Desert Bluegrass Festival

Seven shade canopies, each twenty feet by twenty, stand on the soccer field at Gladden Farms Community Park in Marana, just west of Tucson, for one weekend each March. Around them sits the audience of the Desert Bluegrass Festival. Some use the festival’s folding chairs, and many bring their own, which the organizers ask not be too tall. In 2024 the Arizona Daily Star suggested a blanket or “one of those inflatable couches.” Leashed dogs are allowed. Peggy Baker covered the 2025 festival for The Bluegrass Situation and counted “plenty of well-behaved bluegrass dogs enjoying the music.” That year the Rincon Mountains and a snow-capped Mt. Lemmon stood behind the stage, and several hundred people gathered in front of it.

The Town of Marana opened these fields in June 2022, and youth soccer leagues play on them most weekends. The town forbids alcohol sales in its parks, but the festival holds a permit that lets visitors bring their own beer or wine. Food trucks, arts and craft vendors, and a Kids’ Zone run through Saturday and Sunday. Golf carts carry anyone who needs a ride from the parking lots to the gate. The Desert Bluegrass Association runs the festival entirely with volunteers. Anyone who works four hours earns a weekend pass.

Friday on the house

The first afternoon is free and needs no wristband. The association calls it a way of thanking its supporters. In 2026 Friday opened at 2 p.m. with the band contest. The band scramble followed at 4, a Desert Bluegrass tradition by the Star’s account. Pickers bring an instrument and drop their names into a bucket, and names are drawn at random to form bands of strangers. Each new band has a few minutes to choose a name and a song before it faces the audience. Mike Headrick, the longtime festival coordinator, once wrote that the “drop of the hat band scramble” gave “questionable talent the chance to shine.” At 6 the band Monsoon Sky played a set. At 7 it stayed on for a contra dance, with Abbie Song calling the figures.

Two days on the main stage

Saturday of the 2026 festival began at 9:45 a.m. with the national anthem. Bands then took the stage on the hour: the Old Pueblo Bluegrass Band, Greg & Randal Morton, Forest Thurman & Breakline, Ten Dollar Wedding, Crying Uncle, Chicken Wire Empire, and at 5 p.m. the Sonoran Dogs. At 1 p.m. festival performers taught instrument workshops on the east soccer field, included with admission. At the same hour the DBA Showcase put three of the association’s home-grown bands on stage. Sunday opened at 9 with a gospel open mic. Jam Pak Blues ‘N’ Grass played at 11, and Chicken Wire Empire closed the stage at 3.

Jam Pak is a community youth band from Chandler, Arizona, led by Anni Beach. Baker wrote that its players “start young and some have played long enough to do some very respectable picking.” The band has produced several generations of performers, including Cisco & the Racecars, who also played in 2025. In 2025 Jam Pak opened Sunday morning. The Becky Buller Band headlined Saturday. The band was meant to lead workshops over the lunch break, but airline trouble kept it from arriving in time. It closed the evening instead with the song cycle from Buller’s album Jubilee and bluegrass versions of Simon & Garfunkel and Joni Mitchell songs. One attendee grumbled that it was never going to be a jamgrass festival, since the headliner went on before sunset.

Headliners have come from a long way off. In 2024 the Mike Mitchell Band came from Floyd, Virginia, a town of about 450 people. The same lineup included the Notorious No-Gig Girl Band, four friends who met at a Desert Bluegrass Association workshop and played together in parks during the pandemic. “What’s particularly special about this group is that we all came to bluegrass, and most of us to our instruments, rather late in life,” fiddler Suzette Sommerer said.

When the stage goes quiet each evening, the jamming moves to the campground. In 2026 RV dry camping cost $60 for the weekend, Thursday night included. Tents near the RVs, “where much of the jamming happens,” cost $20, and tents on the soccer field were free. Dave Polston of the 2 Lazy 2 Ranch Band described the arrangement to the Star in 2014: “The jamming and campgrounds go hand in hand. You’re playing new songs and playing with other people.”

The fall festival at the AVA

The Desert Bluegrass Association was conceived in March 1995 by “a group of avid bluegrassers” in Greater Tucson. One of its stated purposes was to develop an annual bluegrass festival. The Bluegrass Situation dates the first Desert Bluegrass Festival to 2000. From that year through 2013, the association produced Tucson’s Desert Bluegrass Festival each fall. It drew more than 10,000 paid attendees and put 84 bands on stage at three venues.

The 14th and last edition took place October 25 to 27, 2013, at the AVA Amphitheater, which the Star places at Casino del Sol. Joe Mullins and the Radio Ramblers headlined. They were the IBMA Emerging Artists of the Year at the time. Jeff Scroggins and Colorado came down from Colorado. The Tuttles, a father and three children from Palo Alto, California, also played. Molly Tuttle had been voted best guitarist by the Northern California Bluegrass Society. That year the band contest benefited the Tucson Community Food Bank: anyone who brought food got a free raffle ticket, and the top three bands split $700.

In February 2015 the association announced that the fall festival was over. It cited the loss of the AVA venue and too few volunteers to lead the work. Headrick wrote a farewell. He listed the artists the festival had brought to Tucson: the Gibson Brothers, Blue Highway, JD Crowe, Sierra Hull, Dry Branch Fire Squad, and others. He recalled “the rattlesnakes in the restrooms, the missing bands, getting cash for bands so they can gas up the bus, security enforcement of the nudity ban in the campground.” He also wrote: “things blossom, then fade. Other things grow in their place.”

Arizona bands in Marana

The festival that replaced it had already started. The 2013 Marana Bluegrass Festival took place April 13 and 14. It was a partnership of the Town of Marana, S&S Bluegrass Promotions, the Desert Bluegrass Association, and the Arizona Bluegrass Association. According to DBA trustee Charlie Sides, it was the first time the two nonprofit associations had combined resources to stage a festival, and they split the profits equally. Only Arizona bands played. The DBA chose five from the Tucson area, including Run Boy Run and Old Pueblo Bluegrass. The ABA chose seven from the Phoenix area. Sides reported “no big rush at the entry gate” either day, only “a steady trickle” of attendees.

The sources differ slightly on when the Marana festival began. An Explorer article called the 2017 festival the fifth edition, and the Star counted 2023 as the 11th year in Marana, both pointing to 2013. In April 2014, however, organizer Jim Sanchez told the Star the festival had started two years earlier. That spring it ran at Ora Mae Harn Park on North Lon Adams Road, and bluegrass guitarist Dan Crary headlined. “The atmosphere is pure festival,” Sanchez said. “It’s people bringing out their lawn chairs and listening to music.”

Peter McLaughlin brought the Sonoran Dogs to that festival. He is a native Virginian who moved to Tucson in the early 1980s, and his wins include the Arizona State Guitar Championship and the Telluride Bluegrass Guitar Championship. “Even if you don’t play anything, you can sing along,” he said. “Or you can participate by shouting out requests.”

The association’s 2015 announcement noted that the 2014 festival had added a national headliner and that the 2015 edition would add a flatpicking contest on Friday night. The fifth edition in 2017 returned to Ora Mae Harn Park. It featured an instrument “petting zoo” where children could pick up and play instruments, and a free Friday night of Tucson singer-songwriters, closed by McLaughlin. Rebecca Frazier headlined with the Hit and Run Band.

By 2023 the event was called the Desert Bluegrass Festival and had moved to Gladden Farms. The Sonoran Dogs were on that year’s lineup, and they closed Saturday’s stage again in 2026. The Arizona Old Time Fiddlers’ calendar lists the next Desert Bluegrass Festival for March 12 to 14, 2027, at the Marana Pumpkin Patch.