13th annual old time music jamboree

The Berkeley Old Time Music Convention (BOTMC) is back for the 13th year, celebrating old time music from September 16-20, at locations all over town. This five-day festival offers concerts, square dancing, a string band contest, workshops, and activities especially for kids and families, all in intimate settings where the line between audience and performer is as thin as a guitar pick. Participants travel from across America for the chance to hang out, dance, and pick and sing alongside some of the top musicians and dancers in the old time fiddle and banjo world.

Pharis and Jason Romero, from Horsefly, British Columbia, are renowned for their beautiful duet singing, which has been heard on A Prairie Home Companion and at festivals throughout the United States and Canada. As Alice Gerrard says, “Pharis and Jason have close, tight, enmeshed harmonies, so that sometimes you can't can’t tell who’s doing what—but you don't don’t care. It’s the whole that creates the feeling and gives you the chill bumps.”

Lynn “Chirps” Smith, Fred Campeau, and Steve Rosen have played old time music together for over 35 years, most notably in the Volo Bogtrotters, at festivals and barn dances throughout the United States. Hailing from Illinois and Wisconsin, they learned much of their material directly from some of the great elder masters of their region. The trio can grind out fiercely intricate tunes at lightning speed as well as sing old time songs that will bring a smile to your face. They are committed to promoting and preserving Midwestern as well as classic Appalachian old time music, and believe it to be the best way to commune with the human race and get fed.

Art Rosenbaum, born in 1938 and living in Athens, Georgia, is a musician, painter, and film-maker who plays old time banjo and sings rare and unusual songs, many of which he collected in rural Kentucky and Georgia. His field recordings are housed in the Library of Congress and have been released in a box set by Smithsonian Folkways. Art’s instructional book Old-Time Mountain Banjo was published in 1968 and is still in print.

visit the Pharis and Jason Romero website

visit the Lynn "Chirps" Smith website

visit the Steve Rosen website

visit the Art Rosenbaum website