Bristol Rhythm & Roots Reunion closes a 25th festival on the state line

Bristol Rhythm & Roots Reunion has finished its 25th year, three days of music spread across stages in Bristol, Tennessee, a town that sits on the line with Virginia and takes its identity from the 1927 recording sessions held there. Festival director Richard Oakley told the crowd, the volunteers and his own team before Sunday's closing set that "this festival is yours, forever."

It opened in the late afternoon of day one with Jim Lauderdale and Donna the Buffalo playing a 25th anniversary jam on the State Street Stage, Lauderdale's 14th appearance at the event. Inside Paramount Bristol, the German songwriter and producer Toby Gad played with the Bristol cellist and composer Dave Eggar, performing songs Gad had a hand in writing: Big Girls Don't Cry, My Immortal and Viva La Vida, which is not a run of titles anybody expects at a roots festival. Los Lobos and St. Paul and the Broken Bones took the Piedmont Avenue Stage later, and Johnny Mullenax closed the night on the Country Mural Stage.

Rain interrupted day two. Josh Mitcham and the Possum Creek Playboys had played before a shower pushed the outdoor stages into a delay, and the music carried on indoors at Paramount Bristol with Radio Bristol's Farm and Fun Time, a programme modelled on the old WCYB show and used this year as the official anniversary celebration, featuring Cruz Contreras & The Black Lillies, Trousdale and The Band Loula.

Once it cleared, the sets resumed across the grounds: Acoustic Syndicate, Franklin Jonas & The Byzantines, Florencia & The Feeling from Johnson City, and the Del McCoury Band. Sierra Ferrell headlined the Cumberland Square Park Stage, back at a festival she first played on the 6th Street Stage in 2021, and Clay Street Unit and Braxton Keith closed out the night.

Sunday belonged partly to the museum. Alongside sets from Virginia West, Logan & McKenna and Erin Lunsford, the Bristol Sessions Super Raffle announced more than $250,000 in cash and prizes benefiting the Birthplace of Country Music Museum, which is a substantial number for a festival of this size and the clearest sign of what the weekend is actually funding.

The rest of the final day worked through Denitia's Texas-rooted mix of soul and country, River Shook on the Piedmont Avenue Stage, The Band Loula at Cumberland Square Park, Bristol native Aaron Dowdy leading Fust through Americana and indie rock, Maggie Antone's country and Southern soul, and Marty Stuart & His Fabulous Superlatives bringing cosmic country to Cumberland Square Park.

Old Crow Medicine Show closed the festival on State Street and used the set to look backwards twice. They brought out Hannah Dasher for Just Someone I Used To Know, honouring Dolly Parton and Porter Wagoner, and paid tribute to Jimmie Rodgers as a way of starting the Birthplace of Country Music's year-long programme marking the centenary of the 1927 Bristol Sessions. The weekend ended with Rocky Top and Wagon Wheel carrying down State Street.

That centenary is the thing to watch. A festival that has spent 25 years building an audience now has a year of programming ahead of it tied to the sessions that gave the town its claim on the genre, and the 2027 edition is already dated for 10 to 12 September on the festival tracker. Old Crow Medicine Show, meanwhile, have a Holiday Hootenanny tour to get through first, and the Parton tribute puts Bristol in a country and rock season full of them, Tedeschi Trucks Band having debuted a Wildflowers cover for her at Wolf Trap.