Over the weekend, a portion of Bolado Park transformed from a grassy lot to a campground and performance space for the Northern California Bluegrass Society’s 19th annual Good Old Fashioned Bluegrass Festival.
On a Friday afternoon before performances began on the main stage at 3 p.m., many musicians were playing mandolins, banjos, cellos and guitars in makeshift campsites. The grassy area used for parking during the San Benito County Fair and the San Benito County Rodeo was full of tents and RVs, as visitors to the festival camped out from Thursday through Sunday.
“My favorite thing is being with people I know and love that I don’t get to see very often,” said Patty Kiner, who said she has been attending the festival since the first one 19 years ago.
Regina Bartlett snuck away from watching a band that had formed a stage behind a barbecue pit on the north end of the park to talk about the Kids on Stage program.
“We encourage and promote young people playing music,” Bartlett said. “It used to be that there were all these great bands they could come and watch, but now they are included.”
For the last 12 years, Bartlett has worked with kids from 4 to 18 each year. The kids are formed into bands that rehearse on Saturday and then perform on the main stage on Sunday.
“They learn from each other,” Bartlett said. “The little ones learn from the older ones. It helps the younger ones if they are having an emotional meltdown. The older kids can say, ‘Try it like this.’”
Peter Ludé said his daughter Helen has been involved in the Kids On Stage program since she was 6.
“She was halfway interested, but then she saw the Kids On Stage,” he said, of his daughter’s increasing interest in music.
Since then, she has won fiddling contests and continues to work on her skills.
“It let’s them know they can do it, too,” Ludé said.
Bartlett counts AJ Lee, a teen bluegrass sensation who has been compared to Alison Krauss, among the kids she has worked with in the program.
Local Hollister resident Kim Elking has long been a visitor to the bluegrass festival. She is a member of the bluegrass and acoustic band Sidesaddle & Co., which performed Saturday evening at the festival this year.
“We all get together and jam after the festival music is over,” she said, of the camaraderie in the campsites. “It’s all people we’ve known for years. We always have fun getting together.”
Elking and her band mates, mostly from San Jose, have played many venues around the United States and Canada. But she said her favorite venues are smaller concerts in the park.
“I always feel bluegrass does the best when you are up close and personal,” she said. “The way I like to listen to it is to get right in the front row and listen. It is acoustic so you don’t have the huge amplifiers. You are just playing through microphones with the acoustic instruments.”
Elking said she first got into bluegrass because her brother played it. Then when she lived in the Sierras, she met a banjo player “and started falling in love” with the music. She bought a $30 mandolin and taught herself to play. She described the music as being simple, but also having an intricacy to it.
“You leave with a melody in your head, and with some music you don’t do that,” she said.
The Lampel Brothers were the first to take the main stage during the festival, performing at 3 p.m. Visitors set up a hodgepodge of lawn chairs to watch the show in the center of the park, with about 50 people gathered for the first performance. Jason and Jeremy Lampel, along with two guest artists, sang some original songs for the audience, including one about unrequited love.
The stage was decorated with quilts, with flower-filled baskets on wooden pallets in front of it. They used all acoustic instruments, including a banjo, mandolin, guitar and bass. They noted that the first few songs in their set were on the somber side and moved on to a happier tune.
While some people gathered to watch the main stage performance, others stayed in their camp sites where they socialized and jammed together.
Michael Hofer played the bass with a group of musicians.
“Most of us know (each other,)” he said. “We always come back and bring string instruments. We like to pick along with what’s going on on stage.”
