MerleFest: From local fundraiser to stage of country legends

For the uninitiated, there is one thing about MerleFest that must be clarified up front: The 38-year-old Wilkesboro-based festival for traditional bluegrass and Americana music has nothing to do with Merle Haggard.

“There has been some of that in the past — not as much as you would think — but we do get, a few times a year you’ll hear the comment, ‘Are we talking Merle Haggard here?’” MerleFest director Wes Whitson told the Carolina Journal.

Haggard, the country music outlaw and unofficial ambassador for Muskogee, did play there in 2014, just two years before his death.

MerleFest was, in fact, named for somebody who never got to play at it: Eddy “Merle” Watson, a member of North Carolina’s Music Hall of Fame and son of legendary picker Arthel “Doc” Watson.

Tragically, Merle Watson died in a 1985 tractor accident, at the age of 36. Three years later, his father agreed to perform in a one-off charity fundraiser at Wilkes Community College, on the condition that they named it in Merle’s honor. The rest is history.

The annual event still takes place at the community college, and its proceeds largely go to benefit the campus and its students, bringing otherwise out-of-reach educational opportunities to the rural areas of western North Carolina.

For up-and-coming artists in the country genre — and related musical styles — it is now a rite of passage, fostering unique opportunities for crossover collaborations with seasoned veterans of the Nashville scene.

Willie Nelson, Dolly Parton and Charlie Daniels are just a few of the iconic performers who have graced the stage, while others, like the Avett Brothers, cut their teeth at the festival before hitting it big.

“We’ve been really lucky to be able to have some of those guys and gals that are just out-of-this-world talents and legends in their own right,” Whitson told CJ.

Concertgoers need not be bluegrass purists to enjoy the show. This year’s festival (which takes place Thursday, April 23 through Sunday, April 26) is likely to feature several songs that even casual music fans will know and love.

Friday’s headlining act, Old Crow Medicine Show, penned the original “Wagon Wheel,” which frontman Ketch Secor fleshed out from a few impromptu bars sung by Bob Dylan in Sam Peckinpah’s 1973 Western “Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid.”

The catchy number, which famously talks about “thumbin’ my way into North Caroline,” hit the bigtime with a cover version by well-known artist Darius Rucker. OCMS lovers often insist the Hootie and the Blowfish frontman’s sanitized, studio-friendly version has nothing on the raw twang of the original.

Sunday’s headliner, Alison Krauss and Union Station, also had a stint in the limelight courtesy of the Coen Brothers’ 2000 comedy “O Brother, Where Art Thou.”

Krauss was prominently featured in several songs on the soundtrack — which went on to win the 2002 Grammy award for Album of the Year, charted at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 and sparked a renewed interest in the once-obscure Americana genre.

Krauss’s longtime guitarist, Dan Tyminski, struck it even bigger as the voice behind George Clooney in the Soggy Bottom Boys, performing the movie’s breakout hit “Man of Constant Sorrow,” a cover of an old folk standard first recorded in 1913.

Although Tyminski left the band last year, Union Station’s current lineup remains jam-packed with talent, anchored by renowned dobro player Jerry Douglas.  

Douglas (who will lead a separate set with his own band) is among several luminaries returning to the festival who also played at the original 1988 concert. Other charter members on the set list include mandolin player Sam Bush, guitarist Peter Rowan, and two of Doc Watson’s former pickin’ partners: Jack Lawrence and Joe Smothers.

On the other end of the spectrum, MerleFest attendees can catch stars on the rise like Presley Barker, a teen sensation and fan favorite who has been performing at the festival since he was 7 years old.

Whitson, who is originally from Charlotte, enjoyed MerleFest as a spectator long before taking over as its director in 2017.

“I started attending the festival in the early ‘90s and definitely gained an appreciation for Doc Watson, all the adjacent surrounding musicians that were a part of MerleFest and in the bigger folk music and then Americana scene,” he said.

He noted that the festival’s audience noticeably had grown with the bluegrass renaissance of the early aughts.

“I remember walking through the campgrounds, in the parking lots, and everybody was playing ‘Man of Constant Sorrow’ those years, and there was a heightened level of excitement around the festival at the time,” he recalled.

MerleFest waned again during the COVID years, when the organizers were forced to cancel the 2020 event. But it has now bounced back to pre-pandemic levels.

All in all, the festival’s underlying vibe has remained remarkably consistent through the decades, Whitson said.

“I think through the work that we do here to make this experience just above and beyond the others [music festivals] for our fans, that’s contributed a lot to our staying power,” he said. “And we’ve seen numbers stay very consistent over the years.”

Having the event on the Wilkes Community College campus, where alcohol is prohibited, may have helped in part, keeping the focus on the music itself — although the festival also features four aisles of vendors selling food, artisan crafts, and more.

MerleFest also currently boasts 12 stages — a far cry from its humble beginnings when “they started on two flatbed trailers out in the field” after overselling the school’s 1,100-seat auditorium, Whitson said.

Organizing the event is now a full-time, year-round job. As the crown jewel of the Wilkes Community College Foundation’s fundraising operations, it even has its own corporate sponsor, Window World.

Since its inception, the festival has raised more than $21 million, Whitson said.

Organizers are excited about what surprises the future has in store, with planning already underway for next year’s festival and the 40th anniversary in 2028.

Yet Whitson said there are no plans in place to continue expanding it beyond its current levels.

“You know; we’re pretty landlocked over here at Wilkes Community College,” Whitson said. “So we don’t look to grow in population. As far as the number of folks we’re bringing to the festival, I think we’re big enough.”

“There’s some traditionalists out there that remember this festival being a good bit smaller,” he said. “But it’s been about the same size for the past 10 to 15 years, and I don’t see that changing. We’re just going to grow in the way we can help folks and raise money for our students and make the fan experience even better.”

“MerleFest: From local fundraiser to stage of country legends” was originally published on www.carolinajournal.com.