Last September, the International Bluegrass Music Association’s (IBMA) annual World of Bluegrass festival fell on the same weekend that Hurricane Helene swept through the Southeast. Several of the artists coming down from Western North Carolina had to cancel, as the festival trudged through its last year in Raleigh under rain and somber conditions.
World of Bluegrass has since decamped to Chattanooga, lured by support from Tennessee’s Special Event Fund. Now Raleigh Wide Open, the free street festival emerging in its stead, will debut in downtown Raleigh on October 3-4, a little over a year after Helene changed everything.
David Brower, executive director of Raleigh nonprofit PineCone, booked World of Bluegrass between 2021 and 2024. He now manages bookings for Raleigh Wide Open.
“There is a thread going through the festival,” Brower says, “both on stage and amongst the artisans who are participating in the art market, of people coming down to Raleigh from one of the 26 impacted counties and helping to tell the story.”
“We’re a year in, but those communities experience generational change,” he continues. “We really want to be a part of helping [artists] continue to tell the story, and make sure that folks don’t forget that—that they’re still there and going through it.”
Yesterday, Raleigh Wide Open announced its debut lineup. Balsam Range, one of the bands forced to cancel last year, is part of that thread. So is Nest of Singing Birds, a Marshall collective of eighth-generation ballad singers. The collective draws its name from a phrase that the English folklorist Cecil Sharp deployed in 1916, upon hearing the ghostly, centuries-old ballads of Madison County.
It’s a music that continues through Nest of Singing Birds, which has held a monthly ballad swap for the past two years at the decommissioned 118-year-old Old Marshall Jail, a space that was flooded by Helene’s waters. Since then, Nest of Singing Birds has taken its ballad swap on the road.
artists performing at raleigh Wide Open
Carrying traditions like that forward is a core tenet of Raleigh Wide Open, a festival whose logo features a squirrel proudly brandishing a banjo, a pinecone lolling pleasantly beside it. The name is drawn from a 2006 event celebrating Fayetteville Street’s revitalization; by adopting the moniker, Brower says, the festival is continuing a “tradition of bringing people downtown, showing off the heart of the city.”
Brower says that the festival is designed to feel like a continuation of its predecessor to attendees and that the PineCone team, which has been producing World of Bluegrass since its inception 12 years ago, is not looking to reinvent the wheel.
“Quite frankly, we’re just having too much fun to stop,” Brower says. “It’s been wildly successful by just about any measurement, from economic impact to attendance to just downright good vibes—such that, you know, somehow fiddles and banjos have become a genuine economic driver downtown.”
Where Raleigh Wide Open may feel different a bit is in its lineup, which reflects a broader definition of bluegrass music, incorporating roots, alt-country, gospel, and, more generally, music that has the feel of “friends getting together to play tunes together,” as Brower puts it.
The lineup of 35 acts will play shows across six stages, and includes traditional bluegrass names like Big Fat Gap and Jim Lauderdale, as well as a slate of local acts like Blue Cactus, Sonny Miles, and Joseph Decosimo. Ticketed shows at Red Hat Amphitheater will be announced later this summer, and attendees can also expect the usual summery markers of a Fayetteville Street festival—food trucks, craft vendors, and beer gardens.
The festival will also feature nightly square dances.
“That’s at the core of what PineCone was founded to do, which is, bring people together around fiddles and banjos for this shared cultural experience,” Brower says. “There are so few things in life these days where we’re actually together, moving physically with strangers—you know, reaching out to grab the hand of your neighbor and spin around a couple of times. Hopefully in time.”
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