Three-day bluegrass festival attracts young, old to Detroit

DETROIT – Bluegrass musicians and fans from across Maine reveled in toe-tapping bliss over the weekend in the fields at the Detroit Nightdrifters Snowmobile Club.

The sounds of guitars, banjoes, mandolins and bass fiddles resonated from a flatbed trailer “stage” and across a temporary village of campers and RVs. Musical groups playing songs of love and loss stirred memories and evoked cheers and clapping from an audience of all ages. The three-day event was the club’s third annual bluegrass festival.

“It’s the last form of traditional country music,” said Alan “Mac” McHale, a 43-year veteran picker who has watched interest in bluegrass wax and wane during his career.

“People are dying to find their roots and tradition,” McHale said of the renewed interest in bluegrass. “These festivals are massive today.”

McHale’s Old Time Radio Gang was just one of 10 featured groups at this year’s Detroit festival. McHale’s group and the other performers are scheduled to perform somewhere in Maine and New England nearly every weekend for the next four to six months. Many of the events are festivals similar to Detroit’s, attracting whole families with campers and RVs for multiple days of music making.

Shirley Whitaker set out three years ago to help her nephew market some original bluegrass tapes and compact discs from his Gardiner-based group Traditional Heights.

“I listened to those tapes and I was stuck,” said Whitaker, who organizes the Detroit fest with the help of loyal club members. “A lot of bluegrass festivals are on the coast, and we needed to bring them to eastern Maine.”

The grounds around the Detroit clubhouse were the perfect match for hosting a country music festival, according to her nephew Ed Cooper. It wasn’t too hard to convince Whitaker to make the proposal to the local club.

The music is what Whitaker and many bluegrass fans remember from their childhood.

“It’s derived from old-time country,” she said. “I heard this music when I was growing up.”

She was stagefront, tapping and clapping, when Cooper was performing with Traditional Heights, the host band for the event.

“He’s my inspiration,” she said of his music.

Bluegrass is interesting music, representing a lot of culture, Cooper said following the group’s afternoon performance.

“It’s traditional music, mountain music from the deep South,” he said. “It has Irish, French and Scotch roots.”

Maintaining tradition, bluegrass is performed with acoustic instruments, no electrical enhancement. The musicians perform traditional tunes as well as original fare with stories of life and love set to music and rhythm.

“Instrumentally, it’s very exacting for a musician,” said Cooper, who like many of the weekend participants is self-taught. “The better you get, the more fun it is.”

The fans, many of whom also are musicians, come for the music, the sing-alongs and the picking, according to the Katahdin Valley Boys. “Field-picking” is 24 hours, on stage and off, as people gather around campers and RVs for informal jam sessions.

The Katahdin group members, like their fellow performers, tell of growing up with the sounds of bluegrass. Dale Hodgdon of Westport Island played bluegrass as a child, growing up to join the band members who were his early heroes in the field. Kip Yattaw of Port Clyde grew up with bluegrass but took a turn at rock ‘n’ roll bands before returning to his roots.

“When new people come to bluegrass festivals, they don’t know what to expect,” Yattaw said. “Some of these festivals started with as few as a hundred people. Now they attract thousands.

“There are no strangers in bluegrass, just friends you haven’t met yet,” he remembers being told.

Bob Stackhouse of Pittsfield has been coming to the Detroit festival since its first year.

“I like the music and I come to help out,” he said, toe-tapping to a Traditional Heights tune.

Kevin Weston of Belgrade won a ticket to this year’s festival. But when he went to order a bloomin’ onion at the snackbar, he found the on-duty cook couldn’t make one.

“I love ’em so much I bought a machine,” Weston said. “So I’m making ’em for them [the Detroit club]. I love these festivals. I just play for the fun of it.”