scene is. “We love going to shows and seeing like little kids busking or playing fiddles. It’s such a positive atmosphere,” adds Bell.
“We play a lot of all-ages shows and events, which makes sense. Bluegrass came from family porches and today’s bluegrass still has that spark. It lights kids up to either want to play it or just have music in their lives,” says Waters.
“I’m a dad of little ones and big ones and if you can go to a festival that is fun for you and your kids—that’s what turned us on to this scene,” says Peremel. “We would bring our kids to Telluride and they would have so much fun dancing and playing in the kids area and just enjoying the outdoors. It turned them on to music really early. That kind of festival is very special and that’s what I’m trying to create here.”
Tickets on sale now at https://www.baygrassfestival.com/.
By Kathy Knotts
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