Bluegrass revitalizes life, love
Staff writer
Tim Land ignored constant pain in his left shoulder for as long as he could. A doctor’s visit in 2016 and four words then changed his perspective on life: stage four lung cancer.
“My oldest daughter was with me, and as she heard ‘stage four,’ she totally freaked out,” Land recalled.
Despite that grim news, Land was at Bluegrass at the Lake that weekend, as he says he has been every year since for almost a decade.
“This is what I live for,” he said.
Months after his diagnosis, Land went into remission in 2017. Most patients in stage four don’t live very long, but his progress gave him new-found love for life and music, one that he carried with him Friday and Saturday at Marion County Lake.
“Winter comes around, and I sit at home with nothing to do,” said Land, 68, of Carbondale. “I go out of my mind with boredom. But as soon as March hits —” he continued, stopping abruptly to strike a cartoonish sprinter’s pose.
Hundreds more bluegrass, folk, blues, and country fans joined Land and his wife, Connie, who celebrated their 22nd wedding anniversary Friday — though the couple jokingly couldn’t agree if it was anniversary No. 22 or 23 — the best way they could think of.
Campsites were claimed as early as Thursday the week before the festival. Campgrounds eventually were filled with tents, canopies, trailers, and RVs full of attendees and artists eager to perform and hear the strums of guitars and plucks of fiddles.
Lake superintendent Isaac Hett said it was the biggest event of the year at the lake.
“Most of the people that are here aren’t from Marion,” he said.
A truck flew a Grateful Dead flag featuring the group’s signature skull and dancing bears. Some trailers were still frames of the 1960s, painted coral-green and decorated with flowers and mushrooms of various sparkely colors.
Wandering through the campsite hours before Mandolin Monroe kicked off the two-night festival featuring seven groups, you could hear Paul Radell on the guitar and his friend, who went by “Can’t,” on the ukulele, softly playing and singing along to John Prine’s “Please Don’t Bury Me,” as an old, black dog dozed in and out of a mid-afternoon nap.
“We’re the one camp that doesn’t have good pickers,” Radell, who had come from Wichita for his sixth festival, said with a laugh.
As gates opened, people from all over — Arkansas, Missouri, Oklahoma, Topeka, and Wichita to name a few — filtered onto the lawn, speckling it with tie-dye shirts, flowing skirts and dresses, lawn chairs, blankets, and even swim suits to take a dip in the lake while the instruments twanged.
Some came with their families after having not listened to bluegrass growing up.
Jeremy Long, 37, McPherson, said his style was faster-paced. Bands like Metallica, Megadeth, Twisted Sister, and Avenged Sevenfold fill his playlists.
It wasn’t until 2015, when he met his wife, Ashley, now 38, that he was exposed to bluegrass and the like.
For the past few years, the Longs have made Bluegrass at the Lake a family event with their 3-year-old daughter, Gemma, brothers, sisters, and parents.
“Just have fun and listen to some music,” Jeremy Long said. “[Gemma] doesn’t have a lot of exposure to live music. I don’t think she remembers the first couple times she came out here.”
Connie Land understands the value of younger generations coming to the festival.
“They may be the next generation of musicians,” she said.
Andy Benning, 68, Council Grove, put it in simpler terms.
“The best think about being here is that we are making the younger generation excited about this,” he said, “because we sit there and do nothing and they have to figure that out. I don’t know how to explain that any better.”
As Mandolin Monroe closed her set, she and the band — Archer Hawke on mandolin, Kyle Grigsby on guitar, and Brody Wellman on double bass — performed “Fade,” a dedication to Monroe’s late friend, Deb McPherson, who died in January, 2021.
“I thought it was kind of odd that she never told anybody that she was sick,” Monroe said. “She just disappeared. She was kind of an unofficial mom to me. … She was a very influential person in my life.”
After loud pleas from the crowd once the song concluded, the quartet played a one-song encore.
Concerts ended around 11 p.m. Friday, followed by jam sessions into the early hours of the morning.
They’d do it all again the next day.
“That’ll show you why we come,” Connie Land said. “That’s the purpose. Not getting up on stage. It’s the after-concert jams in the back.”