What makes a great festival? Great bands are essential. A beautiful venue with plenty of space to spread out? That’s a bonus. And let’s not forget about vendors with delicious food and unique items to explore. But perhaps most importantly, a great festival has a spirit of community and a setting so inviting you’d visit even without a festival. Enter Bluegrass Island Music Festival in Manteo, North Carolina—probably the best festival you haven’t heard of, until now.

It’s been 20 years since their start with the one and only Dolly Parton … The GRASCALS are celebrating their 20th anniversary as a band with the new album “20” (Mountain Home Music Company).

“When The Grascals started in 2004, I really never dreamed that we would still be going strong 20 years later,” confesses founding member Danny Roberts, “but here we are!” Thus the title of the bluegrass sextet’s new album for Mountain Home Music Company: 20.

“When the Grascals started in 2004 I really never dreamed that we would still be going strong 20 years later,” confesses founding member Danny Roberts, “but here we are!” Thus the title of the bluegrass sextet’s new album for Mountain Home Music Company, now available for pre-save/add ahead of its August 23 release: 20.

After a moody meditation on addiction (“I Go”) and a sweetly hopeful ode to lifelong love (“Just Let Me Know”), bluegrass stalwarts The Grascals are back with an energetic portrait of a lovelorn man who just can’t get the woman he’s wooing to reciprocate his feelings.

After two songs that spotlight his emotive vocals and original songwriting, mandolin master and Grascals founder Danny Roberts returns with “My Brown Eyed Darling,” a new single that not only features a guest singer in wife and bassist Andrea Roberts — that’s a 1994 photo of her on the cover — but offers an organic example of the way songs from the bluegrass canon resonate across the decades.  

On the heels of 2022’s hit single, “Small Town America,” Danny Roberts — best known as a founder of and mandolinist for bluegrass powerhouse, The Grascals — returns with a somber meditation that takes its place in a long line of powerful country and bluegrass songs reflecting the hard, dangerous working life of underground coal miners.  

It’s been almost twenty years since Terry Eldredge, Jamie Johnson, Jimmy Mattingly, Dave Talbot, Terry Smith, and Danny Roberts played a fateful run of shows at the Station Inn (with Bobby Osborne as the special guest) as an unnamed band in February of 2004—the earliest iteration of what would become bluegrass supergroup, The Grascals. The band quickly rose from the hallowed and popcorn-scented Station Inn, and their signature sound of cutting edge bluegrass mixed with Nashville songwriting sensibilities made legions of fast fans.

Since the music’s earliest days, regret for leaving the childhood home and a longing to return have been among the most durable themes in bluegrass. From “The Fields Have Turned Brown” to “Old Home Place” and beyond, generations of songwriters and musicians have contrasted cold, uncaring city life to rural family traditions, sometimes in mournful laments and sometimes through deceptively up-tempo sounds.