If you’re a fan of regional bluegrass, mark your calendar for August 8-10 when the 7th Annual Lovegrass Music Festival returns to Lake Wilson in Wilson State Park, Kansas. We caught up with Aimee Riegel, one of the original masterminds of the event. This year promises to be the biggest Lovegrass yet, with headliners including The Haymakers, Front Porch, The Matchsellers, Chain Station, The Fretliners, Maw, John Depew, 80 Proof Alice and many more.
To hear the full interview with Aimee, click the link at the top of this page. Check out the full line-up here, and register for your tickets here!
More about the festival (from Aimee Riegel): “Our festival started in 2017 as a wild hair idea when I booked a group camp and made a Facebook event, inviting folks to come out and just jam, but then had a band reach out to play; a friend's business covered the costs of $400. We quickly realized we wanted to make more out of this and started soliciting some more sponsors to make 2018 even bigger. After the 2018 festival, we decided to become a non-profit to assist in funding some more regional bands.
Our festival has always been free to attend (though camping is an additional fee), and we have grown substantially each year from 100-150 attendees in year one to about 1,200 in 2023 and that will be our cap to keep our festival small and intimate. We try to keep our bands in the line of more progressive, up-and-coming bluegrass bands.
Our festival is family-friendly and we also feature workshops and art activities. You can check out most of what is offered here, but we will also feature some live art installations and demonstrations (e.g., live needle felting art demo, live blacksmithing demo, etc.). We also offer some fabulous kids’ arts and crafts on two evenings of the festival.
We are truly a labor of love, relying on a crew of 50 volunteers to come together during the festival. We are run by a board of directors (7) who work tirelessly year-round to make the event successful.
We also offer outreach events year-round, featuring community acoustic jam nights twice a month at a local brewery in Hays, KS; outreach concert events and fundraiser concert events in communities surrounding Russell County (e.g., Summer of Lovegrass Concert Series, Lovegrass on Tap at Defiance Brewing Co., etc.), such as Wilson, Great Bend, and even as far as Olathe, KS (e.g., Lovegrass on Tap at Tall Trellis Brewing). We hope to see some new faces at this year’s fest! Click here for registration now.”
