Humboldt Folklife Festival (Blue Lake)

On the last Saturday of the Humboldt Folklife Festival, music runs on two stages at once at Dell’Arte International, the physical theatre school at 131 H Street in Blue Lake. In 2026 that Saturday fell on July 25, and admission was free. The Street Stage opened at 10:30 a.m. with Huayllipacha. The Amphitheatre Stage followed at 11 with Chubritza, an Eastern European folk band. Food trucks pulled in: Happy Sloth, Alma’s, Manzanilla Kitchen and Jersey Scoops. There was a kids’ area. Dogs were not allowed on the grounds, and neither was outside alcohol. The day ran until 8 p.m. The Times-Standard’s advance notice promised 16 bands. Mark Larson, photographing for the North Coast Journal, counted fifteen. Members of one of them, Cowtown Sound, played in Holstein cow costumes under a hot sun, with Tea Finch on the singing saw beside her partner Daniel Nickerson on guitar and vocals.

At 4:30 the Street Stage gave its last two hours to the Beatles Sing-along, led by Joel Sonenshein and Jeff Kelley with singers Terry Bean, Violet Mercedes Dinning and Laura Krueger. All day, Humboldt Hot Air sold classic country, western, folk and bluegrass records to support its station, KHHA 94.7 FM. The records came from the collection of Don Wolski, a longtime DJ at KKUP and KHSU. Maggie Gainer of Arcata had donated 1,200 of them from her late husband’s collection, and she looked them over with station manager Neroli Devaney.

Workshops at the Grange

The free workshops met at the Grange. At 11 a.m. local bassist Amber Grimes brought out Ernest, an upright bass she has kept company since 2010. The Society’s notice called him “buttery,” with “a dapper bow tie collection,” and everyone who came got a turn plucking or bowing him.

The Ukulele Fight Club, a community group that meets twice a month, lent spare ukuleles to anyone who arrived without one. It promised each newcomer would “leave smiling and able to play a dozen songs.”

Seabury Gould and Jim and Tamara Hubbard, who sing together in the Beatles tribute band Ticket to Ride, taught two- and three-part harmony on “Will the Circle Be Unbroken” and Crosby, Stills & Nash’s “Helplessly Hoping.” Gould has led song circles in the spirit of Pete Seeger for decades. Afterward he hosted the Uplifting Hopeful Singalong, accompanying on guitar.

Jesse Jonathan handed out xylophones for a beginning marimba band. The notice asked, “Did you know Humboldt County is the marimba capital of the world?”

The workshops closed at 5:30 with an Irish seisiun led by Dana E. Connors, open to players of any level. “If you don’t know any Irish tunes,” the notice read, “bring along a Scots song, an old-time tune or a traditional ditty.”

The evenings before

The free day closes a week of ticketed evenings. The 2026 festival opened Saturday, July 18, with a kick-off party on Dell’Arte’s outdoor stage. It was a fundraiser for the Humboldt Folklife Society, and people were invited to bring picnic baskets. Kingfoot played first, with Joe King on guitar, Jimmy Foot on guitar and mandolin, and Kevin Johnson on bass. Huckleberry Flint closed before a large crowd, and guitarist Dustin Taylor brought his three children onstage as surprise guests. Everyone took Sunday off. On Monday Nigella Mahal held a release show for her album Murmurations in Dell’Arte’s Carlo Theater.

On Tuesday in the Carlo, Patrick Cleary, the festival’s longtime host, led Songwriter in the Round with Dave Trabue, Tony Cogliati, Katie Belknap and James Zeller, asking each what inspired them. Zeller brought protest signs against a proposed Amazon distribution facility and sang a recent song with the line “We’re not buying what you’re trying to sell.” Cleary read from Ian Leslie’s book John & Paul: “The role of an artist is to convey an emotion so that others can feel it.” The five closed with “I’ll Fly Away.”

Wednesday’s Bluegrass and Beyond opened under cool, overcast skies. A Banjo Makes 3 played first. Afterward, Larissa and Charlie Sleep of that band joined the audience to hear the Compost Mountain Boys, and people got up and danced. Photographs of the late Paula Flannery, a local “free spirit” dancer at many live shows, stood on the stage in her memory. Hobohemia closed the night, telling the crowd they had rehearsed only one bluegrass song.

Thursday’s Under the Stars, with low chairs and blankets recommended, began in warm sunshine. Harmonic Howl opened at their first festival. Their drummer, Surya Sardonicus, stayed on to fill in for April Moore and Ranch Party of Southern Humboldt. Their singer, Ruby Ruth George, returned as a guest with Cadillac Ranch, who played the night out under a crescent moon.

Friday brought the barn dance at Prasch Hall in Blue Lake’s Perigot Park, with the Cidermill String Band playing and Lyndsey Battle calling. No experience was required, and a large crowd came. Larson recorded clear skies and warm temperatures across the eight days.

A wagon for a stage on Fickle Hill

The Times-Standard and the North Coast Journal both give 1978 as the first year. The festival began at the Lazy L Ranch on Fickle Hill. Founding Folklifer Susan Anderson told the Journal in 2008 that the Lazy L had a facade-front western town and that the stage was an old flatbed horse-drawn wagon. The dance hall, she said, was “a classic ‘Tiltin’ Hilton’ … the floor sloped significantly, and by the end of any given dance all the dancers were pressed into a pack in the lower end of the hall.”

Brooks Otis gave the Times-Standard his account in 2015. Otis is an Arcata banjo, pedal steel, clarinet and saxophone player who came to Humboldt County in 1970. He called the Lazy L a dude ranch of sorts. Its owners had a Hollywood background; they kept a “down-home Western town,” boarded horses and now and then staged gunfights. In the early years, Otis said, the folk musicians gathered there every year. “Mike and I were starting in the early 1970s, one of the first bluegrass bands called Fickle Hill,” he said of Mike Manetas, with whom he later ran Wildwood Music on I Street in Arcata until its sale in 2004.

Anderson called the festival a gift “to ourselves (well, we did it because we wanted something here that we couldn’t find), to our kids (none of them in existence yet, of course), and to the community (hopefully).” From that first event the Society grew to hold concerts, song circles, pickin’ jams and weekly dance meets.

A day added nearly every year

Patrick Cleary began running the festival in 2000. He came from New York City, and his day job was overseeing the radio stations KHUM, KSLG and The Point. “You don’t play banjos in New York City,” he told the Journal in 2007. “They just don’t sound good.” In his first years the festival brought in guest artists. It has since turned into a showcase of local players. Cleary once argued to Otis that Humboldt had more Martin guitars per capita than anywhere else in the country. Otis, who by Cleary’s account had probably sold most of them, thought it over and said, “Well, Galax, Virginia might have more.”

In 2009 Cleary half-joked that the committee had added a day nearly every year since he took over. The 30th festival, in 2008, ran eight days as the finale of Dell’Arte’s Mad River Festival, with dances held off-site in Arcata and Bayside. That year a Kickoff Swing Dance at the Arcata Veteran’s Hall was new. It featured The Country Pretenders, with the voice of Joyce Hough, and Falling Rocks. A Sunday fiddle festival filled Perigot Park for Annie & Mary Day. “I think it is the workshops and jams that are the most important part of the Festival,” Cleary said.

In 2009 a ninth day arrived: a Kickoff Barn Dance at the Arcata Veteran’s Hall, with the Striped Pig String Band and Tara Stetz calling. Cleary would not swear to a definition, but he found barn dances “rowdier” and contra dances more “organized.” That year the Beatles sing-along grew to two hours, after participants got upset when it was shut down after one hour the summer before. Also in 2008, Ukesperience had taught its workshop a song and brought everyone up to play it, with about 25 ukuleles on stage at once.

By the 37th festival, in 2015, Cleary said that fifteen years earlier he would not have believed a week could be filled with volunteer musicians. “The sad truth is we didn’t have room for everybody,” he said. “We turned away a fair amount of people.” That summer Dominic Romano sang at Songwriters Night. Cleary remembered him competing in the Annie & Mary Day fiddle contest: “I think he was about 10 years old.”

The 2020 festival, which would have been the 42nd, was cancelled. There was no festival in the usual form in 2021. In 2022 it returned to Dell’Arte for three outdoor days.

Songwriter Eileen Hemphill-Haley said in 2008 that every other festival she had played brought in acts from out of town and left local performers off the bill. “The Humboldt Folklife Society has turned its festival into a celebration of the arts in its own community. What a concept!” That same year Maggie Gainer, who raised her children in Folklife, said: “This is where my husband and I first got to know each other. This is where we were proud to show off our new baby.”