Bluegrass festival draws more than 500

FORT FAIRFIELD – Bluegrass music enthusiasts didn’t need Sandy Cormier’s urging early Saturday morning to applaud the Union River Band of Clifton for an encore.

They had their hands together before the band had finished their piece. The band returned for an encore when asked by Cormier, a member of the Blistered Fingers bluegrass band and master of ceremonies for the fourth annual Aroostook County Bluegrass Festival at the Fort Fairfield FARM Park. Friday night, opening night of the three-day festival, saw 500-600 people attending, according to organizers. The music, which officially ended at 10 p.m. in the pole barn auditorium, continued with pickers and players until the wee hours of the morning in an adjoining RV campground.

Eight bands were on hand for the weekend jamboree that started at 4:30 p.m. Friday and ended at 2 p.m. Sunday. Rain, interspersed through the weekend, didn’t dampen the music and family-like atmosphere.

“I believe this is the only bluegrass festival in Aroostook County and people come from all over,” Cormier said between sets on the stage. “The bluegrass community follows these bands all over the place no matter where they play.

“Weekend after weekend during the summer months, people travel throughout Maine, the Maritimes and New England to take part,” she said. “Bluegrass lovers are like a big family. It’s just awesome, and they are all kind-hearted people.”

The crowd, from infants to octogenarians, clapped their hands, moved their feet and swayed their heads to the music as the Union River Band played.

They did the same an hour later for Borderline Bluegrass of Benedicta. Cormier said it was the same no matter who played.

The weekend also featured Aroostook County Bluegrass of Washburn, The Muellers of Oakland, Bluegrass Diamonds of Memramcook, New Brunswick, White Mountain Bluegrass of Madbury, N.H., the Lewis Family from Lincolnton, Ga., and Blistered Fingers.

Held for the first time at the Fort Fairfield Chamber of Commerce’s new 25-acre FARM Park, which includes a 12-acre RV campground, the festival featured mandolin, banjo, guitar and bass players performing scores of musical pieces that were familiar to the audience. The park is located off the West Limestone Road, just a couple of miles from Fort Fairfield’s Main Street.

“It’s just going super,” Shawn Murchison, executive director of the Fort Fairfield Chamber of Commerce, said Saturday morning. “They picked music, band members and nonband people as well, until the early hours this morning. “The people in the audience know all the players and they talk back and forth between pieces,” he said. “Everyone here came to relax, listen to the music and have a good time.”

A young girl walked her leashed dog along the perimeter of the band site, and a young man wheeled his wheelchair along, keeping an eye to the stage inside the open-air stadium.

Inside the three-sided 70-by-100-foot pole barn, people sat in their own chairs. They wore truck driver caps and cowboy hats, ate sandwiches out of brown paper bags and drank coffee and cold drinks. All the time they were enraptured by the fast-moving music and lyrics from the bandstand.

Food stands outside the pole barn offered breakfast menus along with beans, coleslaw, corn bread, brown bread, Italian sausage, chips and cookies. Some ate at picnic tables at one end of the building.

Murchison said the new site for the festival came into being this spring and early summer. The one wall of the pole barn that was completed just last Friday protects bands from the rain. This weekend it was a must.

The park is surrounded by fields of flowered potato vines, still-growing grains and broccoli, and one field was being picked clean by workers oblivious to the music festival a half-mile away.

Some 70 campers were in the RV camping area, protected from the music by a row of trees and bushes. The RV site was mowed and packed down by a huge road construction vibrator, Murchison said. Murchison said the bands come from all over, much like the bluegrass music lovers that follow them. Cormier said there is a bluegrass festival just about every weekend somewhere in Maine, the Maritime Provinces or New England in the summer.

“You see a lot of the same people at each festival,” she said. “We have two festivals a year in Sidney, where we are from.

“We’ve been doing that since 1991,” she said. “The people are great, and they applaud everyone and the musicians just love that.”

The Cormiers travel every weekend in the summer with their band. She said bluegrass audiences are just great, very responsive.

Musicians, she said, just love Aroostook County, and some return each year for the still-young festival at Fort Fairfield.