On Labor Day weekend at the Skyline Ranch Resort in Front Royal, VA, and within spitting distance of Shenandoah National Park, the Appaloosa Festival will float into town. Expanded from a two-day to a three-day festival for the first time, hosts Scythian are welcoming an even larger slate of performers, but not forsaking the intimacy of previous years. Acts include Steep Canyon Rangers, Dustbowl Revival, Fireside Collective, Humming House, The Gothard Sisters, Shane Hennessy, YARN, and of course the aforementioned Scythian.
In anticipation of the Appaloosa Festival, we had a brief conversation with Graham Sharp, principle songwriter and exceptional banjoist of Steep Canyon Rangers. A dozen records to their name, a trails blazed across the country and around the world, and having played with a veritable who’s who of the bluegrass scene, SCR is making their first Appaloosa appearance this year.
One of the greatest joys of a festival – especially in bluegrass – is the easy familiarity between artists and their fans. “All of the artists are sort of accessible and before you know it, you’re talking to all of these people you’ve admired for so long. I think that festivals have always been a great place for artists to interact with each other and fans to interact with artists.” This is especially true in a smaller festival like Appaloosa, which has valued and continues to value the importance of community and family. It’s not uncommon to see musicians walking around the campgrounds with instruments in hand, walking up to a fire to pick with other musicians.
You can just walk up to a circle of people picking and if you know the tune, you can just jump in, and before you know it, it’s 3 in the morning, you’ve been playing music for 6 hours with this group of people, if you’d seen ‘em on the street, you’d think maybe you didn’t have that much in common with them. You develop a quick friendship around the music, and it’s kind of unique in that.
Specifically, about Appaloosa, Graham mentioned that the area has “been really important area in the world of bluegrass and for the history of bluegrass.” Front Royal is just a few hours away from the first ever bluegrass festival (Fincastle), and Appaloosa maintains the tradition, but also modernizing it, including acts that explore the boundaries of bluegrass. SCR themselves exemplify this, both in how they let songs breathe just as much as they showcase virtuosity and in the fact that they added a drummer to their onstage arsenal.
So anytime you’re playing up there, you got a lot of people who are tuned in to where the scene’s been and where it’s going, but at a new festival you can have the band sit in and kind of recast it a little bit. It’s a great opportunity for everyone involved to really put a fresh stamp on the music on account of that local scene up there.
We also made a point to ask Graham if the song “Shenandoah Valley” would fittingly feature in the setlist, eliciting a little laugh. He shared that he started writing that one while in the van as the band slept around him. “One of my favorite things about songwriting is that you gotta keep your eyes open and take inspiration when it hits ya,” but then do your best to “ take an ordinary moment and turn it into something that has a wider meaning,” something they more than achieved with “Shenandoah Valley”.
Hopefully, if the audience is lucky, Steep Canyon Rangers will crowd around a single mic to “dilly dally / in the Shenandoah Valley all day.”
If you haven’t already, go get your tickets for Appaloosa. The dates are August 30 – September 1 (Labor Day Weekend), and it will sure to be a barnburner of a weekend.
