Our 26 foot travel trailer is parked in
a large campground designed and built to host bluegrass festivals in
north Florida. The Palatka Bluegrass Festival will begin on Thursday
and run for three days with a huge bluegrass lineup. The weather
forecast calls for low temperatures of 30 tonight and 24 tomorrow as
the faithful assemble for what promises to be a chilly and exciting
festival beginning Thursday. Meanwhile, two seminal events coming
during the next week signal what suggests, even promises, a change
in the way bluegrass reaches its fans and creates new ones. The
advent of the online bluegrass festival is upon us.
The first recognized multi-day
bluegrass festival was held over Labor Day weekend of 1965 by
Carleton Haney at Fincastle, VA, included Bill Monroe, the Stanley
Brothers, Jimmy Martin, the Osborne Brothers, Red Smiley, Don Reno
and more...a bluegrass fan's dream first generation lineup. It was
attended by an interesting mixture of country folk, hippies, early
bluegrass adopters, and local people and was successful enough to
spawn fifty years of outdoor bluegrass festivals, as well as a
tradition of round the clock jammming.
This week, taking advantage of the
advent of large screen, smart high definition television accompanied
by fine sound systems, two events promise to change the landscape of
the bluegrass festival. From February 20 – 28, Concert Window will
be carrying the Bluegrass
Roundup including
a range of bands from a variety of settings that is truly
an amazing mix which must be seen to be believed. Shows will be
broadcast in Concert Windows' idiosyncratic way from every sort of
venue to include home studios, living rooms, and concert halls. Each
presentation is a separate event. Fans signing in may decide how much
each individual show is worth to them and pay accordingly, although Concert Window doesn't go to any effort to explain this system to its customers.
Meanwhile,
the upcoming Wintergrass Festival,
held each February in Bellevue, Washington, has announced that it
will be streaming live from a dedicated stage on both Friday and
Saturday nights with a selection of special bands, a three camera
shoot, and special attention to both sound and lighting, a rarity for
this sort of online presentation. As of this writing, participating
bands have not been named.
Missing
from any televised festival experience would be the sense of
community generated at a festival, wall-to-wall jamming, and your
neighbor jabbering while you're trying to listen. Added value would
include great seats, (hopefully) superb sound depending on your home
system, as well as a broad range of bands featuring a variety of
styles. It's easy to imagine much more focused presentations catering
to narrower or broader tastes. Outreach to a wide audience that would
never consider attending a conventional festival or even a concert in
their home town emerges as a real possibility. I don't see a downside
to this approach, while its potential at nearly the dawn of a new
video age is limitless.
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