The “Woodstock of Bluegrass,” held 50 years ago this week on a farm in the rolling hills of Carroll County, is variously remembered as a beloved moment from attendees’ youths, a seminal moment of the counterculture era, a traffic and logistical nightmare for locals, a once-in-a-lifetime gathering of musicians or a cautionary tale about poor event planning.
However it is recalled, Stompin 76 refuses to be forgotten. To mark the anniversary, the Carroll County Historical Society, local amateur historians and music fans have all undertaken efforts this year to not only preserve those memories, but to make sure the true story of this legendary musical moment is told.
Stompin 76 was held Aug. 6-8, 1976, in an area along the New River called Pot Rock, located in the Woodlawn community of Carroll County, just north of Galax.
It is estimated that more than 100,000 people flooded into the site, which was only equipped to handle a fraction of that number. They came to hear some of the best bluegrass, blues, country and folk artists of the time — a total of 24 performers, including Earl Scruggs, Bonnie Raitt, John Prine, Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, Doc and Merle Watson, and Ry Cooder — all for a ticket price of $12.
“Most attendees were young people, in the 18-25 demographic, from above the Mason-Dixon line,” Mark Boyles, a writer and music promoter who researched the event for its anniversary, wrote in a brief history he recently compiled. “They arrived with long hair, optional clothing, peace signs and all the trappings of the ’70s counterculture.”
Many of them hitchhiked to Carroll County from Maryland, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York or other points to the north, where the festival had been heavily promoted. Some drove in from as far as California. Though there was a clash of cultures with some older locals, local youths joined the crowd at Stompin once word got out.
Marianne Kovatch, associate director of the Blue Ridge Music Center, said the festival tapped into the cultural zeitgeist, drawing in hippies who rejected pop culture and sought out “authentic” experiences, and preferred the folksy styles offered at Stompin 76 over pop music. Embracing the era’s “back-to-the-land” movement, many hippies were moving from cities to rural areas and integrating into the mountain cultures there, Kovatch said. This created the perfect atmosphere for a folk festival in the mountains of Southwest Virginia.
To hear them tell it, those three days of music and freedom are mostly pleasant — if a bit hazy — memories for the attendees, the youngest of whom are now in their 60s. But some locals remember it instead as a mess — tons of garbage, plentiful drugs, naked hippies, ransacked farms, violent encounters with a motorcycle club and backed-up roads for miles around.
So where does the truth lie in this “Tale of Two Stompins,” as Naomi Hall of the Carroll County Historical Society puts it?
The road to Stompin
Greg Talley is a Galax native and historian who maintains one of the most comprehensive archives of photos from Stompin 76. He didn’t attend the event, but his long fascination with it prompted him to seek out promoter Hal Davidson at his home outside Baltimore. He recently wrote about the encounter in a short history of the event.
“He was excited there was so much happening with Stompin 76 after 50 years,” Talley wrote of Davidson, who is often shy of the press due to what he characterizes as inaccurate reporting about the event in the past.
While still in his teens, Davidson was already working in public relations for ice shows and the Barnum & Bailey Circus, and had promoted shows in Baltimore for performers like Thin Lizzy, Golden Earring, Spirit and Nils Lofgren. After forming his own company, Cactus Promotions, he came up with an idea for a big event to commemorate the nation’s 200th birthday in 1976.
“I felt a major rock festival was needed for the bicentennial,” Davidson said in an interview with Talley. “But cost was a factor, so I decided bluegrass with a touch of blues would be more cost-efficient.”
Stompin 76 in photos
“Stompin 76 Remembered” will be held from from 7-8:30 p.m. Thursday at The Rex Theater, 113 E. Grayson St. in Galax. It will include a showing of more than 500 collected photos from Greg Talley, plus expert panelists and a special guest: Stompin 76 promoter Hal Davidson. The photos are being screened, without narration, all week at The Rex.
Talley has posted hundreds of his collected Stompin 76 photos on his Facebook page, and the comments section is loaded with remembrances.
Davidson also has a website (stompin76.com) where you can get some backstory about the festival and buy classic merchandise, like posters and T-shirts.
Mickey Andrews, a lawyer in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, whom Davidson knew, had a 100-acre property in Carroll County with open spaces and a natural amphitheater, where a festival called the New River Jam had been held in 1975. Davidson leased Andrews’ land and an adjoining 99 acres from Boyd Lawson.
Davidson raised $30,000, began working with Nashville booking agent Keith Case to sign the talent and started advertising Stompin 76 in 20 states up and down the East Coast. He took out ads in Rolling Stone and The Village Voice, printed thousands of bumper stickers, put up posters in record shops, and had girls in bikinis handing out flyers and airplanes buzzing beaches, trailing banners.
His idea to promote the festival heavily in places north of Galax was smart, Kovatch said. In areas like Washington, Philadelphia, Baltimore, New York and New England, music fans were hearing bluegrass, old-time, blues and folk at festivals and in coffee houses. Those genres were gaining popularity in the North, while there was less interest in traditional music in the South at that time.
The plan worked — maybe too well. A crowd of 30,000 to 35,000 was expected, but thanks to the aggressive ad campaign, about 100,000 or more showed up.
“In fear of not promoting enough, we over promoted and made history,” Davidson wrote on his website dedicated to the festival. “My apologies to that rural county and those nice country people.”
The event wasn’t marketed or promoted locally, so residents of Galax and Carroll County were caught off-guard when thousands of “Yankee hippies” began arriving.
“Cars from up and down the East Coast and as far away as California jammed the main highways,” Carroll County native Ralph Berrier Jr. wrote in a 1994 article in The Roanoke Times. “Route 58 was backed up for 15 miles near Galax. The available campsites were filled Thursday. By noon Friday, the 40,000 total had been reached. The cars still poured in.”
A long line of hikers and vehicles clogged local roads trying to reach the festival site, and traffic on Interstate 77 was reportedly backed up 10 miles. “Grinding to a halt on their road to paradise, a.k.a. greater Woodlawn, would-be attendees by the thousands abandoned their vehicles on the highway or any of the limited side roads in the area,” Boyles wrote.
“People walked to the festival, sometimes up to 10 to 12 miles,” Hall said. “Others hopped in canoes and floated down the river. Some paid $5 to ride in a cattle truck” to the site.
The Andrews and Lawson properties were full of campers. “So were the surrounding farms — whether they wanted to be or not,” Hall said. “Some of them made money by renting campsites to the out-of-towners. One person made $2,500 that weekend; others made nothing.”
“No one was prepared for the crush of hedonistic humanity that invaded this heretofore peaceful rural area,” Berrier wrote. “The throng prevented mail from being delivered near the site, and it kept many residents from going to work. One local factory had to shut down because many of its employees couldn’t get out of Pot Rock and neighboring communities.”
With a crowd three times what was expected, what could possibly go wrong?
“To say they were under-resourced and overwhelmed was like saying Woodstock was a bit muddy,” Boyles wrote. Like Woodstock, Altamont and other outdoor festivals of the 1960s and 1970s, “things got more than a little out of hand.”
Things get out of hand
Hall believes locals were so unprepared because various contracts signed prior to the event greatly underestimated crowd sizes. One document said Stompin 76 would only draw about 2,000 people, she said, while another estimated 4,000 to 8,000 overnight campers. Hall also noted that there was no requirement to notify local authorities about any of these plans.
The logistical issues emerged quickly. “It soon became apparent there wouldn’t be enough food to go around — short of a loaves-and-fishes miracle,” Boyles wrote. “A handful of industrious young folks hoofed it all the way down to Galax, loaded up shopping carts and pushed them eight miles back to the show.”
“Some kind-hearted residents gave the hungry campers food from their kitchens or their gardens or their stores,” Hall said. “Some residents, unfortunately, woke up to find their gardens had been ransacked without permission.”
Lawson’s wife and his daughter Teresa — 10 years old at the time — sold snacks out of a small trailer just behind the barn.
There wasn’t enough water, either, and Hall said there are stories of Carnation milk tanker trucks being rinsed out and filled with clean water for transport to the festival site. The 100 port-a-johns proved insufficient for the crowd size.
With roads clogged, most performers were brought in by helicopter from Galax, landing on a custom-built helipad on the farm. Davidson said it cost $3,000 a day for the chopper.
Jeff Hannah of the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band said in a 1994 interview that Woodstock was the only event of comparable size they played. “When we flew over it, it sort of went on forever,” he said of Stompin 76.
The late Doc Watson said in a 1994 interview that it was the largest crowd he had ever played for, but he wasn’t sure how many were actually listening. “There were so many people, you just about had to play for yourself, you know what I mean?” he told The Roanoke Times.
According to Davidson, Raitt was afraid to fly on the helicopter, “so she arrived to the stage on the back of a motorcycle, with long red hair flowing and a guitar strapped to her back.”
For many Stompers, the “back to nature” trend of the 1970s meant clothing was always optional. A Roanoke Times article from the time reported that “as the Earl Scruggs Revue fiddled in the afternoon, two nude men flat-footed near the stage.”
“There were often more nude people than clothed,” Berrier wrote in his 1994 article. “Men and women bathed and swam naked in the New River and in Crooked Creek. Nude people streaked through the woods.”
Pot Rock resident Carroll Lineberry told Berrier that he saw at least 300 naked people in or around the New River one afternoon. “You never saw a girl in a short miniskirt in these parts,” Lineberry said. “Then this thing happens, and everybody’s nekkid.”
Complicating the logistical issues was the fact that many of the attendees were “eight miles high on some combination of beer, moonshine, marijuana, quaaludes, cocaine, heroin and LSD,” Boyles wrote.
According to a Galax Gazette article from the time, no one died, but 280 people were hospitalized, with authorities attributing half to drug overdoses.
“Marijuana and LSD were doled out like hot dogs and hamburgers from open-air vendors,” Berrier wrote.
So where was security during all this debauchery?
As Davidson tells it, a security firm had been hired and paid in advance, but when they saw the actual crowd size, they demanded an additional $30,000. He didn’t have the money, so they walked. Davidson said in an interview with Talley that he then hired the Pagans Motorcycle Club chapter from Hillsville as security, paying the several hundred members with a single six-pack of beer.
The Pagans described themselves as a “motorcycle club,” not an outlaw biker gang like the Hell’s Angels, but “there were reports of beatings, thefts of food and beer, and more,” Hall said.
Still, she noted that “some people had a positive experience with the Pagans, as they helped clear roads for ambulances” by picking up cars and moving them, or flipping them onto their sides.
Dickie Duncan, who was vice president of the Pagans chapter at the time, told Berrier in a 1994 interview that the club kept the calm in part through intimidation. “You’ve got to have some fear to hold people in control,” he said.
It sounds like a disaster, but in most attendees’ recollections, the recurring theme is that they had the time of their lives, despite the many issues they faced.
Fond (and foggy) memories
“I enjoyed the heck out of it,” said Eddie Alford, curator of the Jeff Matthews Memorial Museum in Galax, who shared his Stompin 76 stories at an Aug. 2 anniversary event sponsored by the Carroll County Historical Society.
In June 1976, he had just graduated high school and was on a trip to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, when he first learned of the festival back home. “We go to a record store and see a poster, and we buy tickets,” he said with a laugh. “And then we see airplanes going by the beach, with banners saying ‘Stompin 76 – 8 Miles North of Galax, Va.’”
The day before the festival, Alford was gassing up his car at a station in Hillsville. “I hear this rumbling, like thunder, and here come the motorcycles, coming up [U.S.] 221. It was the Pagans, at least 100 of them,” he recalled. Among the motorcycles was a trike pulling a coffin-shaped trailer that served as the club’s beer cooler.
Legends and lore
Many have shared stories of Stompin 76’s various legends and myths. One of the oft-repeated pieces of lore is that a baby was born there, a girl named after Bonnie Raitt. Another legend has it that two children were born, and named “Stompin One” and “Stompin Two.”
Various stories claim the child’s (or children’s) birthplace was in a van or on the helicopter, but Hall said none of those stories has ever been verified. However, Raitt did indeed announce from the stage that a baby had been born.
In an interview with writer Mark Boyles, festival promoter Hal Davidson dispelled one of the pervasive stories about the festival, that the musicians didn’t get paid and the promoters left in the helicopter with all the cash. According to Davidson, the musicians were paid half up front, and the rest came after the performance. “Every musician got paid every dollar owed,” he said. “The helicopters were only used to transport stars, not as a getaway.”
Davidson shared with historian Greg Talley a story about Earl Scruggs, who was paid half of his $10,000 fee up front. After the show, “one of Scruggs’ managers asked Hal to meet Earl behind the stage and pick up the second payment,” Talley said. “When a large luxury car pulled up at the appointed time, Earl unexpectedly popped out of the trunk. A surprised Hal handed him the other $5,000, then Earl returned to the trunk and the car pulled away. Maybe Earl was nervous about the amount of money involved or didn’t want to be recognized.”
Being locals, Alford and his friends knew the backroads to reach the site without getting stuck in traffic. When they finally ran out of road, they parked their VW Beetle and walked 3.5 miles to the site. As it turned out, their tickets weren’t necessary — no one was checking for them at the gate.
They enjoyed the music of Eric Weisberg & Deliverance, Papa John and Red, White & Bluegrass that first day, Alford said, and when they were ready to leave, they jumped on a van’s back bumper, held on tight and rode it back to where they’d parked.
On the second day of the festival, a hard rain fell on the crowd, which afforded Alford an unexpected sight: “A young couple came walking along, and when the rain started pouring down they immediately took off all their clothes, folded them up, put them under their arms and kept right on going.”
On the final day, Alford remembers the reverent hush that came over the crowd when Nitty Gritty Dirt Band played “Mr. Bojangles,” a hit for the band at the time. “The crowd got so quiet you could hear a pin drop,” he said.
Wayne Henderson, a nationally recognized luthier and guitarist from Grayson County, shared a story for Boyles’ research, about trying to enter a local band contest that had been advertised on the Stompin 76 poster. When he and his band arrived, Henderson discovered that the contest had been canceled, or possibly never existed.
“We spent hours trying to get there with tents and vehicles blocking the road,” Henderson said. “We wouldn’t have never gotten there if [bandmate] Herb Key hadn’t offered the Pagans a bottle of Jack Daniels to clear the road.” He said some of the other band members complained so much that the festival organizers paid them $500.
Nancy Sluys, banjo player for the award-winning old-time band Pilot Mountain Bobcats, said she and a friend hitchhiked to Galax from Greenville, North Carolina, with a pair of counterfeit tickets they made, a banjo and what they had on their backs.
Sluys said she enjoyed jamming with other musicians, and got to meet bluegrass legend John Hartford. When Stompin’ ended, she stuck around to clean up, but was never paid — except for a keg of beer.
Several people spoke at the Aug. 2 Carroll County Historical Society event about their experiences.
Dr. Darlene Burcham Vaughn said she was 17 when she attended the festival. “It was the best of times, but for the families here in those neighborhoods, who had no clue what was going to hit them, it was the worst of times,” she said. “It was a blessing on my path of experiences that my hometown had something so rich to offer the populace in the ’70s.”
Jerry Sharpe’s grandfather, Wilson Sharpe, owned Knob Hill Grocery, which was not far from the festival site. “He completely sold out of everything in the store,” Sharpe said. “We saw tags from California, Texas; people pulling boats, because they thought they’d be able to put them in the river.”
Sharpe, who was 8 years old at the time, remembered a family pulling into his grandpa’s store in a station wagon. “They guy said they didn’t have any money, and they were trying to get back to California.” Sharpe’s grandfather traded gas for some of the man’s tools.
The aftermath
When Stompin 76 ended, it left behind more than just shell-shocked locals, lawsuits, hungover hippies and mountains of garbage. It had an impact on other music festivals and drew a whole new demographic to Southwest Virginia: people who wanted to immerse themselves in the music they heard on that weekend and who genuinely fell in love with Appalachia.
But still, there was a lot of garbage.
‘A very defining moment in my life’
Wendy Smith Taylor is administrator of the long-running Facebook group “I Was There For Stompin 76,” where attendees post stories, memories and photos. Established in 2009, it now has more than 2,200 members. She shared some of the thousands of posts from the page for this article:
• Frank Miller posted that he was a volunteer from the Help Center in Radford during Stompin 76. “Our responsibility was trip management, basic first aid (cuts on bare feet) and walking amongst the few who partied too much and passed out,” he said. “We checked to make sure they were OK; breathing and all that stuff.”
For Miller, the highlight was when, “after my shift I went backstage, climbed up on the roof of a U-Haul box truck to watch Bonnie Raitt. I’ll never forget her cover of John Prine’s ‘Angel From Montgomery.’”
• Patti Carney said she came down from Rockville, Maryland, with two friends. It was getting dark when they arrived, so they set up their tent in a field and crashed. “We woke up to a bunch of long-horned cows around us,” she posted. “You never saw a tent unassembled so fast. We headed up the road and met some Tennessee people drinking moonshine for breakfast. They were kind enough to share.”
• Jim Koopman said he was hitchhiking from Florida back home to Chicago, and one of his rides was going to Stompin 76. So he decided to come along.
“I knew nothing about bluegrass, but that weekend I got a great education,” Koopman posted. “Mostly I remember being super impressed by the campfire jams. Guys who had just met would agree on a song and a key, somebody would count to four and off they’d go, perfectly tight like they’d played together for years.”
• For Diane Cummings, Stompin 76 “was the prelude to a lifetime of adventure.” Barely 16 years old, Cummings said she “jumped right into the back of an old ambulance and hit the road” from Long Island, New York.
“I have travelled far and wide these past 45 years,” she posted. “In the spirit of my Stompin adventure, I’ve done many things others find foolhardy and had a great time doing them. Yes, Stompin 76 was a very defining moment in my life. Thank you all for creating a safe place for me to grow into my own.”
“The trash that was left behind was legendary,” Hall said, “and it sat there for a week because the promoter didn’t pick it up, as he was contracted to do.” Carroll County ultimately cleaned it up, at a cost of $2,800. The Lawson farm was declared a health hazard after the event, due to the trash and human waste.
The Carroll County Board of Supervisors passed an ordinance in December 1976 tightly regulating outdoor music festivals, Berrier reported in The Roanoke Times in 1994. “The ordinance requires up to a $25,000 bond ensuring cleanup and that certain regulations will be met. Many other counties in Southwest Virginia, fearful that a Stompin could take place in their backyards, passed similar ordinances.”
Lawson and Andrews, the two landowners, filed lawsuits against each other up until 1983, seeking damages associated with the event. One case was appealed all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which refused to hear it.
As for Davidson, he went on to produce many more events, including music festivals in Australia and Canada, and wrote books on festival promotion. He also produced Stompin 99, which was held in Buffalo Gap, West Virginia, with a lineup of performers that included a returning Doc Watson, The Seldom Scene, Ralph Stanley and Donna the Buffalo.
Kovatch said Stompin 76 might have been a “one and done” event, but its legacy lives on in the Galax Old Fiddlers Conventions that followed.
That year’s convention was held just a week after Stompin 76, and many from the festival crowd heard about it and hung around for another week to attend. Kovatch said this changed the character of the long-running event, which had been held for more than 40 years by that point.
“There was a big influx in 1976 of people from other places” attending the convention, which had until then not attracted too many fans or musicians from outside the region, Kovatch explained. “They told their friends about it, and they came back. … That changed the fiddlers convention forever.”
It was clear that Stompin 76 wasn’t going to have an encore, so for the hippies who wanted to repeat that “authentic experience” of camping out and enjoying roots music in the mountains, Galax became their destination for years after.
The convention is celebrating its 90th year in 2026. “It became a national, and eventually international, event,” Kovatch said, in part because of Stompin 76.
Talley recently visited the Stompin site and walked those hallowed hills, which have returned to pristine pastures that are no longer accessible to the public. He also talked with Boyd Lawson, now 90 years old.
“The only remaining structures left are the collapsed barn and a small building at the entrance that had bathrooms in it,” Talley wrote in his history. “The Lawsons no longer own the land that the barn, stage and helicopter pad were on. Mickey Andrews has since passed, but his family still owns the property where half the festival site was situated.”
Looking back 50 years later has given Talley some perspective on the event. “It started with good intentions. Did it get too big and out of hand in some ways? Sure. But the memories for the 100,000-plus who attended will always be cherished,” he said.
Given the comments on his Stompin 76 Facebook posts, he said, “I’d say there were a lot more good times than bad.”
So was Stompin 76 a success or a failure? Like everything about the event, it depends on who you ask.
Though Stompin 76 was a massive success as a festival, it was a financial failure, Hall said. Davidson estimated that it cost about $650,000 to put on the event, and though the 35,000 tickets sold out, two-thirds of the 100,000 attendees didn’t pay to get in. “That’s not a great business model,” Hall said.
“The music at Stompin 76 lived up to its promise,” Boyles wrote. “The magical sounds of those times echoed through the hills and over the river, and the spirited crowd responded in kind. From that perspective, Hal Davidson was highly successful. His dream of bringing so many kinds of bands and so many kinds of people together for an unforgettable experience on the fields of rural Virginia was fulfilled.”
