Justin Hiltner
The nonprofit Bluegrass Pride is relatively new — both as a part of the tradition-focused genre and as part of LGBTQ culture. The organization was founded as an offshoot of the California Bluegrass Association in 2017, and made its festival debut with a float in the San Francisco Pride Parade that year. San Francisco’s Pride celebration is one of the world’s biggest, and there were some 270 floats in the parade that year. Despite being new to the game, the Bluegrass Pride crew, complete with three different bands showcasing the breadth and depth of the music, took home the top-ranking Best of the Best prize. It was an important moment of recognition, acceptance and encouragement for the organization, whose mission statement reads, in part, “We want to make sure that if you love bluegrass, then bluegrass loves you right back.”
It makes sense, then, that San Francisco Pride has remained central to Bluegrass Pride’s efforts. With this year’s SF Pride canceled due to COVID-19, Bluegrass Pride has replaced its in-person programming — which was to include events in San Francisco, Portland, Ore., and an inaugural happening in Nashville — with the all-streaming Porch Pride: A Bluegrass Pride Queer-antine Festival. A slew of musicians will appear Saturday and Sunday via Bluegrass Pride’s official website, including local aces Rachel Baiman, George Jackson, Molly Tuttle and Justin Hiltner. Old-time music legend Alice Gerrard is another highlight of the lineup, as is string-band scholar and member of Our Native Daughters Amythyst Kiah. The stream is free to watch, but a $10 donation is encouraged; funds raised will be shared by Bluegrass Pride and the performers.
The streaming festival was the brainchild of Jake Blount, an acclaimed old-time banjo player and a board member of Bluegrass Pride. (Blount will perform Saturday with his band The Vox Hunters — see bluegrasspride.net for a full schedule.) He tells the Scene he was inspired to pitch the festival to the rest of the Bluegrass Pride team after successful streaming concerts early in the pandemic.
“I had been part of several different streaming festivals, and thought it would be great if we could do something like that, so that some form of Bluegrass Pride still happens,” Blount says via a video call. “And maybe it would open it up to folks like me who are on the East Coast and hadn’t been able to attend the annual Pride festivities before.”
Rachel Baiman
“People have tried to get me to do a festival before,” says Bluegrass Pride executive director Kara Kundert, speaking on the same call. “At the time, I was like: ‘We have SF Pride in two months. We don’t have the capacity for it.’ Then three weeks passed and SF Pride wasn’t happening anymore.”
Porch Pride boasts a mostly queer lineup, with many of the participating artists already members or friends of the Bluegrass Pride community. Blount notes that this year’s lineup is the most musically diverse they’ve had yet. All participating artists have the option to be compensated for their Porch Pride set, though Kundert explains that some have chosen to donate their time to the cause. Paying artists is essential to Bluegrass Pride, considering how many musicians have lost the majority of their income since the beginning of the pandemic.
“Over the past two years, we have been trying to book all LGBT bands at our float for SF Pride,” Kundert says. “So we already had that arranged before the pandemic hit. … From there it was reaching out to the rest of our network to see who had the time and technology available.”
Kundert was an early member of Bluegrass Pride, having attended a planning meeting for that fateful debut at SF Pride. Then a graduate student at the University of California at Berkeley, she was excited to find a community of people who shared two of her biggest interests: bluegrass music and LGBTQ issues. She was tapped to helm Bluegrass Pride’s social media marketing efforts, and eventually rose within the ranks to become the organization’s executive director.
“That first year in the parade, people really loved us,” Kundert says. “It was the first time that a first-time entrant won. I’d never been to Pride before, so it was a whirlwind first year. We realized pretty quickly that there was a lot of interest in Bluegrass Pride outside of California.”
Since that first year, Bluegrass Pride’s reach has spread internationally, with local chapters hosting events across the United States as well as in Canada. While the organization’s members will miss attending SF Pride in person this year, they are also excited by Porch Pride’s ability to reach members of the community who wouldn’t otherwise be able — for financial or geographic reasons — to attend one of their events.
“We’re excited to bring Bluegrass Pride to people right where they are, right when they need it most,” says Kundert. “And to help these artists, who really don’t have a lot of ways to make money right now.”
