Oly Old Time Festival, Olympia WA

On Friday and Saturday nights in mid-February, people line up at a check-in desk in the South Bay Grange on Sleater Kinney Road NE. Their names are read off a will-call list and a wristband goes on each wrist. Inside, the evening runs from a lounge act at five to a concert, then a square dance with a caller at the front of the hall. At the 2026 festival the Friday dance belonged to the Tallboys Reunion, which the festival announced as “Charmaine, Charlie, W.B., John, and Joe together again.” Connor Maguire called the dance from ten until midnight. The last line on the schedule for both nights reads “Jamming throughout and late, late at Grange.”

This is the Oly Old Time Festival. Arbutus Folk School has run it since 2016, and its own site describes it as “dedicated to teaching, learning, and participating in the tradition of old-time music.” Artists from around the United States and Canada come to play concerts, jam, call dances and teach. The site observes that most fans dance to the music and are usually musicians themselves. The 17th annual festival is set for February 11–14, 2027.

Four days on Presidents Day weekend

The 2026 festival opened on Thursday, February 12, with a free kickoff jam at Ilk Lodge Brewery downtown from six to nine, with smash burgers on offer. At nine the jam moved to Mossy Bottom Records, “until it ends.”

Friday’s main concert at the Grange put Squirrel Butter, Golden Shoals, and the Alum Ridge Boys and Ashlee on stage. The festival’s notice for the last band listed first-place finishes at Galax, Mt. Airy and Clifftop. The lounge acts were Mississippi Hotdogs and Dear Crow, who traded slots on short notice. “OOPSIE!” the festival posted. “Lounge Act flip flop due to a scheduling snafu.” It closed with “It’s all good!”

Saturday was Valentine’s Day. The Tallboys returned as a lounge act at five, Tradwife Stringband followed at six, and the Alum Ridge Boys and Ashlee played the square dance with Charmaine Slaven calling. Mississippi Hotdogs took a honky-tonk dance from nine, and line dancing began at eleven and ran “until it ends.” A taco truck serves both nights and takes cash or card. Beer and wine are cash only, with beer from Three Magnets Brewing and Matchless Brewery and cider from Whitewood.

A silent auction runs through the weekend. In 2026 it held two fiddles, one donated by Anna Sandy, along with a banjo from Nate Calkins, a bow from Jacob Mitas, and a quilt by the artist Mona Brown of Fogo Island, Newfoundland. The 2026 poster was by Kendl Winter, an Olympia artist and musician who has performed at the festival. The hats carried the festival’s fiddle pie, drawn by Nikki McClure. The same pie names an award, and the 2026 Fiddle Pie Award went to Tom Paul. The festival cited his work “as a caller, musician, radio show host, dedicated OOTF volunteer, and always welcoming jammer.”

Sunday afternoon closes the festival with a free crankie show at the Grange. The schedule describes a crankie as “a box with two scrolls of paper or some other material that is ‘cranked’ to reveal images that are set to music and lyrics.” In 2026 the show featured Sue Truman and the Crankie Factory with W.B. Reid and Jerry Gallaher, and Zoe Leger. It ended with the festival’s own crankie, made two days earlier in a workshop.

Free afternoons on Fourth Avenue and Sleater Kinney Road

That crankie came out of the free daytime workshops, held from noon to 4:30 on Friday and Saturday at both venues. One venue is Arbutus Folk School’s front room at 705 4th Avenue E. The other is the Grange, which has both a hall and a lounge. Arbutus can be reached by bus, and buses are free in the Olympia area. The Grange cannot be reached by transit. Festival artists teach the workshops between their night sets, and the general list runs to clawhammer banjo, fiddle tunes in two keys, hambone, Cajun two-step and waltz, and clogging.

The 2026 sessions were taught by name and by instrument:

• Community Crankie Making: Emily Teachout and Shanty Slater had participants illustrate a tune or ballad on a scroll, light it from behind and roll it in time to the music.
• Matchbox crankie: Sue Truman’s group took home a tiny crankie with a folk-art bottle-cap pie, a miniature rolling pin and a felted pumpkin.
• Cajun accordion: Paul Denison brought one-row button accordions in C and D.
• Mandolin: Andrew Small promised to “hammer home the three T’s - Tone, Taste, and Timing (although not necessarily in that order).”
• Upright bass: Rina Rossi told bass players “it’s how you play each note that counts.”
• Fiddle care: Anna Sandys, a luthier from Portland, Oregon, looked over fiddles in need of “care and feeding.”
• Intuitive bowing: Joe Fulton, fiddler in the Mississippi Hotdogs and formerly of the Tallboys, taught this fiddle session.
• Flatfoot dance: Charmaine Slaven taught steps under the title “Hoofin’ it!”
• Clawhammer banjo: Charlie Beck’s description promised that “banjo jokes will be shared.”

Children had their own afternoon. Sam, Charlie and Greta of Portland’s Triple File led a kids’ jam, open to any acoustic instrument. Then came a family square dance, with Caroline Oakley calling to the Schnoll Family Band.

Grizzle Grazzle and a fortieth birthday

The festival began in 2008, and the sources tell its beginning two ways. The founders’ history, as told to OLY ARTS, starts with people who liked old-time music jamming in Olympia homes. They played under the band name Grizzle Grazzle, with the motto “We are Grizzle Grazzle and so are you!” The motto was often shouted from the stage at the end of dances. In this account, the idea for a local winter festival came up at one of those monthly jams.

In 2015 Emily Teachout told ThurstonTalk that the spark was her own 40th birthday party. “We gathered a bunch of friends to play Old Time music, which is a great time to get everyone together and was so much fun in the middle of winter,” she said. “We promised to get everyone together every year to do it again.” She and her husband were among the founders. He had bought her a fiddle out of the blue some years before, and a trip to the Festival of American Fiddle Tunes in Port Townsend “blew me away,” she said. Her husband later took up banjo and a daughter took up fiddle. The family band, Fiddlie-I-Ay, and her trio, Yodelady, both went on to play the festival.

According to OLY ARTS, the first festival was largely organized by Carolyn Arnold, Billie Burlock, Ardas Hassler, Laura Hurson, Mischa Moren, Callie Jan Mills, Erik Neatherlin, T-Claw and Teachout. Vince Brown, John Flory, Anthea Lawrence and Ray Leach also gave input. Teachout said that first event drew roughly 200 people, all by word of mouth. The organizers had been inspired by the Portland Old Time Music Gathering and spread the word there and in Seattle. To the founders’ surprise, many of their favorite musicians agreed to travel to Olympia without guaranteed pay.

The Loft on Cherry Street

That first year the festival’s home was the Loft on Cherry Street, a former K-Records performance space. The lineup included the Atlas Stringband, Deaf Lester, the Grizzle Grazzle Tune Snugglers, the Peach Colored Jug Smugglers from Santa Cruz, the Tallboys, the Water Tower Stringband and the Young Geezers. Eight workshops met at The Evergreen State College. In the founders’ telling, dancers packed the floor into the wee hours and there was jamming in every corner, “literally all night long.”

The festival stayed at the Loft for several years, though the space had drawbacks. It was not ADA-compliant, had few amenities and only one toilet. Its big wooden floor was at first full of splinters and holes, through which dancers could see the warehouse below. Planning happened mostly around a single dining room table. The first festival merchandise was thrift-store patches, silkscreened by hand and sewn onto baseball caps in somebody’s living room.

Over the next few years the Loft’s manager refinished the floor. With the sound engineer Jeff Bartone, he put in a sound system, built a stage and improved the acoustics. Then Fish Tale announced it needed the whole space for storage, and the festival moved to other locations around Olympia.

From the Ballroom to the Grange

Within five years, the festival was bringing in performers from the East Coast and the Appalachian states. Early guests included John Haywood, Brett Ratliff and Travis Stuart from Kentucky, and Fred Park from North Carolina. When T-Claw left Olympia for Nashville, Jerome Cox, Jerrod Davis, Jesse Partridge and Shanty Slater joined the planning.

In 2013, Elizabeth Laprelle and Anna Roberts-Gevalt of Cedar Springs, Virginia, brought their “Crank Music” shadow storytelling to the festival, performed behind a hand-cranked screen. “It’s a really compelling way to engage people in music, because it’s a scroll that tells the stories of music in a ballad,” Teachout said. “People were totally blown away.”

OLY ARTS lists other guests over the years:

• Carl Jones and Erynn Marshall of Galax, Virginia
• Bruce Molsky of New York
• Evie Ladin of Oakland

ThurstonTalk’s 2015 piece names an “Erin Marshall” of Dallas, Virginia, as the first woman to win the Appalachian String Band Festival. Teachout described her as an accompaniment fiddler originally from British Columbia.

By 2015 the festival had moved to the Olympia Ballroom. Teachout expected more than 500 people that year, with a weekend pass at $30. She said a Kickstarter campaign “carried us through for the last couple of years, but really we’re still on a shoestring budget.” After each festival the organizers held a debriefing and asked, “What were the magic moments?” Teachout said they then tried to repeat them. Organizers’ children made buttons and trained greeters. “Put your iPad, laptop and phone screens away and just look people in the eye and dance to the music and enjoy a good time,” she said.

In 2016 the festival ran at the Olympia Ballroom and the Urban Onion Lounge on Legion Way SE, with workshops spread across three venues. Molsky headlined, and Pharis and Jason Romero, who make banjos, returned for a second time. The event coordinator, Juli Kelen, said old-time music “has a theme of ‘do it yourself’ work ethic that resonates with the community.”

That same year the festival became a program of Arbutus Folk School. Its planning committee now sits as a subcommittee of the school’s board. By 2019 the festival had settled at the Grange and Arbutus, with nearly 1,000 attendees expected. OLY ARTS reported that it draws people from as far as Alaska, California, Idaho, Utah and British Columbia. Callers, performers and workshop leaders go home with stipends. Many who came as toddlers when the festival started, OLY ARTS wrote, are now callers, leaders, performers and teachers.