Annapolis is catching a lucky break.
It’s lucky that, after breaking her elbow, classical violinist Sarah Larsen picked up the bluegrass fiddle.
After Larsen and Daniel Stewart brought their passion for bluegrass to Annapolis in 2019, they broke up. Now this former couple is driving an expanding bluegrass moment at twice the tempo.
One is producing a new concert series that starts Sunday. The other is focused on a winter festival at the end of the month.
Will the moment last?
“I hope so,” said Stewart, owner of Turtle Hill Banjo Co. in Edgewater. “It’s drawing people from Northern Virginia, Delaware, Pennsylvania and the Eastern Shore. Annapolis is a central location. It just makes sense.”
Annapolis always has been a musical city. Soul and blues, indie-folk singer-songwriters, rock, jazz, opera, chamber and orchestral music, and even bossa nova have crossed its stages.
What is surprising then isn’t the presence of bluegrass. It’s the sudden sense that it’s everywhere.
“Isn’t that something?” said Neil Hamrick, producer of the Marathon Bluegrass Jam for the last 16 years. “And it’s a lot of young people, too.”
Together and apart, Larsen and Stewart are at the center of it all.
On Sunday, she kicks off the Annapolis Opry concert series. More than a dozen bands will take the small stage at St. Margaret’s Episcopal Church during five performances through May.
A fiddle player, singer and songwriter, Larsen is producing the variety show, and her all-women five-piece band, the Black-Eyed Suzies, will serve as musical hosts each month.
The talent list includes Mike Munford and Jon Glik, Big Howdy, Rare Spirits, Michael Stone and Annapolis singer-songwriter Aaron Yealdhall, who performs under the stage name Skribe on an eight-string gas-can banjo.
The appeal is almost a reaction to the direction of Top 40 country.
“A lot of the acoustic grit and instrumental personality got sanded down,” Larsen said. “But people still want to hear humans making music. Hands on strings, voices in a room, not just computers doing the heavy lifting.”
The Annapolis Opry builds on the Chesapeake Winter Bluegrass Festival launched by Stewart and Larsen last year, which returns under Stewart’s solo leadership Jan. 30. Some acts will play at both events, including the Black-Eyed Suzies.
At Stewart’s festival, the Lonesome River Band, Valerie Smith & Liberty Pike and others will mix with seminars on making, sharing and promoting bluegrass to fill the Crowne Plaza Hotel over three days.
“At any one time, there’s five classes going on, plus the shows and jams,” Stewart said.
Bluegrass came to Maryland from Appalachia, following workers headed into Baltimore factories in the 1940s.
Walter Hensley’s banjo started the hard-drivin’ style still popular today, while Ola Belle Reed’s “High on a Mountain” evoked homes lost beyond the hills:
High on the mountain, oh, wind blowin’ free
Thinking about the days that used to be
High on the mountain, standing all alone
Wondering where the years of my life had flown
By the 1970s, the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band and D.C.’s The Seldom Scene revived the music. Decades later, Punch Brothers and Alison Krauss & Union Station did it again.
Now it’s Molly Tuttle, Sierra Ferrell and Billy Strings, whose “Dust in a Baggie” brings the music to the present.
I ain’t slept in seven days, haven’t ate in three
Methamphetamine has got a damn good hold of me
My tweaker friends have got me to the point of no return
I just took the lighter to the bulb and watched it burn
Music doesn’t go silent between peaks of popularity. It swirls and mixes, adds and subtracts.
There are more stories and commentary now, the influence of folk. Blend it with jazz and it’s called roots and Americana. There’s a greater role for women.
The Black-Eyed Suzies will play original music at each Annapolis Opry show, but they’ll focus on traditional Appalachian songs like “Little Maggie.”
Oh, yonder stands little Maggie
With a dram glass in her hands
She’s drinking away her troubles
She’s a’courting some other man
The music never left area stages during the lulls, and now it’s on new ones.
The Green Room and Pickett Brewing in Baltimore have regular jams and shows. The DC Bluegrass Union tracks the music across various venues. It’s a growing part of the Rams Head On Stage lineup in Annapolis.
“We have definitely featured more and more bluegrass in recent years,” said Royal Bundy, spokesperson for the city’s busiest music club.
Alison Brown returns to Rams Head with her banjo Friday, and Jenna Nicholls & Sweet Petunia will mix bluegrass with folk and jazz there Monday. The Good Deale Bluegrass & Eastman String Band plays in March.
Thousands head to Sandy Point State Park each September for Annapolis Baygrass, a jam-band festival.
And bluegrass continues in places you have to know to go.
The monthly Annapolis Bluegrass Jam returns Tuesday to Coconut Joe’s in Edgewater, started by Larsen and Stewart and now a destination for pickers.
Hamrick’s annual Marathon Bluegrass Jam has raised $600,000 to support Fisher House Foundation, a nonprofit refuge for military families in medical crises. Billy Harrison & Haywire Bluegrass Band and Hayden Shaw & This Side of Pleasant join the all-day session Feb. 28 at the American Legion post in Severn.
Things happen.
Larsen and Stewart are headed in different directions, both full-time musicians and entrepreneurs.
He plays with the U.S. Navy Band Country Current and runs Turtle Hill Banjo. She’s getting the Annapolis Opry off the ground, performing with the Black-Eyed Suzies and teaching.
Where will all this go?
“I teach 4-year-olds and I teach people pushing 70, sometimes on the same day,” Larsen said. “I love seeing how different generations approach music ... and honestly, they’re all good in their own way.
“Curiosity doesn’t age.”
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