Food and Wine Festival in Retrospect

After the dust settled from a busy week in March, I am finally getting around to posting about The Bluestone Ramblers' BB&T Food and Wine Festival experience.

As you can see from the photo above we played bluegrass for 1,000's of people through out the day of March 7th, 2009. I started the day of fueled by Kudu Coffee and started playing at 10am. Pick'n at 10am on a Saturday in the middle of Marion Square is the best way to kick off a my Saturday!


The morning started off like the photo to the right, quite, desolate, almost an eerie calm before the storm. The temperature was 70 degrees at 10am. It was a picture perfect day for sampling the best Food and Wine Charleston has to offer.

We started promptly at 10am and were well into our first set when a line started to form for Bobby Flay's Burger demonstration. Yes, it was hard to pick smelling that wonderful smell, BURGERS!
As they started letting people in to the event we were rocking some great tunes, then out of now where a man dressed in the black PDA garb came hustling our way, "We have some complaints from the Bobby Flay cooking Demo, "I can't hear Bobby over that Banjo."" Ahh, the mournful cry of some fare soul having there life altered by the banjo! Captured is a rare picture of such an scary monster, known as "Banjozilla." Yes he appears to be bigger than the tallest of Hotels in Charleston.

Well after our extended set break, so that the banjo would not interfere with the day's biggest event, we promptly kicked back into bluegrass high gear. We had Will Dantzler on Fiddle, wowing the young ladies with his 17 year old charm and mad skills on the fiddle. We also had a brief time where we had double mandolins, Phillip Barker and Keith McCullough playing there respectable mandolins, The "Kimble" and The "Wood." I mean I am surprised I can still hear after having mando's in both ears on top of "Banjozilla". As you can see in this picture I am searching for more volume in my guitar. Volume where can you be?

We wrapped up the Festival around 5pm, packed up, and headed on to the Kismet Spring Party on Wadmalaw Island and played from 7pm till 10pm. Exhausted we were and we would do it all over again in a heart beat!

Sandy