Over the western border of Arizona, just across the Colorado River, lies the town of Blythe, California. Blythe hosts a yearly bluegrass festival which we have attended four times now. Last year was cancelled due to the crummy Covid thing.
And so we’re back for this year’s festival, keeping ourselves socially distant and pretty much strictly outdoors. Sure hope we avoided the Omicron variant – so far so good.
The festival always presents a nice mix of acoustic bands from virtually all over the map! Montana Standard from (you guessed it) Montana, Cold Creek from Utah, The Gibson Brothers from Upstate New York, and the Sonoran Dogs from Tucson, Arizona (among others).
We captured a few great moments although we didn’t get all the bands. Here’s a short video of various snippets from the “concert portion” of our experience. Apologies on the amateur camera work!
What blew our minds was the realization that we hadn’t seen any live music on a stage since this nightmare pandemic began! It was truly a spiritually uplifting feeling to witness this phenomenon that we once so easily took for granted.
Because of our fascination watching all this incredible music on stage, we found it difficult to drag ourselves away for the “parking lot pickin'”. But we did manage to get in some “good notes” with the usual gang. Banjo Bob Emmert always gives an interesting twist to a bluegrass jam with jazz standards like “Satin Doll” and “All of Me.” Gordy Acri who manufactures the banjo picks that I use, always has something surprising up his sleeve as well.
Unfortunately, not much of the jamming made its way to video. We were too wrapped up in the moment of the music itself to remember to roll tape…but you’ll see a few moments where someone (namely my wife) hit the “play” button.
I even managed to sell a few Volume 3 banjo books in our time there. Looking back, the Blythe Festival was definitely something we needed. It was like waking up from a bad dream, and finding solace in the waking world of strangers who share a common love of music, and far more than a mere modicum of kindness toward one another.
Hope to see some of you in Blythe in 2023. Until then, enjoy our little film!
Musically yours, Jeff B.
That was good Jeff I enjoyed it. Next time maybe let Mary run the camera