Playing off our area code 608, we are offering up a sweet June 8 deal! For today only, get $6.08 off festival tickets purchased on-line.

Want to explore other #608Day deals? Check out the list of offers and see what the 608 area has to offer!

The accolades keep coming for Noel McKay and Brennen Leigh, both as individual Nashville-based songwriters and artists, and in their joint incarnation as a witty and wry country duet.  When an American songwriting icon like Guy Clark is gushing over the music you’re creating, you’re definitely doing something right (Clark included a McKay co-composition on his 2014 Grammy-winning My Favorite Picture of You, and has noted that “Brennen Leigh plays guitar like a [well, his word is unprintable, but about as emphatic as it gets]”).   Both Leigh, a Minnesota native, and McKay, who hails from Lubbock by way of the Texas Hill Country, have attracted cult followings in their own right in Europe and the US.  Before The World Was Made, the classic album they made together in 2013, overflows with timeless, traditionally melodic country tunes, crossed with a modern lyrical sensibility, full of heart and humor.

Don’t miss McKay & Leigh at the 2019 Sugar Maple Music Festival on Friday, August 2.

~written by Brad Wolbert

The Four Lakes Traditional Music Collective (FLTMC) is a non-profit organization which not only produces the Sugar Maple Music Festival and Sugar Maple Concert Series but also supports the art of traditional music and dance throughout the greater Madison community. FLTMC provides educational and performance opportunities that bring together people of all ages to celebrate diverse musical traditions.

In holding with our mission, FLTMC is proud to sponsor Music con Brio’s Summer Workshop.  The workshop is a chance to spend a whole day making music with Music con Brio and an amazing guest artist, culminating in a side-by-side performance!  This year’s workshop is August 4 and will feature 2019 Sugar Maple Fest mainstage artists the Barnes, Gordy, Walsh Trio! 

Danny Barnes (the Bad Livers, Dave Matthews Band), roots music legend and recent winner of Steve Martins’ Prize for Excellence in Banjo, is teaming up with two young creative voices of the acoustic world: Mandolinist Joe K. Walsh (the Gibson Brothers, Mr. Sun) and guitarist Grant Gordy (David Grisman Quintet).  Come spend the day hanging with the guys honing your bluegrass style and jamming together in concert!

Open to ALL musicians age 10 and up with at least two years of experience on their instrument.  

The workshop will be held at the Goodman Community Center. $40 per workshop for current Music con Brio students, $60 per workshop for others. Lunch, snack and t-shirt included! Register online at: www.musicconbrio.org

Special thanks to our event sponsors: the Sugar Maple Music Festival, Total Administrative Services Corporation (TASC), and the Goodman Community Center.

American Songwriter describes Eilen Jewell as, “one of America’s most intriguing, creative and idiosyncratic voices.” The Boise, Idaho songwriter is one of a kind.

That singular voice springs forth from a woman of more than one mind, and she taps into many of them on Gypsy (August, 2019 Signature Sounds Recordings). By turns personal and political, pissed off and blissed out, Jewell’s first album of original material since 2015 expands brief moments of joy into lifetimes, and distills epic sentiments and persistent doubts into succinct songs.

Jewell seamlessly blends heavy electric guitars and dirty fiddles on the rollicking country rocker “Crawl” with the sweet and understated horn section of the tender “Witness. “79 Cents (The Meow Song)” skewers sexism and discrimination with pointed humor over a circus bed of musical saw and horns.

Longtime fans who love Eilen Jewell in classic country mode will delight in the pedal steel driven “These Blues” and the sole cover on Gypsy, “You Cared Enough To Lie,” written by fellow Idahoan and country legend Pinto Bennett.

Rather than pulling artist and listener this way and that, the tensions within and between these twelve tracks propel Eilen Jewell’s eighth studio album forward as a remarkably cohesive full-length.

Eilen plays the 16th Annual Sugar Maple Music Festival on Saturday, August 3, 2019.

In the music of Milwaukee’s breakout roots-country group Buffalo Gospel one hears the timeless qualities of the best traditional American country music. It’s stripped-down, authentic and incisive.  It tells stories of the human condition: of love and loss and broken dreams and the power of dogged persistence to overcome misfortune and heartache, in spare, direct discourse that cuts straight through to the core of our shared experience. Band founder, guitarist and singer Ryan Necci absorbed the records of his youth – the honest ballads, the trucker country anthems, the heartfelt weepers – and then found himself living the stories told by these songs. With a pair of critically acclaimed albums (including 2018’s “On The First Bell”) and a lineup brimming with top musical talent, this is a band at the peak of its powers.  The 2019 Sugar Maple Festival is pleased to present Buffalo Gospel, back home in Wisconsin after a tour of the Southeast US and ready to make believers out of everyone who hears them.

~written by Brad Wolbert

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