This week, a special road trip episode featuring up and coming California based bluegrass phenomenon AJ Lee & Blue Summit recorded live at the 2024 Walnut Valley Festival in Winfield, Kansas. Also, a bonus performance from IBMA award winning hit maker Chris Jones & The Night Drivers.

The annual Walnut Valley Festival, now in it’s 53rd season, is one of the oldest and most respected acoustic music festivals in the world. Held at the Winfield, Kansas fairgrounds, more than 30 musical acts will perform on four separate stages, presenting over 200 hours of live music. Also, there is a dedicated contest stage where contestants vie for national and international championships in Finger Style Guitar, Flat Pick Guitar, Bluegrass Banjo, Old Time Fiddle, Mandolin, Mountain Dulcimer, Hammered Dulcimer, and Autoharp. There is a juried arts and crafts fair, exhibits by renowned instrument makers and music shops, family activities, a bevy of food vendors, a farmer’s market and even a pub! An unusual aspect of Walnut Valley is its campground tradition. Campsites are not reserved and campers line up to claim a choice campsite during the "Land Rush.” Walnut Valley Festival goers often bring their own musical instruments to participate in the sometimes all night campground jam sessions. Bands like Old Sound, that began as "Jam Bands" in the campgrounds, have even been invited to perform at the festival.

AJ Lee & Blue Summit are an award-winning energetic, charming, and technically jaw-dropping band quickly rising on the national roots music scene. Based in Santa Cruz, California, the group met as teenagers, picking and jamming together as kids at local music festivals and jams until one day, they decided they would be a band.  Their first gigs were local, small venues, cafes, restaurants, coffee shops, where they’d play for multiple hours honing their set list and learning shared musical vocabularies. Now, as they criss-cross the country performing hundreds of shows a year to larger and larger audiences, you can sense the intention they had back then – to make music together not for just aspirational reasons, but because it’s fun – and it’s all you want to do as young musicians. Currently made up of Lee on mandolin, fiddler Jan Purat, and guitarists Scott Gates & Sullivan Tuttle, the band carries that youthful, festival-parking-lot energy with them still today, but at the same time there’s a genuine ease and confidence to their music making. This is not the bluegrass of ambitious musicians intent on industry success, this is music made firstly for the joy of making it and primarily made for each other.

https://www.bluesummitmusic.com/about-us-1

Chris Jones & the Night Drivers make some of the most distinctively elegant yet driving bluegrass music heard anywhere today. Deeply rooted in tradition but never bound to it, they deliver original music with tight arrangements, emotional authenticity, and engaging humor. Collectively, Chris Jones & the Night Drivers have won 12 IBMA awards and have racked up 24 #1 songs. In July of 2022, they made their debut on The Grand Ole Opry and were soon asked to return.

In this week’s “From the Vault” segment, OHR producer Jeff Glover offers a 1984 archival recording of Ozark originals Bob Momich & Adam Fudge performing a banjo duet on the tune “Protecting the Innocent,” from the Ozark Folk Center State Park archives.

In this week’s guest host segment, renowned traditional folk musician, writer, and step dancer Aubrey Atwater dives deep into Aesop’s classic fable about the ant & the grasshopper.