2023 Festival Schedule
Schedule & Acts Subject to Change
Thursday, July 27th
Opening Night Performances
Main Outdoor Stage or Inside Cozy Cove
For Artists' Pics & Bios, click plus (+) sign to the right on their time/listing box.
Seth Mulder & Midnight Run present a high-energy show filled with nostalgic entertainment, tight harmonies, and skillful musicianship, all built around their curated set list of original material and lost covers.Friday, July 28th
Performances on Main Outdoor Stage
Soggy Prairie has the five-piece instrumentation of a traditional bluegrass band, but don’t call them traditional. With a mix of bluegrass standards, modern takes on country and Americana, and original music, Soggy Prairie puts on a show that demonstrates the versatility and broad appeal of string music.5 PM Bluegrass Institute of the Northwoods Intermission
Seth Mulder & Midnight Run, Meet & Greet Q & A
(Please have your thought-out questions ready and/or email them ahead of time)
With each band member a graduate of East Tennessee State University majoring in Bluegrass or the Bluegrass, Old-Time, Celtic and Country Music Studies program, there in itself spans enough material for a year’s worth of Meet & Greets Q & A’s. Nevertheless, it may be intriguing to ask them about their annual January Bluegrass Cruise to the Bahamas.
"When you sing something, it kind of sneaks in, in that music is a powerful medium," O'Brien said. "It's a language that's mysterious on its own – it tugs on the emotions. It grabs people's attention in a certain way and prepares them to hear things, and music kind of draws people together." Even given the elegantly spoken insight, there are not enough words to accurately describe the quality of Tim O’Brien’s vocals, musicianship and showmanship as it is a great honor for the MidSummer Bluegrass Festival to allow you to experience it.Performances Inside Cozy Cove
Saturday, July 29th
Performances on Main Outdoor Stage
5 PM Bluegrass Institute of the Northwoods
The Tim O’Brien Band, Meet & Greet Q & A
(Please have your thought-out questions ready and/or email them ahead of time)
To give patrons an outline of what might be discussed in this Meet & Greet session, it proceeds from a quote of Mr. O’Brien’s about a person who provided him great inspiration: "Doc Watson's a great roadmap for anybody, really, because he played all kinds of music and made it sound like Doc Watson music," said O'Brien. "Of course, people put him in a bluegrass-folk music pigeonhole, but he really brought all of it together, and that's kind of what I was interested in." O'Brien found a simpatico musical community in Boulder, Colorado, where he moved in 1974 and became a leading figure in the world of contemporary or progressive bluegrass – most notably in the quartet Hot Rize, which toured nationally over its 40-year tenure and earned a Grammy nomination for its 1989 album "Take it Home." In the mid-'90s, O'Brien decamped to Nashville, where he became a first-call mandolin, guitar, fiddle and banjo player on Music City sessions, and collaborated with artists like Steve Earle, Sturgill Simpson and Dan Auerbach; Kathy Mattea, Garth Brooks and the Dixie Chicks cut his compositions, and in 2015 he won a Grammy as a member of the bluegrass supergroup the Earls of Leicester, a nice companion for O'Brien's 2005 Best Traditional Folk Grammy for his album “Fiddler’s Green”.