Laurie Lewis & the Right Hands 

Vern Williams Band Alumni 

Dix Bruce & Jim Nunally 

Gallery Stage: The Blue J’s 

Bluegrass doesn’t get any better than Laurie Lewis & the Right Hands. She’s Berkeley’s own, she’s won the International Bluegrass Music Association award for Female Vocalist of the Year multiple times, not to mention a Grammy for her contribution to True Life Blues: The Songs of Bill Monroe, and her Right Hands are about as talented as a band has a right to be. Laurie sings and plays guitar and fiddle. Tom Rozum sings, swaps jokes, and plays mandolin, mandola, and guitar, Tatiana Hargreaves plays fiddle, Patrick Sauber plays banjo, and Grammy-winner Todd Phillips plays bass. If you’ve never heard them before, you need to hear them as soon as you can. And if you’ve already heard them, chances are you want to hear them again. Singout! calls Laurie “one of the leading lights of American acoustic music, a genuine national treasure,” and Country Standard Time says that she “has recorded some of the finest folk-inspired music of the past three decades.”

Their newest album, The Hazel & Alice Sessions, features the repertoire of bluegrass trailblazers Hazel Dickens and Alice Gerrard. “Creatively ambitious and utterly unpretentious, steeped in tradition but doggedly progressive,” says critic Andrew Gilbert, Laurie “is a gifted fiddler, deft guitarist, inspired songwriter and powerfully evocative singer.” The Right Hands are her perfect complement. Don’t miss Laurie & the Right Hands in their musical home at the Freight.

Vern Williams’ story is inextricably linked to the development of California bluegrass. By design or not, betwixt the Vern Williams Band and the California Bluegrass Association, they put California bluegrass on the map. Just as Bill Monroe’s “Bluegrass Boys” was a proving ground for many future bluegrass stars, Vern Williams’ band introduced many players to bluegrass world who are still major contributors to the music.

Dix Bruce & Jim Nunally are a duo in the true down-home style: two soulful voices and two acoustic guitars, mixing folk, bluegrass, and country, spiced with humor, beautiful harmonies, and hot picking. Jim and Dix's latest CD, Brothers at Heart, was nominated for Outstanding Country/Alt Country Album of 2004 by the California Music Awards.

Listen to a track from Laurie Lewis:

visit the Berkeley Bluegrass Festival page

visit the Laurie Lewis website

visit the Dix Bruce & Jim Nunally website

visit the Berkeley Bluegrass Festival Workshops page