Tunbridge
So take a look, my little darlin’
And see this smile on my face
Remember the day you threw it all away
I ain’t comin’ back to this old place.
This place, on the other hand …
“Last year was the first time we toured the festival circuit” around New England and upstate New York, Mile Twelve co-founder Evan Murphy told the audience between songs, from the main stage in the middle of the Tunbridge Fairgrounds. “This was one of our absolute favorites.”
Retirees Denise and Bob Whicher, of Key West, Fla., were seconding that emotion Saturday, from the lounge chairs they parked under a canopy connected to their camper-trailer, some three rings out among the hundreds of recreational vehicles and tents encircling the fairgrounds in a pattern resembling the arrondissements that surround the center of Paris.
“We’ve been going to most of the festivals up here for a while now,” Denise Whicher, a native of Berlin, N.H., said while the strains of mandolins, banjos and guitars and plaintive voices wafted on the freshening breeze. “This is always the first one of the season, and this is our favorite. The location is beautiful. The people are wonderful. They’ve always got great bands.
“Oh, and the maple creamees …!”
The festival also has been growing on longtime record producer and Americana musician Jim Rooney, since he sold his apartment in Nashville a couple of years ago and relocated full time to Sharon.
“I love it,” said Rooney, who was staffing the Royalton Community Radio tent on Saturday and who will serve as master of ceremonies at the main stage Sunday. “It has a great atmosphere. And it’s a little more down home than some festivals.”
Indeed, while Ricky Skaggs was the headliner on Friday night, as was the Del McCoury Band in 2016, Jenny Brook organizers Candi and Seth Sawyer always make sure to invite the likes of Mile Twelve, which impressed Rooney last year and again on Saturday.
“They have a nice blend of older, traditional bluegrassers and young bands like this,” Rooney said. “And the audience is here to hear the music and really pay attention.”
That’s music to the ears of Candi Sawyer, who co-founded the festival in Weston, Vt., in 2001 with eight acts to start, and, after it outgrew the venue, moved it to Tunbridge in 2008.
This year, 20 groups are playing the festival.
“That means so much to me,” Sawyer, who also plays bass occasionally in her husband’s Seth Sawyer Band. “He’s been such a big help to us the last couple of years. One of these years I really want to pick his brain for ideas about how to keep making this better.”
It works fine for Kelley John Gibson’s money. In front of hundreds of spectators, both in low chairs and blankets on the lawn in front of the main stage and under tents, the 21-year-old opened Saturday’s festivities by playing mandolin and guitar and singing on the main stage of Jenny Brook for the first time, covering, among others, Johnny Cash’s Ring of Fire and I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry, which he described as “one of my favorites, by Hank Williams … Sr.”
For as long as he can remember, Kelley Gibson has watched the Gibson Brothers play featured roles here and around the Northeast. The quintet — two-time winners of the International Bluegrass Music Association’s awards for entertainers of the year and vocal group of the year — is led by his father, Eric, and his uncle Leigh.
In recent years, Kelley, who is on the high-functioning end of the autism spectrum, performed on Jenny Brook’s Gazebo Stage and at the festival’s annual Barn Dance.
“I really like the turnouts they get here,” Kelley Gibson said. “The festival always seems to do really well. I also like it because I know more of the people around me.”
Familiarity also keeps 23-year-old Michelle Canning coming back. A Massachusetts native, she started coming with her grandfather, who’d introduced her to bluegrass, when she was 8.
“I’d just started to play the banjo,” Canning, the 2009 New England champion on the instrument, said after performing with her Michelle Canning Band. “I started coming here to work, helping out emcee-ing at the small stages, around age 14, and pretty soon playing, too. … Most of the time, I try to get here on Wednesday to help out, but I couldn’t make it until Friday. As we were riding up, it dawned on me: ‘I’m going home. I’m getting to see all my friends.’ ”
The friends among musicians, spectators and volunteers inspire Sawyer to continue spending most of her year organizing the festival by email and by phone, despite a long struggle with the multiple sclerosis that restricts her mobility.
“It’s worth it when I see all these people coming. This year we’ve got some from Colorado, from Japan, from Holland,” Sawyer said. “This is my medicine.
“It keeps me going.”
Editor’s note: The Jenny Brook Bluegrass Festival concludes today, starting with a gospel sing at 9 a.m. and ending with a 1:40 p.m. performance by BigApple’Achia. David Corriveau can be reached at dcorriveau@vnews.com and at 603-727-3304.
Correction
Kelley John Gibson is on the high-functioning end of the autism spectrum. An earlier version of this story misstated his condition.