On stage for two days, Kentucky’s homegrown musical genre, Bluegrass, was celebrated. For the second year, it was in a festival of fiddle picking and banjo playing dead center on the lawn of Christy’s Garden in the Paristown Art District. The event, titled the Paristown Root Revue, lasted from May 24 to May 25th and brought in a sizable crowd filling up the 5,000 square foot area, Christy’s Garden. “1,750 – 2,000 folks attended Roots Revue over the weekend,” according to Jeanne Hilt, Director of Business Development at Paristown. The crowd, as the first night progressed, saw the audience spill out of the bursting space onto the paved sidelines. Headlining the festival and performing the first night, late in the evening, was renowned bluegrass artist Sam Bush, age 73. Bush is known for playing a progressive style of bluegrass music that fused influences ranging from as hard-hitting as rock to the downbeat of reggae. The second day of the festival was rainy, but people still filled up the lawn and kept dry underneath the metal awning of Christy’s Garden. The second day’s headliner was the Seldom Scene, for whom many lined up through its storied 53 years of performance.
The two-day event was MC’d by Dean Osborne, age 62, who performed as well at the head of his own titularly named band, the Dean Osborne Band. Osborne is an instructor at the Hazard-based Kentucky School of Bluegrass Traditional Music, which also had a troupe of performers, KSBTM Mountain Traditional Ensemble, play as the opening act of the festival. Osborne noted that “the Paristown crowd was with each group and really paid attention,” and that he ”liked how attentive and respectful the crowd was to all the performers and artists.”
Osborne also enjoyed MC’ing as well, as it “allows you to interact with the band in ways you normally would not get to.”
“Sometimes a crowd may not know a group as well as others, so you have an opportunity to educate and really introduce the crowd to the band and not just read off the name,’ Osborne continued.
One of Dean Osborne’s students, Eli Patrick, age 20, was one of the performers in the KSBTM Mountain Traditional Ensemble, playing banjo, and echoed Osborne in similar sentiments about the audience. Patrick found the audience was ”very (respectful) and enthusiastic” about how he and the KSBTM Mountain Traditional Ensemble played. It was his and the ensemble’s second year of playing the festival. Patrick started playing music at around age 5 and hails from a small town of 3,215 people called West Liberty, in eastern Kentucky. He enrolled in KSBTM after meeting Osborne at Mountain Arts Center in Prestonsburg, Kentucky. Osborne invited him to take a tour of KSBTM, and after Patrick’s graduation from high school in 2023, he enrolled in KSBTM. The highlight of the evening for Patrick was ”the finale.”
At the finale, Sam Bush called many of the previous performers from throughout the first day’s roster back on stage to perform with him. “We had the pleasure of playing with the Sam Bush Band and Michael Cleveland,” said Eli Patrick.
Cleveland, who is an acclaimed fiddler, is blind, and a graduate of the local Kentucky School of the Blind in Louisville and has won “Fiddler of the Year” 12 times from the International Bluegrass Music Association, performed previously in the evening.
“Standing on the stage surrounded by musicians of that level made for an experience like no other… it was surreal, to say the least,” Patrick continued.
Patrick said that performing on the stage gives musicians “a feeling that is almost indescribable.” “When a performance goes well and the crowd enjoy(s) themselves, it puts you on a natural high that you don’t get any other way,” he stated. Patrick concluded that playing at the Root Revue, a lot of the audience “hadn’t been exposed to a lot of traditional bluegrass,” and playing at the festival left him with a good feeling about introducing a new crowd to bluegrass.
