STRING FEVER
Festival features bluegrass, old-time and New Mexico music
The love of bluegrass and oldtime music combined with the appreciation of New Mexico music and Mexican music is all part of the Santa Fe Traditional Music Festival.
The event, which runs tonight through Sunday at Camp Stoney, just outside Santa Fe, features workshops and performances from about 25 bands. Genres include bluegrass, old-time, Americana, honky-tonk, Balkan singing, mariachi, New Mexico music and a range of folk subgenres, including eclectic, cosmic, traditional and world.
“We have four venues,” said Ron Hale, chairman of the festival planning group. “We’re doing it at Camp Stoney, which is a church-related camp, 10 miles outside of Santa Fe. It’s on the edge of the national forest, and it’s a beautiful location, and they have several buildings that we’ll be
using. There’s the main stage that will have the main performances, actually two stages that will have performances and then there’s a couple of others that will have primarily workshops.”
The event opens tonight with Mariachi Buenaventura, Bluegrass Collective with Jean-Luc Leroux and the Fast Peso String Band. Saturday is filled with a number of performances beginning at 10 a.m. with the ATC String Band and wrapping up with Albuquerque’s bluegrass band, Squash Blossom Boys, at 9 p.m. on the Paige Stage and starting at 10:30 a.m. with East Mountains singersongwriters, Blue Moon, and ending at 4:30 p.m. with Albuquerque’s Americana folk band, The Kipsies, on the Barn Stage. The Gazebo will feature a variety of workshops from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. including banjo, dulcimer jam, ukulele, guitar and mandolin.
Sunday wraps up the event with gospel performances.
The Santa Fe Traditional Music Festival is an outgrowth of a previous festival called the Santa Fe Banjo and Fiddle Contest, which was started 43 years ago. The event was taken over by Southwest Pickers and renamed the Santa Fe Bluegrass and Old Time Music Festival. Hale and a group banded together to present a festival again.