Black Rose Acoustic Society jams

A Gazette account from 2024 sets the scene at Treehouse Cafe on Colorado Springs’ north side on a Saturday morning: a few musicians “bearing guitars, one fiddle, some sheet music.” Group leader Kelly Hagerman opened with “Fox on the Run,” which he called “an oldie but a goodie,” to three other guitarists. One of them was Bob Ucman, who had taken up the guitar nine years earlier at 60 and kept dangling feathers on its neck. When the chords escaped him, he said, he rapped on the guitar’s body for percussion. “Any sound you make is music,” Ucman said. “You just have to figure out how it fits. When I can’t figure out the chord progression, I just become a snare drum.” Katie Champlin-Hagerman arrived late and joined in on fiddle. Halfway through the two hours, Danny Cuevas led “(Get Your Kicks on) Route 66,” and a customer at a two-top sat back with his drink, tapping his fingers on the table.

Songbooks, stands, and the fifth Monday

The jams belong to the Black Rose Acoustic Society, an all-volunteer nonprofit. The society holds them most Monday and Thursday evenings, from 6:30 to 8:30, and on Saturday mornings from ten to noon. The rooms are scattered across the city. All Souls Unitarian Universalist Church on North Tejon Street is entered by a ramp at the southwest corner of the building. At Beth-El Mennonite Church on Ranch Drive, players meet in Room 10, Room 16, or the sanctuary. Calvary United Methodist Church is on Austin Bluffs Parkway, and Treehouse Cafe is on North Academy Boulevard. The society asks any level of player, beginner to advanced, for a small donation toward room rental. Its invitation covers singers and players of guitar, mandolin, banjo, fiddle, bass, dulcimer, dobro, and harmonica, and those who “just want to listen.”

Each night of the month has its own music. The October 2026 calendar runs as follows:

• First Thursday: Fiddle Tunes (“not just for fiddles”) with Danna Moore and Bill Schmitz.
• First and third Saturdays: Robin Benton leads the Beginning and Intermediate Bluegrass Jam Session for anyone new to jamming.
• First Monday: Gil Bierman leads Pop and Rock in Room 10 while Charlie Schlauffman leads Festival Bluegrass down the hall in Room 16.
• Second Thursday: a different songwriter each month. It was Hank Williams in October with Mike Burns, after John Prine in September.
• Second Monday: Jerry White leads Gospel in the sanctuary, billed as “songs of praise and worship, but not a prayer meeting.”
• Second Saturday: Doug Kladder leads front-porch Country.
• Second and fourth Saturdays: Russell Puffer holds a folk Hootenanny at the Treehouse.
• Third Monday: Bill Leake leads Django Reinhardt Gypsy swing. The charts are “relatively advanced, but all are welcome.”
• Fourth Thursday: Ray DeMers leads the Blues.
• Fourth Monday: Michael Watry leads Cowboy Campfire, “songs of the west.”
• Fifth Mondays, when the calendar has one: Honky Tonk, “rowdy music from the taverns and dance halls of the American south and southwest.”

An advanced bluegrass session is on hiatus, and a kids and teens jam is arranged by email.

Players bring their own music stands, since the rooms have little storage, and most jams follow songbooks the leaders compile, which can be downloaded. Festival Bluegrass uses no printed music, except a word sheet for the song leader. The society’s reason: “the song is the music, not the paper it is written on.” Watry, whom the Gazette called a BRAS “Jambassador,” put it plainly: “People think they have to be good, but if you know a few chords that’s all you need.” He found the society in his 40s. He had bought his daughter a guitar, sat in on one session of a class Charlie Hall was teaching, and told her, “guess what? Your dad is joining the class.” In June 2024 he left a high-tech career to play music full time.

The jams have had other forms. During COVID they met online through a program called JamKazam. In 2023 more than 200 people filled the main hall at the Flying W Ranch for the first SuperJam, playing a few well-known tunes together before splitting into nine groups by style. The second SuperJam, on May 4, 2024, followed the same format at Calvary United Methodist.

Friday nights in the log hall

In summer the jams move north to Black Forest. On the second and fourth Friday evenings, players gather before the concerts at the Black Forest Community Center, a log hall on Black Forest Road about nine minutes east of the Interquest exit on I-25. A pre-show jam on September 11, 2026, ran from 5:00 to 6:30. The summer 2026 concerts brought Second Gear Bluegrass, Taarka, the Brad Colerick Band, and Luke Bulla, and Eli Cook played the blues on August 28.

Over the decades the stage has held Roger McGuinn, Ricky Skaggs & Kentucky Thunder, Mason Williams, Karla Bonoff, Chris Thile, John McCutcheon, Tom Rush, Tom Paxton, Tommy Emmanuel, Beppe Gambetta, and Bill Hearne. “We only do 21 shows a year,” Bob Lord, a board member emeritus, told the Gazette. “We’re pretty fussy about who we allow on stage.” The arts listing service PeakRadar describes the “Black Rose Stomp,” in which performers feel “the rafters and floors shake with a rousing, sustained stomp of approval.” Watry valued the quiet that comes first. In a bar downtown in 2004 he heard Gillian Welch while “people were talking over her.” Lord described what the society hosts as “handmade or hand-crafted music,” and said, “It’s got soul.”

The Gazette notes that many people take the society for a Black Forest organization because the concerts are held in the hall. Its events in fact run across Colorado Springs on more days of the week than not. Lord credits a long partnership with the Black Forest Community Club, which owns the hall, for keeping ticket prices low.

A flyer, a banner, and a new name

The Gazette traces the society to the early 1990s, when acoustic musicians met in one another’s homes around the city and hoped for a central place to play. The society’s own history dates its start to April 8, 1994. That evening Charlie Hall, Hope Grietzer (then Kressner), and Murry Stewart gathered local musicians at the Black Forest Community Center, and the “Black Forest Music Society” was born. A few weeks later, with historical input from Stewart and his brother Bill, it became the Black Rose Acoustic Society. The society’s pages spell Grietzer’s name both ways, Grietzer and Greitzer. By the Gazette’s account, the first concert in the log hall came the following year.

“It opened up a world of community and connection, making music with people and learning old tunes from centuries ago and new ones still being composed today in the traditional genre,” Grietzer told the Gazette from Ithaca, N.Y., where she now lives.

The first newsletter, in 1994, was a single-page flyer. It grew into multi-page “newspapers,” then full-color postcards, then twice-monthly email. KCME-FM interviewed Grietzer and Hall in 1999. Ginni Francis designed the logo versions from 2000 on. The late-1990s stage banner was quilted muslin, designed by Grietzer and Alex Carr and sewn by Marcia Hall. Volunteer Maria Swalley handcrafted the colorful replacement that has hung behind the stage since 2014. That same year Lord began filming the shows, and his channel now holds more than 1,500 videos. Readers of the Gazette voted the society Best Non-Profit Arts Group, and KRCC-FM and the Colorado Springs Independent gave it their Community Weaver Award. In April 2024, for the thirtieth anniversary, the Colorado Springs City Council issued a proclamation in its honor. The society keeps a tribute page for Charlie Hall.

The hall at Black Forest and Shoup Roads

The National Register nomination for the old log schoolhouse records that the log Community Hall, two hundred feet to the north across a shared parking lot, was finished in 1929. The Black Forest Community Club was chartered that same year.

The work had started five years earlier. In the mid-1920s, by the club’s history, about 30 families were spread across some 420 square miles. The schoolhouse on Shoup Road was too small for their meetings, and Black Forest Road was then called Templeton Gap Road. In 1924 they decided to build a hall. Gertrude Burgess gave the land, and families gave trees from their own property. The men felled the logs with axes and cross-cut saws and hauled them to the site, and the women and children peeled the bark. By 1927 the walls were up, the roof was on, and the floor was laid. The families held a dance to celebrate, before the doors and windows were in.