Festival fills Labor Day weekend with sound
The County Bluegrass Festival returned to Fort Fairfield over the long Labor Day weekend for four days of family-friendly music and camping.
Now in its 13th year, the festival draw hundreds of people from Atlantic Canada, as well as New England, Maine and Aroostook County. Stev Rogeski, a Fort Fairfield electrician, along with his wife Nancy, has been organizing the event since 2008.
Held under a pole barn at the Farm Park, surrounded by the Rogeski family farmland, the festival started as a part of the Maine Potato Blossom Festival and now runs three times a year. In late July and again Labor Day weekend, the festival is at the Farm Park, where several hundred people stay in RVs and campers, and in January the show is held at the Presque Isle Inn & Convention Center.
“We’ve been pretty successful. It’s been a nice slow growth,” said Rogeski.
In 2008, the town’s Chamber of Commerce discontinued the bluegrass event as a part of the Maine Potato Blossom Festival and the original concert venue had found a tenant for its original use as a livestock barn when Pineland Farms opened its cattle operation.
Rogeski, who helped do the electrical work at the first venue, had warmed to bluegrass music and its followers and wanted to see the festival continue, so he and his family offered to take over the event, donate land on West Limestone Road and help build a new pole barn and build a bathroom in collaboration with the town.
“We didn’t want to see it die on the vine,” Rogeski said. “Our local audience is building. Some of our local customers have bought campers just to come to the concert and stay.”
The festival brings in a range of musicians from near and far, with each night having one headliner, Rogeski said. And after the scheduled concerts each night, festival goers and musicians gather for “picking” – playing music on their own into the night.
The music Thursday night started with the Tennessee Mafia Jug Band of Tennessee, the Baker Family of Missouri, and Rustic Harmony of New Brunswick. Among musicians from Maine were the Misty Mountaineers of St. Albans, who played Friday and Sunday, and Blistered Fingers of central Maine, who played on Saturday. From New Brunswick were Rustic Harmony and from Nova Scotia were The Spinney Brothers.
Among bluegrass devotees, Rogeski said, the most well-known musicians at the festival this Labor Day weekend were Rhonda Vincent & the Rage, a Missouri band led by the Grammy-nominated Rhonda Vincent, and the Becky Buller Band, a Tennessee band led by the fiddler Becky Buller.
And overall, Rogeski said, they’re working on making the festival a fun, rural music event.
“We want this to become a family vacation destination,” said Rogeski. “We travel to a lot of festivals to learn how to do it right.”
