Hardly Strictly Bluegrass-A Lasting Legacy
Imagine a free, entirely non-commercial outdoor music festival of bluegrass (and bluegrass adjacent artists) cherished by people all over the world. Imagine it drawing as many as 750,000 people to Golden Gate Park in San Francisco in the ‘before times,’ when such events were possible. Today, as I write this post, Hardly Stricly is broadcasting live on YouTube to a global audience, unstoppable, now known as Hardly Strictly Everywhere 2021. Last year, when it was also online, more than one million people watched it.
This is a legacy that Warren Hellman, a successful Wall Street investor who was once the head of Lehman Brothers and an amateur claw hammer banjo picker with a passion for bluegrass music, left the city of San Francisco, and now the world. Here he is quoted in a 2006 interview on NPR,
“ Some Texas oilman said money is like manure - I'm sure you've heard the statement - that if you spread it around, good things grow; and if you pile it up in one place, it just smells bad.
So the idea of doing this as a gift to a city that's given everything to my family for, you know, 150 years just was very appealing.”
Started as a modest affair with 12-14 acts, including Hazel Dickens and Emmylou Harris, the festival has grown to a sprawling three-day festival with 27 acts performng roots and Americana, but also funk, rock, soul and more. Since Hellman’s death in 2011, the Hellman Foundation, created after his death and let by his family, has continued to support the festival as a free festival.
To Hellman, it was gift that also made him happy. In Forbes, in 2006, he said this:
"It’s a fantastically selfish gift, but it is a gift. There are hundreds of thousands of people there who are appreciating it. Just being able to do something that is completely not commercial, that is pure, hopefully, pleasure for the participants to create a surrounding where the musicians and professionals like it as much as the crowd does. How could you have more fun than that? What the hell is money for if it isn’t for something like that?"
So, what’ s my point? While we all don’t have a dynastic fortune and the resources to create a legacy of this scale, we all have our passions, and we all have our joys, and it is my hope that Strictly Hardly Bluegrass can inspire each of us to consider how we can create joyous experiences for ourselves and our communities now, and consider how we can ensure that such things can continue after we’re gone.