The 2022 festival is shaping up to be another great weekend of music!

We hope you are looking forward to enjoying all the 18^th annual Sugar Maple Music  Festival has to offer; dancing, jamming, learning, and most of all, listening to and appreciating the outstanding music!

While festival organizers will ensure high-traffic areas are cleaned frequently and will provide extra hand sanitizer and handwashing stations, you attend this event at your own risk. 

To assure all attendees have a fun and safe experience, please follow these simple and courteous guidelines:

1. If you are not vaccinated, we strongly encourage you to wear a mask under tents and when waiting in line. Disposable masks will be available at the ticket booth and merchandise/information table.
2. Absolutely no pets allowed. Service animals are allowed only when in service.
3. Parents and/or guardians are responsible for the safety and whereabouts of your children at all times. Festival organizers/volunteers do not monitor the public play areas.
4. Take care of the park: pack in and out all belongings, throw away/ recycle trash, and be courteous to your fellow park guests and festival attendees.
5. All festival attendees must wear wristbands at all times. Always.
6. Unless you are camping overnight in the rustic camp area or in the designated RV area, you must leave Lake Farm Park by the 10:30 p.m. park curfew.
7. Only campers with a paid camping permit are allowed in the rustic camp area at any time.
8. Only vehicles with a paid vehicle permit and a paid camping permit are allowed in the rustic camp area. No canned music, running engines or generators, nor vehicles longer than 20 feet are allowed in the rustic camp area.
9. Parking in the paved area is reserved exclusively for emergency vehicles, festival performers, festival staff, and vehicles displaying a valid disabled parking identification card, disabled license plates, or disabled veteran license plates.
10. Any person engaged in illegal activities can, and probably will be, arrested by Madison police.
11. No fireworks or unauthorized weapons of any sort are permitted. No exceptions.
12. Those engaging in violent, abusive, or unruly behavior will be removed from the festival grounds. No exceptions.
13. Smoking is strictly prohibited within 20 feet of any performance space. Out of respect for your fellow festival attendees, please refrain from smoking within 20 feet of any tent or structure. Please extinguish smoking material properly and discard responsibly. Please do not extinguish any smoking material in the sand, on the volleyball courts or any playground area.

Take a listen to Truck Driven’ Man by the TwangBangers and within two measures you’ll know you better bring your dancing shoes to the 2021 Sugar Maple Music Festival. Bill Kirchen and Redd Volkaert swap vocals and guitar leads, illustrating their deep history in Honky Tonk and Rock n’ Roll along with their command of the electric guitar.

Bill Kirchen is a founding father of Commander Cody, and his diesel-fueled licks drove Hot Rod Lincoln into the Top 10 nationwide. A Grammy nominee for Best Country Instrumental in 2001, he has recorded with Elvis Costello, Emmylou Harris, Nick Lowe, Dan Hicks, Maria Muldaur, Hoyt Axton, Hazel Dickens, Gene Vincent and Link Wray. His Transatlanticana disc cracked the Americana Radio Chart Top 10 in 2018

Redd Volkaert, was born in Canada and played all over there until he moved to the US at age 26. He played his way from San Jose, to LA, Nashville, Austin, and now Galax VA.  In 1997 Redd landed the coveted lead guitar spot with Merle Haggard. Merle said “When I close my eyes I sometimes hear Roy Nichols (Merle’s iconic original lead man) and that has never happened before” 

Redd won a Grammy for his own work in 2009, and has recorded and/or played live with a host of world-class artists, among them Ray Price, Eric Johnson, Johnny Paycheck, Rhonda Vincent, Vince Gill, John Jorgensen, George Jones, Buck Owens, Connie Smith,  Tim McGraw, Allison Krause, Charlie Pride, Brad Paisley, Billy Gibbons, Jimmy Vaughn, and a whole lot more.

Bill and Redd play the mainstage Friday August 6. Tickets on sale now

“Paper Wings blends two distinct voices and impeccable skills as instrumentalists to create a modern, unified vision built on Appalachian traditions.” -No Depression.

Paper Wings is an Nashville based Indie-Folk duo featuring Emily Mann and Wilhelmina Frankzerda. They released their first self-titled album in 2017 consisting of traditional & original songs inspired by classic duet harmonies and old-time Appalachian sounds. In 2019, their second and most recent album “Clementine” hit the scene with a bang featuring a stunning collection of all original songs inspired by love, longing, self-reflection, and finding sympathy in nature. Self published and self produced, “Clementine” received wildly positive reviews in admiration of their striking vocal blend, inventive writing, and distinctive way of weaving traditional sounds into their music.

Paper Wings plays the 2021 Sugar Maple Music Festival Friday, August 6.

Buffalo Nichols will play the Sugar Maple Music Festival on Saturday, August 7, 2021

For all the moonlighting he’s done in other genres over the years, Carl Nichols always comes back to the blues. At various points in his career Nichols has played gospel (despite being an atheist), West African music (despite being born and raised in Milwaukee) and, as one half of the acclaimed folk duo Nickel & Rose, Americana (despite having some deep reservations about that genre’s long history of appropriating black music without always welcoming black musicians). None of those gigs, however, extinguished his desire to play the kind of traditional, acoustic blues he grew up admiring.

Maybe on some level he’s pathologically drawn to spaces where he’s an outsider. As a twentysomething black musician, Nichols is all too aware that the modern blues scene doesn’t look much like him, but he never outgrew his childhood love of the music. “It seemed cool to me when I was young,” he says. “You’d just hear people like Lightnin’ Hopkins or R.L. Burnside, and they just seemed cool. That’s why anybody gets into music, because it speaks to them.”

And it continues to speak to him, so much so that he’s tabled Nickel & Rose just as the duo was establishing itself as a major folk festival draw to pursue his dream of returning the blues to its songwriter roots. “I think a lot of what’s been lost in the blues since the early ’60s is the black experience, so I try to sing about that,” Nichols says. “I can’t escape racial realities, but I’m also aware that my audience is different than me, so the way they receive my message is different. I have this nostalgia for an era where blues musicians sang about their experiences to their own people, but that audience isn’t there now.”

It’s a challenge, he admits, but there’s power in crossing racial and generational divides. And on a personal level, he sees Buffalo Nichols as a form of justice for the music he’s always loved. “I want to redeem the blues after all the experiences I went through when I was younger,” he explains. “When I first started getting into the blues, my mom would take me to blues shows, and inevitably there’d be some old white guy there who would try to take me under his wing and explain ‘the rules’ of the blues to me. It chased me away. “I always related to the blues,” Nichols concludes. “I grew up in abject poverty. I experienced racism. And when I would sit down with a blues record, I could hear that in the songs. Now I want to be that person that I never got to see on stage.”