For decades the onset of Spring meant gathering at the Spirit of the Suwannee Music Park in Live Oak, Florida for a weekend of fun, family, Bluegrass and string music. A beloved tradition continues as the picturesque grounds play host to a new take on a classic family-friendly gathering with the 3rd Annual Suwannee Spring Reunion taking place Thursday through Sunday, March 21-24, 2019.

A story with a head wound is always a good story. This story has a head wound. But it's not the best part of the story. This story is about music. Music at Grey Fox Bluegrass Festival. You'll notice I omitted the. It's not The Grey Fox Bluegrass Festival. It’s Grey Fox. We’ll get to that just like we’ll get to the head wound. But first, music. After all, that’s why we travel to the Catskills every year. But why this music? What about this music sets it apart? Truth be told, bluegrass can feel so rigid.

Highlighted by spirited headlining performances by The Devil Makes Three (Saturday), The Infamous Stringdusters (Friday), and Railroad Earth (Sunday), there was a profound additional component to this year’s WinterWonderGrass Tahoe. The weather. Before turning all sunny on Sunday, Friday and Saturday’s proceedings included periodic showers of snow, graupel (look it up), and a little rain.

Sometimes I think I am so full of shit. Ask my wife, and it’s probably safe to drop sometimes I think. But coming to Grey Fox Bluegrass Music Festival, a festival I come to every year, trying to think of a new way to make you, fair reader, understand that it is unlike anything that you have or ever will experience? I am full of shit to think I can do this. But thankfully, this year mother nature is co-writing this review, and she’s writing in the blurry ink of rain.

I have a moleskine book I keep in my pocket at concerts. My wife gave it to me as a gift years ago. She always gives the best gifts. This tattered little vestige to my musical history is used solely for notes at concerts I am reviewing. Nothing could better embody who I am, not just as a writer, but as a person. Every time I write in the book, it is a process. I have to take the now stretched out elastic rope off of the book, turn to the page marked with the connected bookmark and pick up where I left off.

In a time where any musician can self-produce and release their own independent album, up-and-coming talents need to set the bar extra high, or at least posses image marketability. The story behind music industry insider Matt Reynolds’ debut release is far from this trend. The longtime road manager for Grateful Dead tribute favorite Dark Star Orchestra has released his impressively diverse Been Long Gone after years behind the scenes.

To return to a point in your life that you have already lived is metaphysical. Déjà vu, as most of us call it, feels mystical, even if it has a chemical explanation. Scientific evidence aside, to relive something that you have lived before is an experience that seems to connect us with something beyond ourselves. We can both be in the moment and be able to predict (or at least have the feeling that we are predicting) what is coming around the next corner. But to experience déjà vu and to be able to improve upon the actions that once were? Now that is something different altogether.

What a magical weekend it was indeed at the Dark Star Jubilee. Each year is just as good as the last if not better. I had the honor of attending this festival for the fourth year in a row out at Legend Valley, Ohio over Memorial Day weekend. There are so many positive things to be said about this festival. It is a world of its own filled with beautiful music, positive people, smiles in every direction, and of course Grateful Dead Tunes.

Our society has developed a Chicken Little mentality that leaves lots of folks either glued to their cell phone or computer while waiting for a miracle or cringing that the good old days are gone.

The pop-up and its small footprint we would call home for the next 4 nights was ready. The sun had long since set and the kids were happily snuggled under doubled over blankets in the 1975 Apache Mesa. The evening’s cold temperatures were more than the few packed layers of cotton could defend against, so Laura and I were doing our best to think warm thoughts and be thankful for the reprieve from last year’s unbearable heat as we sat outside in the still and dewy night.  Her vapor filled exhalation was caught in the beam from her headlamp, over top of the festival’s program.