Wickenburg Bluegrass Festival and Contest

The Wickenburg Bluegrass Festival is held outdoors at the Everett Bowman Rodeo Arena, 935 Constellation Road, less than two miles from the historic downtown. A 2019 account places the grounds a half-mile east of Highway 60/93. The 2026 festival, the 47th, runs November 13 through 15. It is produced by the Wickenburg Chamber of Commerce, which calls it one of the oldest bluegrass festivals in the Southwest.

The arena on Constellation Road

The covered grandstand has limited seating, taken first-come, first-served, and the Chamber tells spectators to bring lawn chairs. Outside food, coolers, alcohol, and dogs are kept out; the Chamber’s own pages make an exception for service dogs. Inside the grounds are food trucks and food vendors, a beer garden, and craft booths. For the 2026 festival the Chamber has set up a kid zone with several community organizations.

The Chamber’s 2026 listing gives the hours as 9 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. In 2019, gates opened at 7 a.m. on Saturday and Sunday for breakfast, and the music began at nine. Tickets come by the day or as a three-day pass. They are cash only at the gate and not refundable, and the festival goes on rain or shine.

The 2026 ticket page announces three featured bands playing all three days, then names four: Permafrost Road, TenDollar Wedding, Cross-Eyed Possum, and Badly Bent. Cross-Eyed Possum also played the 46th festival, November 14–16, 2025. That year The Wickenburg Sun listed The Storytellers and North of Lonesome on the same bill, along with pickers from across the Southwest. The 2019 festival brought Chris Jones & The Night Drivers, The Po’ Ramblin Boys from East Tennessee, and the Incidental Bluegrass Band. Two of the Incidental members had long fiddle ties in the state:

• Peter Rolland, called Doc, plays fiddle and teaches it. The 2019 program said many Arizona state fiddling champions owe much to his instruction.
• Roy Sandoval plays guitar. He grew up in Payson and once coordinated the Arizona State Fiddle Contest.

Fiddle, banjo, and a band scramble

Between the featured sets, contestants take the stage. Dozens compete each year for more than $8,000 in cash prizes, in fiddle, banjo, mandolin, flatpick guitar, specialty vocals, and other categories. The 2026 festival adds a festival-wide band scramble. In 2019 there were eight categories, and the fiddle, mandolin, flat pick guitar, and banjo winners took championship titles.

The Arizona Old Time Fiddlers Association lists the festival on its contest calendar. In 2026 it falls a week after the Salome Fiddlefest and two months ahead of the Yuma Fiddle Contest.

Some contestants have come back in other roles. John Kennedy entered the contest early on and later served as a judge. In 2019, Chamber executive director Julie Brooks wrote of “the little ones who we’ve watched become talented musicians and fine young adults.”

The Chamber also runs a limited campground near the grounds, reserved in advance, with festival tickets included. In 2019 it took self-contained RVs in Constellation Park and had a separate tent area. The rules printed that year allowed 24-hour jam sessions, provided tape players and radios did not disturb a neighbor. They kept fires in containers 18 inches off the ground and allowed no generators between 10 p.m. and 7 a.m. The list closed: “Act like a guest, be treated like a friend.”

Buck Wayne and the Roundup Club

The festival began in 1980 as the Four Corner States Bluegrass Festival and Fiddle Championships. Its founder was Wayne Laverne Johnston, known in Wickenburg as Buck Wayne. He was born May 13, 1923, in Marlow, Oklahoma, and raised on a farm in Clarendon, Texas. He served as a first lieutenant in the Army Air Forces in World War II. Over his life he was a radio personality, a concert hall promoter, and a songwriter. He also played western swing with the Buckshots, a San Diego band, and was a member of the Western Swing Hall of Fame.

Johnston came to Wickenburg in 1980 and started the festival that year. The same year he married his third wife, Deborah Green. From 1980 to 1986 he managed the Roundup Club, as the Chamber of Commerce was then known. In 1986 he moved to San Diego.

He died of cancer at his home in Alpine, California, on December 27, 2001, at 78, and was buried at Fort Rosecrans National Cemetery. The Wickenburg Sun’s obituary noted that the festival had marked its 22nd anniversary the previous fall.

The Chamber he managed now keeps its office in the old railroad depot at 216 N. Frontier Street. The railroad reached Wickenburg in 1895, and in-person festival tickets are sold at the depot. The town is older than the rails. It dates its founding to 1863, the year the Prussian prospector Henry Wickenburg found the Vulture Mine and settlers from Sonora joined the miners along the Hassayampa.

Ben, Stuyve, and Mike

The Wickenburg Sun printed a special supplement for the 40th festival, held November 8–10, 2019. In it, Julie Brooks, then festival chair, named the committee who started the festival:

• Buck Wayne
• Stuyve Hamersley
• Wally Storm
• Ron Badowski
• Mike Wallace
• Bill Breen
• Ben Sandoval

She called Sandoval “mentor, friend, producer, director, musician, and coordinator for our festival from the beginning.” He died in 2017. Mike Wallace had died three years before the supplement. He chaired the festival for 19 years, and under him, Brooks wrote, the event doubled in size.

“This special event is the legacy of Ben, Buck, Stuyve, and Mike…,” Brooks wrote. “I’m very honored to follow in their footsteps as the festival chairman.”

The festival now goes by a shorter name, but the old one has stayed in use. The Chamber’s 2026 pages carry the heading “Wickenburg Bluegrass Festival,” and the paragraph beneath it still begins, “The Four Corner States Bluegrass Festival is produced by the Wickenburg Chamber of Commerce.”