Bristol Rhythm & Roots Reunion is celebrating 25 years in the Twin City. Running the show is a first-time festival director.
But Richard Oakley is no stranger to large music events. His 10-plus years in ticketing, artist relations, site operations and VIP customer operations have taken the Raleigh, North Carolina, native to Bonnaroo, Coachella, Lollapalooza and Outside Lands, among others.
Among his first gigs after graduating from Appalachian State University was at FloydFest, where he interned for the festival’s future chief operating officer, Sam Calhoun.
When Rhythm & Roots’ umbrella organization, Birthplace of Country Music, asked Calhoun for recommendations, he connected BCM officials with Oakley, he said.
“It takes a dedicated, fierce, wholeheartedly believed intention and desire — not to mention a whole lot of hard work, blindly raising your hand and learning new, foreign skills in rapid fire — to rise to leadership positions in the live-music industry,” Calhoun wrote in a text message. “And Richard has done exactly that, now a decade since he raised his hand asking to be my intern.”
Calhoun added that he is proud of Oakley and excited to “stand with him and support him.” He and multiple other FloydFest managers will be working as part of the festival staff in Bristol this weekend. Oakley said that even though the two events are not officially affiliated, they consider themselves festival best friends.
“I am confident and certain that Richard’s creativity, forward thinking and ability to curate and cultivate relationships will positively serve the storied history — its past, present and future — of the Birthplace of Country Music and its annual celebrations,” Calhoun wrote.
Oakley has been on the job for a year, but he spent last year’s festival “learning the ropes and seeing how everything was done,” he said. This year’s Rhythm & Roots is his first full cycle of planning and producing.
Atop the bill is folk and roots music star Sierra Ferrell, returning for the first time since 2021, when she was an ascending star. Ferrell headlines on Saturday, along with The Del McCoury Band, Braxton Keith and Mon Rovîa. Top-of-bill acts for Friday are St. Paul & The Broken Bones, Los Lobos, The War & Treaty and The Creekers. Sunday features Old Crow Medicine Show and Marty Stuart & His Fabulous Superlatives.
Getting a strong lineup for the 25th festival was the first thing Oakley jumped into, he said, with the festival’s music planning committee.
“It’s a committee of very knowledgeable and diversely oriented music fans and industry professionals, and music community members from this area,” he said. “We worked together, and I think we really wanted to get on the cutting edge of this kind of music, and stay true to the same principles that were at play in 1927 when Ralph Peer got the Bristol Sessions [recordings] together: take what we have and platform it to the world.”
That started with a regional hero in West Virginia native Ferrell.
“She said last time she was on stage here that her first time playing the festival, she wasn’t even on the stage — she was busking in town, and then played a very small stage at one point and the Country Mural [Stage] a few years later,” Oakley said. “Now, she is absolutely the reigning queen” of roots music. “We’re so excited to have her back, and she’s going to be the biggest artist we’ve ever had at this festival.”
Here since the beginning
An old-time string band, The Corklickers, hasn’t seen Ferrell’s level of fame, but has seen the changes around downtown Bristol, having played every previous Rhythm & Roots.
The Banner Elk, North Carolina, group returns for the 25th time. In Friday and Saturday sets, the band will celebrate a milestone of its own: 50 years of playing songs from The Carter Family, The Stonemans and Stonemans sideman “Uncle” Eck Dunford — acts that were part of the 1927 Peer recordings — along with music from “Blind” Alfred Reed, said banjo man Mark Adams.
It will be bittersweet for Adams and his bandmates. His brother, fiddler Gil Adams, with whom he started the group in 1976, died on July 4.
The brothers, who grew up in Kingsport and ate regular Sunday dinners with extended family in Bristol, had been looking forward to sharing stages at the Country Mural on Friday and Theatre Bristol on Saturday.
“I suspect my brother would have wanted us to” go on at Bristol, Adams said. The band also has a 50th anniversary show set for Oct. 3 at the storied Down Home Pickin’ Parlor, which is also celebrating 50 years in Johnson City, Tennessee, Adams said.
The Corklickers got on the first Bristol Rhythm lineup in part due to their cousin, Rob Nicar, who was on the festival’s original board of directors, and in part due to the reputation they had built playing such venues as the Carter Fold in Hiltons and the old Slagle’s Pasture in Elizabethton. The brothers had gone to Appalachian State and stayed in western North Carolina after graduation, but frequently drove U.S. 421 from there to Elizabethton and Johnson City to pick and sing, he said.
Adams remembered seeing movies as a kid at the Paramount Bristol theater, on the Tennessee side of State Street, and the Cameo Theatre, on the Virginia side, and then as an adult taking part in fundraiser performances to refurbish the Cameo. Both venues have been part of the festival.
“It’s pretty neat that they’ve preserved a lot of those historic buildings and have gotten some commerce back in the downtown area there,” Adams said.
Late nights become early mornings
The festivities have typically ended before midnight. This year, look for more late-night programming, Oakley said.
At least three stages will run certain shows past midnight: Organ Fairchild at Sixth Street, Johnny Mullenax at the Country Mural and Meels at Machiavelli’s Restaurant on Friday, and Caitlin Krisko & The Broadcast at Machiavelli’s on Saturday will all end early the following morning, according to the schedule the festival has posted online.
“We see the desire to keep the party going, and we’ve gone until about probably 11, 11:30 in the past, but we’re pushing that back a little bit and just adding some more programming there,” Oakley said.
Sunday night will end later than it has traditionally, though it won’t push the witching hour. Mullenax will headline an afterparty at the Paramount, with Holy Roller and Florencial & The Feeling. At the State Street stage, Old Crow will go on at 7 p.m. with what Oakley called a “Bristol-inspired” and “Bristol-focused” set in front of the “A Good Place to Live” sign that straddles the Tennessee-Virginia line.
“We put that on State Street because we think it’s really important to have that final moment in both states,” he said. “That’s a big thing around here. We want to make sure we’re spreading the love to both wonderful states and cities that make up the one Bristol and the one Bristol Rhythm & Roots Reunion.”
What’s next: 100 years after the ‘Big Bang’
Plans are already gestating for what will be an even larger celebration next year, 100 years since recording engineer — and, later, music publishing magnate — Peer traveled to Bristol and recorded the Carters, Stonemans and Jimmie Rodgers in the sessions that came to be known as “the Big Bang of Country Music.”
The Birthplace of Country Music Museum and 100.1 FM WBCM, Radio Bristol — which are both under the same BCM umbrella as the festival — are also likely to play major roles in it. One-of-a-kind music sets are a strong possibility as well, Oakley said.
“Planning and some talks behind it started even a year or two before I got here, have been heavily underway the last year and are really picking up,” Oakley said. “We have a few things we’ve got to hold back until after the festival this year, but we are working on some really special projects and really trying to tell the whole story of what’s happened, what’s happening, what’s going to happen with this musical world that started in 1927.”
The festival will celebrate the fact that there are bluegrass bars in Tokyo, and folk artists coming from Liberia — “shout out Mon Rovîa real quick,” Oakley said.
“Some of the most popular country, Americana, bluegrass, folk music artists in the world are from far away from Bristol and from Appalachia and … are still just as important and … big players in that scene and in that story.”
But first, this weekend’s story is waiting to be told, played and sung. Check for tickets and more information at birthplaceofcountrymusic.org.
