"Do You Think Anyone is Going to Come?"
Hardly Strictly Bluegrass is nearly upon us again. A small city of tents, fences, trailers, cell towers, port-a-potties and stages has sprung up around the Polo Fields. Long lines of electrical wire and cable loop from tree to tree. As one HSB worker. explained to me, “There’s so much data flying around here, you wouldn’t believe,”
I’ve been going to HSB since 2007 —I remember I really wanted to see Doc Watson who appeared for the first time that year. I fell in love with the event, for the music, for the happy mellow crowd, for the sunny warm weather that always seems to grace the weekend.
This week, I realized I didn’t know anything about how this one-of-a-kind festival came into being. So I spent some time going through the festival’s archives, news clippings and the oral history of HSB’s founder and benefactor, Warren Hellman (archived at UC Berkeley’s Bancroft Library.) Here’s what I learned:
Hellman, an iconoclastic investment banker, had a longtime dream of holding a bluegrass festival in the park. In 2000, he mentioned that dream to a friend. The friend said “Why don’t you do it?” When Hellman said he had no idea how to go about it, the friend then introduced him to two music industry veterans: Dawn Holliday, the talent booker for Slims and Sheri Sternberg, an event producer.
The first festival in 2001 was billed as “Strictly Bluegrass.”
It was a one-day affair with a single stage and nine performers, including one of Hellman’s favorite singers, Hazel Dickens. A working class West Virginian known for her pro-union anthems, Dickens was at first conflicted about accepting the invitation to play at this rich banker’s festival. As she told the Chronicle, “I didn’t want to insult the man. Most my songs are pretty blatant against people like him.” But Hellman insisted he wouldn’t do the festival without her. She came and sang, and returned every year until she died in 2011.
Holliday had told Hellman that if he didn’t broaden the bill beyond his own taste “there will be about 13 people there.” So even that first concert wasn’t strictly bluegrass with performers including Jerry Douglas, Dale Anne Bradley & Coon Creek; Blue Highway; The Crooked Jades; Road Oilers; Batteries Not Included; Keystone Station; and Emmylou Harris, who has closed out the festival every year since.
“The first year Warren looked at us and said, "Do you think anyone is going to come?" Sternberg later recalled. Some 10,000 people did. And when it was over, Hellman looked at his co-conspirators and said, “Want to do it again?”
The next year, they added two more days and two more stages and tripled the list of performers (to include among others, Steve Earle, another HSB perennial) and 12,000 people attended.
In 2003, “Hardly” was added to the festival name. That was really due to Emmy Lou Harris, Hellman said in his oral history. “Emmylou plays a variety of different types of music and I thought I just—I really favored bluegrass. And originally she had
a band called the Nash Ramblers. So I thought, well, if I call it Strictly
Bluegrass and she comes, she’ll have to put together the Nash Ramblers. And,
of course, you don’t tell Emmy what to do. She’s a good listener but she does
what—so that didn’t work. She sang pretty much what she wanted. So we
changed the name…”
The festival kept growing and spreading through the park. The list of performers kept diversifying, so there would be singers like Elvis Costello or MC Hammer or Roseanne Cash alongside bluegrass legends like Earl Scruggs, Peter Rowan or Ralph Stanley and the Clinch Mountain Boys. “I guess there's enough investment banker still in me that every year it had to grow or it would be devalued or something,” Hellman told NPR in 2006, by which time there were more than 70 performers on five stages.
A sixth stage, Towers of Gold, was added in 2008. The addition was personally thrilling since it took its name from the book “Towers of Gold”, by my friend Frances Dinkelspiel about California power broker Isaias Hellman, who was her great-great grandfather and Warren Hellman’s great-grandfather.
In 2011 Hellman passed away, but left an endowment to keep the festival going. Speedway Meadow, site of the first concert and where the Banjo Stage is always located, was renamed Hellman Hollow in his honor.
I’m not the first to notice how kind and easy-going people tend to be at HSB. The vibe has always felt like a collective response to Hellman’s own immense act of generosity and joy in the festivities. It’s been strained by the intense crowds in recent years — half a million people attended HSB last year — as well by the fences, the shunting of concertgoers through entrance and exit gates, and other security measures that were added after a mass shooting at a Las Vegas concert in 2017.
And yet, the big-hearted spirit persists. You still can leave your blanket at one stage and return later to find it in place. People still readily share their own scrap of real estate. In these crabbed and querulous times, getting to be immersed in an ocean of goodwill feels as big a gift as the festival itself.