“First contest, first first-place,” said Brennen Ernst, a 15-year-old banjo player from Leesburg, Va., minutes after picking up a blue ribbon at the 85th annual Ole Time Fiddler’s and Bluegrass Festival in Union Grove, N.C. It was afternoon on the festival’s second day, and Brennen, wearing a black derby and a pink T-shirt, had been playing all but nonstop since before the festival opened.
“I play everything,” he told me the day before. “That’s not bragging. I just listen to a whole lot of styles, and I play everything.”
When I met him, he was taking a break from picking a tune in the fast, three-finger roller-coaster technique made popular by the bluegrass legend Earl Scruggs in the 1940s. Brennen took up the banjo only a little more than a year ago, and he came to Union Grove with Tom Mindte, 52, an accomplished mandolinist from Rockville, Md., whom he described as his mentor.
Brennen wasn’t the best musician I heard over four days at the festival, known to most simply as Fiddler’s Grove, but it was clear that he was off and running, caught in an obsession on display around the 45 acres of rolling hills at the festival site. Countless string-band jam sessions ebbed and flowed from the morning’s first rooster crow until late at night, when a sequined blanket of stars draped the blue-black sky.
Old-time and bluegrass music festivals have become a summer ritual all around the country, but nowhere is the experience quite the same as in the Southern Appalachians, the music’s birthplace. Popular events in Galax, Va.; Mount Airy, N.C.; and Clifftop, W.Va., draw zealous fans and gifted musicians. Fiddler’s Grove may not be the largest or best known of the major festivals, but its claim to fame is that it’s the oldest continuously held one.
“It’s really the granddaddy or grandmama of all of them,” said Wayne Martin, the folklife director at the North Carolina Arts Council.
