A smash hit
Bluegrass at the Lake makes a strong comeback
Staff writer
Bluegrass at the Lake was, for lack of better words, a smash hit this year.
The two-day festival brought in $16,700, lake superintedent Isaac Hett said Monday. Expenses to run the event were a little over $10,000, he said, making a $6,700 profit.
“Overall, those are the biggest numbers that we’ve had at this festival — ever,” Hett said. “Last year, it was down a little bit. So, we were kind of like, ‘Oh man, what can we do?’ We were hoping it wasn’t a trend. But this year really came back, and it came back strong.”
Between Friday and Saturday, 523 entry wristbands were sold at $20. Children 12 and younger got in at no cost. Wristbands were good for both days.
“The big one was the wristbands,” Hett said, but a 50-50 raffle, cornhole and disc golf tournaments, silent auction, bake sale, and festival merchandise also helped drive profits.
All 56 campsites with electric and water hookups were reserved as well, with some attendees arriving the Thursday a week before the event. Campers also pitched tents at “primitive sites” around the lake.
Hett said that many campers make their way to the lake just twice a year — for the Fourth of July and Bluegrass at the Lake.
“It wasn’t full-full with all of our primitive sites,” Hett said. “But with our electrical hookups, I had zero left open.”
With so many people there at one time, Hett said there’s always a worry about people “not getting along,” or issues with the campsites themselves.
This year, however, there were no such problems.
“You get that many people out here, you know, it keeps you on-edge or makes you a little nervous,” he said. “It went really well, which was a big sigh of relief.”
Most of the expenses came down to paying the bands.
Seven of them — Mandolin Monroe, Billy Ray and the Buttercutter, Dustin Arbuckle and the Damnations, MHM, Rachel and Griffin, Central Standard Bluegrass Band, and The Calamity Cubes — performed hour-long sets over the two nights.
“I get an energy for singing for people,” Monroe said after her set Friday. “I like to perform, and it’s nice to have a crowd to sing for. This in particular. It’s like bluegrass in Winfield, only on a smaller scale. … It’s just a more intimate setting.”
The sound guy, master of ceremony, T-shirts, koozies, stickers, and stage equipment, among others, also filtered into the expenses, Hett said.
Planning for the festival began in January, and organizers met once a month to recap last year’s festival and come up with things to do differently.
Hett said from there, organizers go through a list of potential bands, vendors, figuring out if there is anything they want to change with the vendors or bands, and making sure there are enough volunteers to run the gates and activities.
“Slowly but surely [we] try to get all that stuff lined out there for the upcoming festival,” he said. “The big thing there is really just getting all the bands nailed down and confirmed.”
Gerald Bender, a volunteer from Florence, has helped set up the festival during its 17-year time line. He said he likes to “stay in the background” and let the attendees enjoy themselves.
He arrived at 7:30 a.m. Friday to help set up, putting up the fence and other barriers. Bender’s main role during the concerts was to “get everyone to behave and not get too much booze in them,” he said with a laugh.