A 50-year tradition. Here’s what you need to know about the Delaware Valley Bluegrass Festival.

This weekend, the Delaware Valley Bluegrass Festival celebrates its 50th anniversary with tributes to its founders Bill Monroe and Ralph Stanley and a stellar lineup that both honors tradition and expands horizons into other genres. Performers during the three-day event at the Salem County Fairgrounds in Salem, N.J., include bluegrass legends such as Del McCoury and Ricky Skaggs, award-winning vocalists Claire Lynch, Laurie Lewis, and Danny Paisley, songster and historian of African American folk music Dom Flemons, and New Orleans brass band Tuba Skinny.

First held on Labor Day weekend in 1972 in Bear, Del., the Delaware Bluegrass Festival was a joint venture of Monroe and Stanley, two of the architects of bluegrass music, in conjunction with the newly formed Brandywine Friends of Old Time Music. In its early years, the festival focused on preserving bluegrass and old time folk music, and featured classic performers such as Doc Watson, Merle Travis, Charlie Louvin, Ola Belle Reed, and the Osborne Brothers. The festival moved to Salem in 1990 and became the Delaware Valley Bluegrass Festival.

Carl Goldstein, a now-retired Delaware Superior Court judge who has booked the festival since it began, expanded it to include like-minded acts who were hardly strictly bluegrass or old time traditionalists, such as country comedian Grandpa Jones, Texas troubadour Guy Clark, Canadian fiddler Natalie MacMaster, Cajun band Balfa Toujours, and rising stars such as Alison Krauss and Sierra Hull.

“We have tried to make our focus the more traditional side of bluegrass,” said John Lupton, president of Brandywine Friends. “We tend not to get into the more progressive side of things, but every year we try to bring in something a little different to people, and they respond so favorably that we have to bring them back.”

Del McCoury, who made his first of twenty Bluegrass Festival appearances in 1976 when he lived in southern York County, remembers seeing western singer Hank Thompson in 1988.

“I think it might have been the first bluegrass festival that I ever played that had another style of music on it, and I thought, that’s good, that’s good Carl did that,” McCoury said from his home in Hendersonville, Tenn.

Although bluegrass and old time music arose, primarily, in Kentucky, North Carolina, and Tennessee, it has deep roots in the Mid-Atlantic region, where many families, including McCoury’s, moved after World War II.

“My folks migrated up to Baltimore because of the Martin airplane factory and the steel mill and the shipyards. It brought a lot of Southerners up there because they could get work. Those mountains didn’t have work; the only thing you could do down there is moonshine, and that was kind of against the law,” McCoury said with a laugh.

McCoury, at 83, is a direct connection to bluegrass history: He played with Bill Monroe in 1963. His band, which includes his sons Ronnie and Rob, still performs hard-driving songs sharing a single microphone. But McCoury has also brought his high lonesome tenor voice to collaborations with New Orleans’ Preservation Hall Jazz Band, jam band Phish, alt-country rocker Steve Earle, and current bluegrass star Billy Strings (who, in a sign of the healthy state of bluegrass, has sold out two shows at the Met in November).

Dom Flemons, who will perform two solo sets on Friday, said: “I think it’s beautiful that they are willing to involve new types of acts or acts that have a slightly different sound that at the same time is related on a fundamental musical level.”

Flemons, who first played the festival in 2018, is one of those acts. He was a founding member of the Carolina Chocolate Drops with Rhiannon Giddens, is a scholar of Black traditional music, and plays fiddle, guitar, and a variety of banjos.

“I’m always presenting some of the aspects of African American culture that have been a part of bluegrass from the beginning,” he said. “If I’m performing North Carolina Piedmont music on the guitar, like Etta Baker, Eliza Cotton, even Leslie Riddle, that type of music is not the same as bluegrass, but bluegrass has always lived side by side with these old time musics.”

Singer and guitarist Danny Paisley is part of this region’s bluegrass tradition: He was born in Landenberg and now lives in Oxford. He attended the first festival with his father Bob, who was a member of Ted Lundy and the Southern Mountain Boys.

“As a 13-year-old who loves bluegrass music, I was in heaven,” said Paisley, who joined the Southern Mountain Boys in 1975. He’s been on stage at the festival almost every year since then, including as a member of his father’s band Southern Grass. He now leads his own version of Southern Grass, which features his son Ryan and two of Ted Lundy’s sons. Paisley will play two sets on Saturday and one on Sunday; he will also join the Del McCoury Band and singer Claire Lynch for Saturday’s headlining tribute to Monroe and Stanley.

The festival runs from Friday to Sunday and often draws around 5,000 people, although Lupton notes the daily numbers are hard to gauge. People bring chairs and come and go, and some stay in the campground, which can be a festival within the festival. “A lot of diehard bluegrass fans … make their own music, too,” he said. “Some of them never go near the stage.”

It’s a family-friendly event, with a children’s stage, clogging workshops and other programming. Flemons is bringing his kids; Paisley will bring his mother, who is in her 90s.

“It’s a big thing to music people, especially for bluegrass and old time music and Americana, but to the general public, it’s a little bit of a secret,” Paisley said.

“It’s a small nation for three days of the year,” Lupton said. And it’s been that way for half a century.

INFO:

Delaware Valley Bluegrass Festival, 9/2 — 9/4.

$140 for the weekend; one-day tickets $70 Friday and Saturday, $60 Sunday for adults, with discounts for seniors and students.

Salem County Fairgrounds, 735 Route 40, Pilesgrove, NJ.

delawarevalleybluegrass.org