The Earl Scruggs Center and WNCW are proud to announce the inaugural Earl Scruggs Music Festival, coming September 4-5, 2020 to Tryon International Equestrian Center in Mill Spring, NC. Celebrating the legacy of an American music legend, the Earl Scruggs Music Festival will bring together artists from bluegrass, Americana, blues, and many other roots music genres to celebrate the pioneering vision of Earl Scruggs. Few other artists in American history have had such an impact as Scruggs. His work in 1946/47 with Bill Monroe & the Blue Grass Boys and later with Flatt and Scruggs helped create an entire genre of music. His banjo playing was so fresh and different for the time that it was christened the “Scruggs style” of banjo and is still the most prominent banjo performance style in the world. The Earl Scruggs Music Festival will pay homage to Scruggs’ groundbreaking vision in the setting of the Tryon International Equestrian Center in Mill Spring, NC, a short distance from Scruggs’ birth region and the home of the Earl Scruggs Center in Shelby, NC. The Festival will be a benefit for the Earl Scruggs Center and Isothermal Community College.
The initial festival lineup, announced today at the International Bluegrass Music Association’s annual conference in Raleigh, North Carolina, consists of Marty Stuart and His Fabulous Superlatives, Jerry Douglas, Alison Brown, Dom Flemons, Radney Foster, The Barefoot Movement, Darin and Brooke Aldridge, The Po Ramblin Boys, and Unspoken Tradition. More artists, both national and North Carolina-based, will be added over the coming months. The festival will feature over 20 artists and three stages in a beautiful setting at the foot of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Camping, lodging, restaurants, and other amenities will be available onsite at the Tryon International Equestrian Center.
“Earl was my uncle, so I knew him a long time,” says JT Scruggs, a board member of the Earl Scruggs Center. “The first Earl Scruggs Music Festival presents an opportunity to bring exposure and new visitors to the Earl Scruggs Center in Shelby, North Carolina. The proceeds from the festival will also help to keep the center in good financial shape. The festival will bring great music and many different groups to the region. And I hope that people will hear things about Earl that they may have never heard before as all the artists share their personal stories. I know that Earl would be proud of what we are doing and that we are remembering him through the festival.
FOR MORE INFORMATION:
http://www.earlscruggsmusicfestival.com/
