Today, the Momentary announced the lineup for FreshGrass | Bentonville 2025, a two-day, all-ages festival with the best in American and global roots music and folk traditions taking place on Friday, May 16th and Saturday, May 17th. The 2025 festival will feature an illustrious lineup of artists, including GRAMMY Award winner Lukas Nelson, Americana Music Awards winner Shakey Graves, Afrobeat royalty Seun Kuti & Egypt 80, rising star La Doña, 18x GRAMMY Award winner Béla Fleck with his brand new trio featuring Antonio Sanchez and Edmar Castañeda, as well as GRAMMY Award winner and American Banjo Museum Hall of Fame member Alison Brown, Jesse Welles, Sister Sadie, AJ Lee & Blue Summit,, Lost Bayou Ramblers, The Langan Band, and more. The diverse and exciting lineup combines with unique-to-FreshGrass elements like world premieres of special commissions, artist talks, instrument workshops, band competitions, and square dances to create a festival experience unlike any other.

Also joining the festival as an artist-at-large will be Rosanne Cash with John Leventhal. Cash’s appearance at the Momentary holds special significance, as it coincides with the The Prison Concerts: Folsom and San Quentin (Jim Marshall’s Photographs of Johnny Cash) exhibition on display at the venue. Organized by the GRAMMY Museum, the exhibition features iconic photographs of her father from his historic Folsom and San Quentin prison concerts in 1968 and 1969.

Arkansas native folksinger Willi Carlisle will return to FreshGrass, this year as the 2025 recipient of the FreshGrass Composition Commission, performing new music written for this commission for the first time in public. Previous FreshGrass Composing Commission recipients include Rhiannon Giddens, Aoife O’Donovan, Sarah Jarosz, Kronos Quartet, and Bill Frisell.

The FreshGrass Awards will also make their debut at FreshGrass | Bentonville 2025, with five finalists performing in front of an esteemed panel of judges during the festival. The FreshGrass Awards celebrate and reward emerging artists who offer innovative interpretations of bluegrass and roots music traditions. Prizes total more than $30,000 and the winner receives studio time at Compass Records. For Bentonville 2025, band finalists will be selected internally from the esteemed Awards Council. Previous FreshGrass Awards Band Competition winners include this year’s lineup highlight AJ Lee and Blue Summit. 

Set among the beauty of the Ozarks, FreshGrass | Bentonville has welcomed over 20,000 attendees to the Momentary since its inception. Presented by the Momentary, past artists have included phenomenal talents from Billy Strings to Sierra Ferrell, Trombone Shorty, Jason Isbell, Mavis Staples, Del McCoury, Cimafunk, Caamp, Tank and the Bangas, the GRAMMY Award winning Molly Tuttle & Golden Highway, and a myriad of other national and local stars, Grammy-nominated artists, and internationally and nationally acclaimed musicians taking the stage over the weekend.

For more information and tickets, please visit theMomentary.org/FreshGrass.