Camp Bluegrass

Five days of music, mountains, and community in western North Carolina

- SID EVANS

Sid (at left) with Bryan Sutton

I was standing onstage behind Ricky Skaggs, the legendary bluegrass musician, before a crowd of more than 1,500 people at the Whittington-Pfohl Auditorium in Brevard, North Carolina. It was a Saturday night in late May, and we were playing the finale, Skaggs’ version of the classic song “Uncle Pen” by Bill Monroe. Lined up in rows next to me stood about 130 other students holding acoustic guitars, each of us waiting on the song’s refrain to come in with an emphatic lick called a “G run.” There was plenty of nervous energy in our group, but when the chorus came around, we hit the notes in unison and Skaggs looked back at us with a smile. He was putting on a show that night with some of the best bluegrass musicians in the world, and for the moment, we were part of the band.

Our performance was the culmination of Blue Ridge Guitar Camp, an intensive program at the Brevard Music Center, a wooded 180-acre campus in western North Carolina with stages, rehearsal spaces, cabins, and plenty of room for jam sessions. As a mediocre player with little experience in traditional bluegrass, I was way out of my league. The host of the camp, Bryan Sutton, is the most awarded flat-picker in the history of the genre, and he had assembled a star-studded roster of instructors. My fellow students, who ranged in age from mid-teens to mid-seventies and came from a dozen countries, were pretty intimidating, too, showing a mastery of their instruments and a deep knowledge of old-time songs. But from the minute I arrived, I felt encouraged to jump in. “This is a safe place,” Sutton said on our first night. “This is a community where we know that everybody is doing the same thing, whether you’re a relative newbie or an experienced player. We are all continuing to learn, and that’s the energy I like to bring here.”