Prescott Bluegrass Festival

For two days each June the main stage of the Prescott Bluegrass Festival stands on Goodwin Street in downtown Prescott, in front of the Prescott Chamber of Commerce. The audience sits across the street on the Yavapai County Courthouse Plaza, in lawn chairs and on blankets brought from home, under the plaza’s elms. The 45th annual festival ran Saturday and Sunday, June 20 and 21, 2026. Admission was free, as it has been since 1996. Yavapai County, which maintains the plaza and keeps its calendar, booked the weekend from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. In 2026 the bluegrass weekend fell between the Prescott Territorial Days Arts & Crafts Show and a run of Summer Concert Series evenings.

The Chamber puts on the festival. Around the music there are vendor booths, food, and raffle prizes. Prescott Woman Magazine adds local artisans and “spontaneous jam sessions around the courthouse square.” In 2024 the vendors included food trucks, and that year’s program added sunrise yoga sessions and guided hikes through nearby nature preserves. “This event has become a treasured Prescott tradition that brings generations of families together while showcasing exceptional musical talent in the heart of our community,” said Sheri Heiney, President & CEO of the Prescott Chamber of Commerce, in announcing the 2026 lineup.

The 2026 bill, hour by hour

Both days opened at 10:45 a.m. with opening ceremonies. On Saturday, Chris Cerna and The Bluegrass Republic took the stage at 11:00, followed by The Old Pueblo Bluegrass Band at noon, Ten Dollar Wedding at 1:00, and The Howard Brothers at 2:00. Three of the four came back for a second hour: Chris Cerna at 3:00, Ten Dollar Wedding at 4:00, and The Howard Brothers at 5:00. The Sonoran Dogs closed the evening with a headliner set from 6:00 to 8:00. Sunday repeated the first four hours, and at 3:00 p.m. the raffle drawing ended the festival.

The Chamber states its aim as a spread of bluegrass: “traditional and contemporary; national, regional, and local groups; family and non-family bands.” Ten Dollar Wedding first appeared on the bill in 2023, when the band was less than a year old. It was a five-piece of Mavis Enders on fiddle, Chris Doyle on guitar, Brian Mariner on mandolin, Patrick Brady on banjo, and Marc Oxborrow on bass. According to Across the Street, Enders, Doyle, and Mariner were regulars at jams in Phoenix and northern Arizona, and Brady and Oxborrow had each spent more than a decade in other bluegrass acts. The same few names recur from one year’s program to the next. Oxborrow sat in on upright bass with the Phoenix trio Of Kith & Kin in 2024. Bassist Joelle Tambe-Ebot was listed with the Sonoran Dogs in 2023 and with Cisco & The Racecars the following year.

Earlier bills drew from farther away. The 43rd festival, on June 22 and 23, 2024, was headlined by The Storytellers Band, a progressive bluegrass group from Southern California. It also brought the Blue Canyon Boys, founded in 2003 in the Colorado Rocky Mountains. Cisco & The Racecars, led by Arizona State Banjo Champion Francisco Briseno, played that year with Katie Carmer on cello. The band had toured Ukraine twice. Cross-Eyed Possum, a Prescott band led by identical twins Jason and Jonah Howard, played in both 2023 and 2024. “For me and my brother, our training goes back to complex music because I went to school for jazz and he went to school for classical music,” Jonah Howard told Across the Street. “Those two things are kind of like a bass and then bluegrass is a place where you can put them together and like, make something new and special.”

The Sonoran Dogs, a hot dog, and a flatpicker from Tucson

The 2026 headliners have played this stage before. The Sonoran Dogs headlined the Prescott festival in 2014 and 2015, according to guitarist Peter McLaughlin’s biography. The band takes its name from a kind of hot dog first made in the Mexican state of Sonora. It formed in 2011 out of a tour backing the Japanese bluegrass guitarist Maro Kawabata, and has since played across the Southwest and West Coast. It has also toured Australia and New Zealand more than once.

McLaughlin lives in Tucson. He took first place in the National Flatpick Guitar Championship at Winfield, Kansas, in 1988, and he was inducted into the Tucson Musicians Museum in 2013. In 2023 the Dogs were listed as Mark Miracle, Peter McLaughlin, Tyler James, and Joelle Tambe-Ebot. The 2023 festival also booked McLaughlin in a second act, the Canyoneers. This is his duet with multi-instrumentalist Chris Brashear, a partnership that began when Brashear moved to Tucson in 1992. Their songs come from western landscapes, history, and wild rivers. McLaughlin’s biography says the core Dogs are a four-piece bluegrass band but sometimes expand to an eight-piece electric dance band, and that “every concert is different, as they often improvise their show based on their audience.”

Raffle tickets, tee shirts, and dry camping

The free gate is paid for in small amounts from many hands. The Chamber names local businesses, Texas Roadhouse of Prescott, the City of Prescott, the Arizona Commission on the Arts, and a roster of “Friends of Bluegrass.” Sales of raffle tickets, festival tee shirts, and the festival program add to the fund. Texas Roadhouse was presenting sponsor in 2026. In 2020, when the Chamber appealed for sponsors for a 39th festival set for June 27 and 28, the supporter it named was Lamb Chevrolet. The Chamber asks for donated items for the raffle, and the money from ticket sales offsets the cost of the weekend.

Some visitors stay for the whole weekend. The Chamber offered dry camping for the 2026 festival at $20 a night, for RVs, motorhomes, travel trailers, and tents. Campers could arrive after 2 p.m. on Thursday, June 18, and stay until 4 p.m. on Sunday, June 21. The sites had porta johns but no electricity and no water hookups, and campers packed out what they packed in. The spaces were limited and reserved ahead. The Chamber placed the camp “right at the festival grounds”; a Signals AZ notice put it “near the festival grounds.”

Photographs of past festivals on the Chamber’s page are credited to its volunteer photographer, Colonel Robert D. Shanks.

From a fiddle contest at Watson Lake

The festival began as a fiddle contest dedicated to a local fiddler. None of the pages name the fiddler. The Chamber’s account, repeated in a 2020 Signals AZ article, says the contest “took on the character of a typical bluegrass festival” in the mid-1980s and was held at Watson Lake Park until the mid-1990s. Across the Street told it in 2023 as a fiddling contest that became a regular bluegrass festival at Watson Lake in the 1980s. In 2024 the same paper gave a different version: the festival began in the mid-1980s as a fiddle contest and grew into a full-fledged bluegrass festival by 1996.

All the accounts agree on 1996. That year the event left Watson Lake Park for the Courthouse Plaza downtown, and, in the Chamber’s words, “changed character again to one with FREE admission.” The Chamber calls it “the only FREE bluegrass festival of its caliber in the western United States.” The City of Prescott’s 2026 announcement is more guarded, calling it “one of the few remaining free bluegrass festivals in the West,” with attendance in the thousands.

The fiddle contest’s descendants still share a calendar with it. The Arizona Old Time Fiddlers Association lists the season’s contests and festivals in order. The list begins with the State Fiddle Contest at Payson on October 3, 2026, and runs through winter contests at Yuma and Tucson. Its last entry reads: “June 2027 — TBA Prescott Bluegrass Festival Prescott AZ. Courthouse Plaza. Free admission.”