Montana Rockies Bluegrass Association annual bluegrass festival

On a Saturday in April, at 11 a.m., the first band of the Montana Rockies Bluegrass Association festival steps up to the microphone in the Neely Center in Victor. A different band follows every half hour until 8 p.m. There is one stage, one microphone, and no break in the music. “No set-up. Just get up there and play,” Mike Conroy, the association’s president, told the Bitterroot Star in 2024. The day is the association’s spring festival and fundraiser. The 2026 edition, held April 18, was billed by the Ravalli Republic as the 26th annual.

The Neely Center on A Street

The hall stands at 150 S. A Street, at the corner of 5th Avenue and A Street. The Bitterroot Valley Church of the Nazarene built it and provides its use. The rest of the week it holds the church’s youth group, a women’s exercise class, a Monday food pantry, and a free community meal on Monday evenings. In 2022 its administrator, JD Price, said he was glad to see it used for so many community activities, from Sunday School classes to gym time for homeschoolers.

Victor is an unincorporated town in Ravalli County, near the center of the Bitterroot Valley. It lies between the Bitterroot Mountains and the Bitterroot River, 10 miles north of Hamilton and 32 miles south of Missoula on US 93. The festival is held entirely indoors, so visitors need not bring chairs. It is a family event and serves no alcohol. Conroy has said it draws more than 400 people a year. In 2026 he told the Ravalli Republic that as many as 400 have been in the building at once, though most of the day is relaxed, with people coming and going.

Eighteen bands, one microphone

The 2026 lineup ran to 18 bands, many of them new. The Burhenn Family opened at 11 a.m. Big Bad Frank played at 1 p.m., and Pinegrass, from Missoula, followed at 1:30. “They have been together for over 20 years,” Conroy said of Pinegrass. “Can you imagine that?” Mountain Springs came from Rigby, Idaho, the Bensons Landing String Band from Belgrade, and Blue Point from Missoula. A Well Beaten Path returned as well. The Ravalli Republic placed that band in Helena in 2026, while the Bitterroot Star had called it a new traditional band from Deer Lodge the year before. The headliner was the Johnny Campbell Band, out of Nashville, Tennessee, which has come back more than once. While on tour, Conroy said, the band would “stop and play for free for us. You can’t beat that.” Every band on the bill plays without pay. “This is such a special event because people come from all over to play.”

The bill mixes touring professionals with families who have never performed in public. “We’ve got the whole gamut,” Conroy said in 2023. Janelle Giralt played her first time on stage at noon in 2025. The Jolley Family of Corvallis was “brand new” in 2023, and by 2025 Conroy said, “You can’t believe how good they play.” In 2022 he counted musicians “from teenagers to some in their 90s.” The nonagenarians were the Over the Hill Gang, from Victor. The Darby Sireens, with Tari Conroy among them, appear year after year. After the 2026 festival the association posted a video of the Hilbert Family of Victor with the note, “Erin and her kids were born to sing.”

Chili, cornbread and raffle tickets

Association volunteers cook the festival food. In recent years Susan McCauley has run the kitchen. The menu has been chili, cornbread, vegetable soup and desserts, with hot dogs in 2024. At the Lone Rock School in 2016, Conroy promised “our nearly famous home cooked turkey sandwich.”

Raffles run through the day. Since 2025 they have paid for a youth scholarship. The pilot that year drew 11 applicants for five places, and each recipient received $400 for lessons. The program was made official for 2026. It is open to association members 18 and under, and the association’s own page describes it as help with the cost of a bluegrass camp or festival for young people in Montana and Idaho. Conroy said he had seen “not as many young people getting out and doing this stuff.” He did not think the trial would take long: “After two months of lessons, you’re gonna have a pretty good idea if you want to do it or not.” Door admission goes elsewhere, to the campouts and jams the association holds through the year.

From a Pizza Hut to the Victor School

The association’s founder is Raynae Redman. Her own account, on the association’s website, says that musicians in the area who wanted to play bluegrass had only the Montana Old Time Fiddlers to join, and she wanted a group that catered to bluegrass. She would not use the name Rocky Mountain Bluegrass Association, which she found overused in the area, “so I flipped the words.” The website gives the founding year as 1999. The Bitterroot Star gave 1998 in 2023, spelling her name Reyna. In 2022 the same paper said she had founded the group 25 years earlier and that its members “started out playing at Pizza Hut.”

The festival’s start is told two ways as well. The 2023 Star reported that Mike and Tari Conroy, members from the beginning, started holding it in 2000. In 2022 Conroy told the paper that its return to Victor was a return to where it had begun 25 years before, at the Victor School. From Victor it moved to Stevensville and then to the Lone Rock School, northeast of Stevensville up Three Mile Creek. “It’s old-timey and they really welcome us with open arms,” Conroy said of Lone Rock in 2016. “They let us practice and jam and get ready in extra rooms.” That year he advised visitors to bring a pad for their seats. “Only the diehards can sit through 18 bands.”

The festival was not held in 2020 or 2021. In 2022 it came back to Victor at the Neely Center with 19 bands. “But our numbers are down right now,” Tari Conroy said that spring. “The pandemic was hard on a lot of things.” The next year Mike Conroy reported that “everybody really loved this venue last year. It has a more intimate feel.” In 2025 the association marked 25 years of the festival. Asked why he and Tari had stayed with it so long, Conroy said, “Well, whatever we do, we do it forever, it seems like.”

Mike and Tari Conroy

The two organize the festival with a few volunteers. Tari began playing music shortly after she married Mike, and they have played together since. Mike also teaches mandolin. Anne Merrifield, the association’s secretary and treasurer, has taken lessons from him since she moved to Montana. He serves as president, he writes on the association’s page, “because they promised me I could be first in the pot-luck lines.”

The Conroys also put on the Hardtimes Bluegrass Festival, a separate summer event south of Hamilton, which the association has sponsored. In June 2026 they announced that its 17th year, July 24 to 26, would be its last. “We’re old and wore out,” Mike wrote. The spring festival in Victor is a different occasion, held indoors on a single day.

Conroy started playing bluegrass at about 14, after he got hold of a Stanley Brothers record in Missoula. Asked in 2025 what drew him in, he answered, “the raw simplicity, and Ralph Stanley’s banjo playing, oh Lordy!”