Editorial
Front Page - Friday, September 24, 2010
Three Sisters Festival: Free, talented line-up, family fun
Erica Tuggle
Fletcher Bright plays the fiddle in the local band, the Dismembered Tennesseans. The Fletcher Bright Company is sponsoring the fourth annual 3 Sisters Festival on Oct. 1 and 2 at Ross’s Landing. This free event will feature bands like the Dismembered Tennessans, Crooked Still and Ricky Skaggs.
- Photo provided
The secret is out. Chatta-noogans love a free show. With the success of Nightfall year after year, many festivals have followed suit on the free admission to bring in fans.
The 3 Sisters Festival, now in its fourth year, is one such festival to enjoy a hefty turnout with plans for fans to sit on the Tennessee riverbank and listen to some of the best bands in bluegrass today.
Fletcher Bright, the founder of Fletcher Bright Realty, co-creator and sponsor of the 3 Sisters Festival says, “[Attendees] are going to see the best in bluegrass music and a beautiful city and not ... to spend any money unless they want to buy some food. It’s as nice a festival as we know how to put on.”
This festival is the brainchild of Bright’s bluegrass loving son, George, and named after Bright’s three daughters (George’s three sisters) Elizabeth, Ann and Lucy. In other words, this local festival is very much a family affair.
Bright is the fiddle player for a bluegrass band that plays at the festival each year, and a local favorite called
the Dismembered Tennesseans. Bright and a handful of his fellow McCallie classmates formed the Dismembered Tennesseans in the 1940s. He says only two of the original members, himself and Ed Cullis, remain with the band, but they have added some talented hands to their act as well. Laura Walker joined the band 12 years ago playing bass, bringing along a beautiful singing voice and breaking the long standing all male aspect of the group, Bright says.
“It’s a new dimension because she has a real good voice – strong, but beautiful too,”
he says.
In addition to Bright, Cullis and Walker there is Bob Martin on guitar, Bryan Blalock as a multi-instrument and dobro artist and Don Cassell, who lives in Knoxville and plays mandolin for the group. Together, they provide the vocals.
Bright has been teaching Bluegrass fiddle for more than 18 years at several workshops across the country and in Canada and England and is also an active member of the International Bluegrass Music Museum. He received the Tennessee Governor’s Award in the Arts in 2005, was on the cover of Fiddler Magazine in 2007 and was interviewed for the feature story. The Dismembered Tennesseans were featured in the February 2008 issue of Bluegrass Unlimited.
This year’s festival will begin at 6 p.m. October 1 and run to10:30 p.m., and will resume Oct. 2 at noon and last until 10 p.m. The first day of the festival will kick off with a performance from the Dismembered Tennesseans, followed by performances by Sierra Hull and Chatham County Line, and Ricky Skaggs will finish the first night.
Bluetastic Fangrass will begin the second day’s performances, followed by Lone Mountain Band, the Dismembered Tennesseans, Michael Cleveland & Flame-keeper, Crooked Still, the Boxcars and Cherry Holmes.
The mix of local bands such as the Lone Mountain Band and Bluetastic Fangrass with big names like Michael Cleveland, a blind fiddle player and a “fantastic genius on the fiddle,” and the popular Cherry Holmes family band that has “taken the bluegrass field by storm, been around for less than 10 years and risen to the top tier groups in demand” makes the festival a great deal for the price, Bright says.
“One of the nice features about it, certainly for the fans, is that it is free. If people don’t like it, they don’t have to worry about getting their money back,” he says with a smile.
During the festival, River-front Parkway will be closed and the stage will be by the river, where listeners can gather on the steps of Ross’s Landing to hear the bands.
Chattanooga Presents, Carla
Pritchard’s event planning company behind Nightfall and the River Rocks event, is producing the 3 Sisters Festival and bring food vendors that will line up all along the festival, which has made past attendance quite good, Bright says.
“We don’t know how many people show up, and it doesn’t matter because we aren’t ticketing them,” he says. “We are as big as we want to be. Maybe 3,000 show up.”
The festival also draws visitors from outside Chattanooga to benefit the local hotels and area businesses.
“So we are in year number four and we enjoy it and hope we can continue doing it. We offer it because we can. It gets harder and harder with slow business, and we always think this is something we could cut out, but we hope and plan to keep it going,” Bright says.
He says he loves the 3 Sisters Festival because of the part that he and his family have in it of playing, listening to other bands, seeing different band members they know and enjoying the social and family time on the riverfront.
For more information visit www.3sistersbluegrass.com.
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