Thanks to COVID, a Lexington summer staple is gone for ‘first time in almost five decades’
There are few greater summer certainties in Lexington. Every year when the second week of June rolls around, the Festival of the Bluegrass awakens. It’s been that way for 46 years in a few different locales, although its secured home for some time has been the campgrounds of the Kentucky Horse Park.
Throughout its history, the bluegrass music festival has hosted legends (Bill Monroe), stylistic upstarts (John Hartford), progressive minded traditionalists (Seldom Scene), rising celebrities (Alison Krauss and Union Station), homegrown heroes (J.D. Crowe and the New South) and new generation favorites (Town Mountain).
This year, to no one’s surprise thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic, the headliner is silence. What was to be the 47th Festival of the Bluegrass isn’t happening this weekend. The event was called off in April along with nearly every other summertime music festival.
For festival chieftains Roy and AnnaMarie Cornett, the arrival of June without the festival is understandably bittersweet.
“We both agreed that, in a lot of ways, it was one of the easiest and, at the same time, hardest decisions we’ve ever had to make,” Roy said. “We knew it wasn’t going to happen, but at the same time, emotionally, we didn’t want to have to pull that trigger. It meant being the first time in almost five decades that there’s not going to be one. But it was the right decision.
“When we made the call, things had not been canceled that far out. But it was very obvious that was the way the trajectory was going. One of the people who worked with our kids’ camp had called Anna about everything she was working on to get ready for it. We were both like, ‘We can’t do this to these people. They’re still working their tails off on an event we know in our gut was probably not going to happen this year.”
That meant making calls to the festival’s volunteers, vendors, performers, tech crews – everyone involved with the event, really – before making a public statement about the cancellation because of the coronavirus outbreak. In doing so, they discovered a financial liability being born by many of the scheduled artists that no one saw coming.
“Every one of those bands, they’re getting creamed,” Roy said. “It’s awful. One of the things, though, that never occurred to me was how these bands apply for unemployment insurance. They make their money in three dozen different states. They make a little bit in Virginia. They make a little bit in Kentucky, a little bit in Tennessee, a little bit in Indiana. They don’t make enough in any one individual state to be able to qualify for unemployment in any single state. So they’re looking at, basically, making nothing this year, unless they get help.”
The Festival of the Bluegrass is a novel undertaking in that Roy, grandson of event co-founders Bob and Jean Cornett, and wife AnnaMarie are not full-time music promoters. The festival remains an independent, family undertaking. While that means they don’t have a permanent venue to oversee or other concert events during the year to stage, there is still an army of workers – and, ultimately, patrons - involved with Festival of the Bluegrass under their care.
“This is something that happens once a year,” AnnaMarie said. “Our volunteers, our customers have lives and jobs outside of the festival, so we would be asking them to put themselves at risk by coming out for a week and then go back to their jobs at an assisted living facility or at a school or any number of different places where they could really be putting other people at risk, as well. That’s just not something we can do. It’s irresponsible.”
Such concern, however, doesn’t downplay the very real financial concerns that come with canceling an event such as the Festival of the Bluegrass. For myriad reasons, most of which deal with logistics, rescheduling the event for later in the year was not an option. As such, the impact of the event’s cancellation reaches far beyond the artists that perform and the audiences that come to hear them.
“It trickles down,” AnnaMarie said. “It’s not just the bands. It’s the porta pot vendors, it’s the tent vendors, it’s the sound guys, it’s the stagehands. It’s the folks that come out and sell the lemonade and the funnel cakes. This affects everybody who works in the festival environment throughout the summer. It’s going to have a huge impact.”
Even in the face of the cancellation’s wreckage, however, the Cornetts sense hope. That’s been especially true in the response they have witnessed from patrons who bought advance tickets to the festival.
“People are very understanding,” Roy said. “In a statement we put on our website when we canceled, we said, ‘Look, times are hard. If you need your money back, we’ll refund your money.’ But if you can let us roll it over until next year, we would greatly appreciate it. As of right now, over half of the people that have already purchased tickets said, ‘Just roll it over to next year.’ It blows my mind that people are so kind, are willing to help out.”
“It’s that relationship that – for me, at least – made the cancellation easier because we care about those people,” AnnaMarie added. “The people who come out and camp year after year… we care deeply about them and we don’t want them to get sick. So the decision to cancel was made easier in the fact that we knew that it was the right thing to do for those people. We care about them and want to keep them safe and healthy.
“I’m an optimist. I’m hopeful person. I look at this as an opportunity to grow and to change and to look at things differently. We’re all in this together. It’s not just the festival that’s going through this or just Lexington or just Kentucky. This is worldwide. This is a great opportunity to take stock of how we do things, why we do them and what’s really important.”
