The Mount Airy Fiddle Festival
In the town of Mount Airy, North Carolina, where the popular television show “Andy in Mayberry” was based (Mayberry being the fictional version of the actual town of Mount Airy), there is an annual music festival that attracts larger crowds and more musical performers each year, although the premise of the event is the celebration of old fashioned and traditional style acoustic music, played primarily on the fiddle, banjo, and guitar. Drums are out of place at this event, as are electrified instruments. Instead, hand crafted dulcimers and old fiddles are the more common tools for making music, which takes place on the main stage and also around the many campfires where people pitch tents to spend the weekend in a grand musical convention. But at night few of the festival goers get much rest, instead choosing to stay up until the wee hours of the morning to sit together in impromptu jam sessions, picking and singing tunes and passing bottles of liquor and cups of strong coffee to fuel themselves onward.
The gathering happens each year in the springtime, and if you contact the local Chamber of Commerce for Mount Airy, you can get information on lodging, tickets to the festival, and camping options. Plus, if you would like to compete for one of the prizes awarded to performers, there are many categories of contests and people of all ages can fill out applications and then perform their songs in front of the thousands of audience members for a chance to be recognized as the next great fiddler of the long-standing festival.