MerleFest
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MerleFest is an annual Americana music festival held in Wilkesboro, North Carolina by Wilkes Community College at the end of April. The festival is hosted by legendary guitar player Doc Watson and is named for his son, Eddy Merle Watson, who died in a farming accident in 1985. The four-day-long festival was founded in 1988 and now attracts more than 80,000 participants [1], making it the largest folk music festival in the United States. Its annual economic impact on northwestern NC exceeds $14 million [2] and the festival has contributed some $7,000,000 to Wilkes Community College.
MerleFest offers a generation and genre crossing mix of traditional and contemporary roots music, bringing together the very best of Bluegrass, contemporary acoustic, blues, folk, old time, Cajun, jazz, and singer-songwriter musics. Artists can often be enjoyed in on-stage jam sessions featuring unusual combinations of musicians, such as Sam Bush and Gillian Welch with the Waybacks and Bob Weir of the Grateful Dead in 2006. Other artists who have performed on MerleFest's twelve stages over the first 19 years have included Dolly Parton, Willie Nelson, Earl Scruggs, the Dixie Chicks, John Prine, Alison Krauss & Union Station, Donna the Buffalo, Natalie MacMaster, Vassar Clements, Jorma Kaukonen and Jack Casady from Hot Tuna, David Grisman, Ricky Skaggs, Emmylou Harris, Jerry Douglas, Del McCoury, Mary Chapin Carpenter, Howard Armstrong, and Tony Rice.
