Bluegrass festivals in Ireland and Britain

The bluegrass year on these islands is short, it is mostly held outdoors, and it is built almost entirely by volunteers. There is no touring circuit in the American sense and there is no season ticket. What there is instead is a run of long standing weekends between Easter and the end of September, nearly all of them attached to a campsite, a hotel car park or a village hall, where the stage is the smallest part of the event.

This page is a map of the shape of that year rather than a listings service. Weekends move, venues change, committees run out of steam and events do skip a year, so treat every line below as a rough position in the calendar and confirm with the organisers before you book a ferry or a pitch.

How the year is shaped

Four things drive the dates. Easter opens the season, because the one full week of tuition in these islands has always sat there. Late June and July belong to Ireland, where the festivals are small, hotel based and famously easy to walk into. Late August and early September are the busiest fortnight of the whole year, with the two biggest gatherings on either side of the Irish Sea usually landing on the same weekend or a week apart. After the end of September it goes quiet, and the music moves indoors to house sessions, workshops and a handful of one day events.

Almost nothing here is a big stage festival. A typical weekend is a field or a hotel with two or three hundred people, a stage running from mid afternoon to late evening, workshops on the Saturday morning, and jams that start when the stage stops and finish when the last person gives up. If you have only been to the arena kind of festival, the scale is a genuine surprise: you will end up talking to the people who played, usually in a queue for tea.

Ireland and Northern Ireland

The Omagh weekend is worth explaining, because the setting is the point. The Ulster American Folk Park is an open air museum about emigration from Ulster to North America, with a rebuilt Ulster street on one side of the site and a rebuilt Pennsylvania street on the other. Bluegrass played between those two streets is not a themed novelty. It is the shortest way anyone has found to show what actually happened to this music: it left with people, changed, and came back.

Nobody goes to an Irish bluegrass weekend for the headliner. They go because eleven people they only ever meet in September will be in the same car park on Saturday night.

Britain

Sore Fingers is the odd one out and the one most worth planning a year around. It is not a festival at all: it is a residential school where you are placed in a class for your instrument and your level, taught every morning and afternoon for the week, and left to jam in the evenings. People who go once tend to go for a decade. If you are the only banjo player you know, a week of being one of fifteen is worth more than any number of Saturday afternoons in a field.

For dates as they are confirmed, the two community sources everyone actually uses are the Bluegrass Ireland Blog, which has tracked Irish dates and gigs for years, and the British Bluegrass Music Association, which keeps the British listings and publishes a members' magazine. Neither pays us anything and neither knows we exist.

Worth the ferry

Two continental events pull players from these islands every year, and both are easier to reach than an American festival.

What actually happens on the weekend

The programme on the poster is roughly a third of the event. Here is the rest of it.

• Workshops. Usually Saturday morning, usually free with the ticket, usually one per instrument. They are pitched at improvers and they are the best value on the site.
• The slow jam. Many festivals now run a deliberately slow session, often early afternoon, specifically so that beginners have somewhere to go. If it exists, use it. It is not a consolation prize.
• Open jams. These form and dissolve on their own from late afternoon onwards, in the campsite, the bar or the car park. The unwritten rules are the same everywhere, and we have written them down in how a bluegrass jam actually works.
• The band scramble. Names into a hat, random bands drawn, forty minutes to rehearse, everyone plays. It is exactly as terrifying and as good for you as it sounds.
• The instrument tables. Small makers and repairers turn up at the bigger events with a table. You will learn more in twenty minutes there than in a month of reading forums.

Going for the first time

Buy a day ticket before you commit to the full weekend, and choose the Saturday. Arrive in the afternoon rather than the evening, because jams in daylight are far easier to join than jams at midnight. Bring your instrument even if you are certain you will not play it, because the certainty rarely survives the first afternoon.

If you are travelling from Ireland to a British event, or the other way, remember that instruments count as fragile hand luggage on the ferry and as an argument at the airport. Ferries are calmer and cheaper for anyone bringing a resonator guitar or a double bass, and most of the campsite regulars drive for that reason.

One social note that surprises people: at these events, being a beginner is a normal thing to be, and saying so out loud is the fastest way to be looked after. Nobody minds a slow player. The one thing that irritates a circle is somebody playing loudly over a tune they do not know.

Common questions

When is the bluegrass season in Ireland and Britain?

Easter to late September. The Easter week is taken up by the residential summer school in Oxfordshire, the Irish weekends cluster in June and July, and the two biggest events on either island usually fall within a fortnight of each other in early September.

Do I need to be able to play to enjoy a bluegrass festival?

No. Plenty of people come to listen, and every event has a bar, a stage programme and a campsite. If you do play, even badly, you will get far more out of it, because the jams are the real event.

Are these festivals expensive?

They are among the cheapest music weekends you will find, because they are run by committees rather than promoters and the camping is usually included or close to it. The residential school is the exception, since it is a week of tuition rather than a festival ticket.

Can I bring children?

Most of the camping events are strongly family oriented and some run children's workshops. The pub based Irish weekends are the ones to check first, because licensing hours limit where under eighteens can go in the evening.

What should I do if I only play a bit?

Find the slow jam, sit in the outer ring, and play rhythm. If there is no slow jam, ask the guitar player in a small circle what key they are in and stick to chords. Read the etiquette page first and you will be ahead of half the field.