An amazing Grey Fox festival

The Grey Fox Bluegrass Festival moved ahead on its new grounds this past weekend, and the music was top-notch! See the YouTube playlist above. I will be adding to it as I go through the videos, so check back.

Despite scorching heat, the weather held up fairly well. Only a few brief bouts of rain, which tended to cool things down. But the music was tremendous and I managed to see bands like a reunion of Hot Rize and their alter-egos Red Knuckles and the Trailblazers. What a treat watching Hot Rize don their country-swing outfits for a few tunes and antics at the main stage, then a lengthy set at the dance stage!

The Wilders lived up to their names, and while fans moaned loudly about the fact that they were denied an encore on Saturday afternoon, they cheered when a huge rainbow soon soared above the festival grounds.

Fans loved the Del McCoury Band, Dan Paisley, Sam Bush and David Grisman, but it was relative newcomers like The Grascals, Dailey & Vincent, The Greencards, The Infamous Stringdusters and the Swedish band Gravity who created fresh memories. I caught many, but not all, of the acts during the course of the festival, opting to hear some groups on the radio in the shade when the heat beat me down.

I did manage to get video of many of the groups mentioned above, especially Hot Rize and Red Knuckles.

Of course, being the first year on the Walsh Farm in Oak Hill, N.Y., there were some glitches — inevitable with an event of this size. People attended a “town meeting” on Sunday to voice their gripes about things like the height of chairs in the stage area, the general layout and the massive land grab that took place by campers on the day before the festival. To their credit, festival volunteers worked with patrons to wedge in everyone. And while the new site is larger than the old one at the former Rothvoss Farm, in the end, it seemed smaller. There were a host of other issues, but in the bigger scheme of things, they will likely get worked out.

Besides seeing Red Knuckles and other groups, highlights for me included spending time with friends, visiting Catskill Stream, which circles the festival grounds, and camping prior to the festival with The Liners at the Allen Farm in Durham, N.Y.  The Allen Farm is too small, they say, to host Grey Fox, but its spectacular views of Greene County made me wish otherwise.

Meanwhile, check out the jam band in Catskill Stream:

~ by folkmaster on July 22, 2008.