MerleFest turns 20 in a couple of weeks, and you should probably go. Slated for April 26-29 at Wilkes Community College in Wilkesboro, NC, the event (as most know) was started in tribute to folk-blues-guitar legend Doc Watson’s late son, Merle, taken early in a tractor accident. From makeshift stages on flatbed trucks, the festival grew to become one of the country’s premier Americana festivals: the kind of event where an appearance by Loretta Lynn or Emmylou Harris or Dolly Parton or Gillian Welch isn’t a coup, it’s standard. Coordinators stumbled a bit in the late ‘90s when they decided to give MerleFest a poppier edge; long-time fans’ heads are still swimming from an incongruous appearance by Hootie and the Blowfish. But, by the next season, it was back to picking as usual. Bluegrass lite (Union Station), real old-time (Joe Thompson), living legends (Earl Scruggs, Doc), etc., will all be heard this year. As these genres were heard last year. And the year before. MerleFest resides in a happy place between over-hyped underdog festivals and identity-crisis-troubled bigger ones that try on new formats and names and locations every couple of years, fooling no one. Sure, news releases from MerleFest headquarters might tout a newly refurbished stage or a press-stopping change in ticketing policy. But constancy has an odor, and it smells like pale-green grass on a hilly campus near Boone.
— Melanie McGee Bianchi, arts & entertainment editor
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