Stapleton School will host its annual Bluegrass Festival on Saturday, April 6, bringing six bluegrass and Americana acts to the campus for an afternoon of live music, food trucks and family activities. The festival has become one of the rural Baldwin County community’s most anticipated days of the year, a homegrown event that turns the school’s grounds into an open-air concert venue for fans of string-band music from across the region.
Gates open at 10 a.m. at the school, located at 35480 Harriot Ave. in Stapleton, and proceeds from the event go directly toward funding the school’s academic programs. Admission is $10 for adults and $5 for children ages 5 to 12, with tickets available at the gate, making the festival one of the more affordable full-day music outings on the Alabama Gulf Coast’s spring calendar.
Organizers describe the festival as one of the community’s signature springtime traditions, drawing families from across Baldwin County to enjoy the outdoors alongside a full day of regional bluegrass talent. For Stapleton, a small unincorporated community in northern Baldwin County, the festival doubles as a showcase for the school itself, bringing hundreds of visitors onto a campus that serves as the community’s civic center by default.
School fundraising festivals like this one carry particular weight in Alabama’s rural communities, where parent-teacher organizations and school foundations bridge the gap between public funding and the extras — technology, instructional materials, enrichment programs — that schools want for their students. A single well-attended festival can fund a meaningful share of a small school’s supplemental needs for a year.
The format has proven durable: a full afternoon of music with no overlapping stages, food trucks lined up for lunch and snacking, and activities that let children play while parents listen. Attendees are encouraged to bring lawn chairs and blankets, and the school’s grounds offer room for families to spread out between sets.
The lineup
The lineup includes six bands with roots throughout the greater Mobile Bay area. Fairhope-based Blue Mullet will open the day with a mix of traditional, contemporary and gospel bluegrass, a range that has made the Eastern Shore group a versatile draw at festivals across the region and a natural act to set the tone for an afternoon that spans several styles.
The Unknown Bluegrass Band, longtime favorites on the Baldwin County bluegrass circuit, will bring decades of combined experience to the stage. Veteran groups like this one form the backbone of Alabama’s regional bluegrass scene, playing the festivals, fiddlers’ conventions and community stages that keep the music alive between the big-name tours, and their sets typically reward the faithful with tight arrangements and the deep songbooks that only years of playing together produce.
The String Slingers round out the instrumental lineup with tight vocal harmonies and a stage full of traditional stringed instruments, including an accordion alongside the usual banjos and fiddles. The addition of an accordion to a bluegrass instrumentation gives the group a distinctive texture on stage, and their emphasis on harmony singing reflects the genre’s roots in family and church singing traditions throughout the South.
Phil & Foster will showcase a blend of Americana and bluegrass influences, occupying the middle ground where the genre meets folk, country and singer-songwriter material. Americana-leaning acts have become fixtures on festival lineups across Alabama in recent years, drawing listeners who drift between genres and giving bluegrass audiences something fresh between the more traditional sets.
Fat Man Squeeze, known locally for its high-energy “bargrass” sound, will mix traditional bluegrass standards with more contemporary material. The group’s reputation for fast tempos and playful stage presence has made it a favorite at venues around the bay, where “bargrass” — bluegrass built for barroom energy — keeps dance floors busy and festival crowds on their feet.
Closing out the festival as the headline act will be the Amanda Cook Band, fronted by a vocalist who grew up immersed in bluegrass music through her father and has since recorded with Mountain Fever Records. Her most recent release, “Deep Water,” blends acoustic instrumentation with reflective lyrics and has drawn praise within the bluegrass community, adding a nationally recording act to a lineup built mostly from regional favorites.
Cook’s rise reflects a broader moment for women in bluegrass, as frontwomen have moved from featured harmony singers to bandleaders with their own recording careers. For a school festival in northern Baldwin County, booking an act with a national label resume gives the event a marquee close, and local fans of the genre will get to see a recording artist whose career began in the same family tradition their own communities know well.
More than music
Beyond the music, festival organizers are planning food trucks and family-friendly activities throughout the day, giving attendees plenty of reasons to stay and enjoy the grounds between sets. The food truck lineup serves the practical role every festival depends on — feeding a crowd that arrives at 10 a.m. and stays through the headline set — while the family activities keep the event true to its school-setting roots.
The festival’s structure reflects the realities of fundraising in a small Alabama community. Volunteers from the school community handle parking, ticket sales and logistics, local businesses sponsor stages and services, and the bands themselves typically play community fundraisers at reduced rates in support of the schools that serve their own neighborhoods. The result is an event that functions as a community-wide effort disguised as a concert.
For attendees, the practical details matter: the gate opens at 10 a.m., admission is $10 for adults and $5 for children ages 5 to 12, and tickets are sold at the gate rather than in advance, so organizers urge early arrival for the best seating. The school’s address at 35480 Harriot Ave. places it within easy driving distance of Bay Minette and the central Baldwin County communities, and the festival’s rural setting means plentiful parking and a relaxed, unhurried atmosphere.
Bluegrass on the Gulf Coast
Bluegrass occupies a particular place in Alabama’s musical family tree, a genre born from the same Southern wellspring of gospel, old-time fiddle and mountain string-band music that shaped the state’s churches, schools and family gatherings. On the Gulf Coast, the tradition took root in rural communities like Stapleton, where distances are measured in church auditoriums and school cafeterias rather than concert halls, and where a traveling fiddler or a locally recorded gospel-bluegrass album could make a band’s reputation across an entire county.
The genre’s modern resurgence has been visible across the state, with streaming playlists, public radio programs and festival lineups introducing the music to listeners who never grew up with it. Younger acts blend the traditional instrumentation of banjo, fiddle, mandolin and upright bass with contemporary songwriting, and audiences have followed, filling festivals from the Tennessee line to the beaches. Baldwin County’s circuit sits squarely in that current, with its mix of veteran bands and newer groups drawing multi-generational crowds.
Baldwin County has long been fertile ground for bluegrass and traditional music, a stretch of small farming and fishing communities where family bands, church singing and front-porch picking traditions survived the generations that carried them. Festivals like Stapleton’s sustain that scene, giving local bands a stage and giving audiences of all ages a reason to gather outdoors each spring.
The health of that circuit depends on exactly the kind of event Stapleton School puts on: community-organized, family-friendly and affordable, with proceeds flowing back into the community that hosts it. Regional bluegrass thrives on this ecosystem — schools, churches, VFW halls and civic clubs booking local bands — and each festival feeds the next, as fans move between events on a spring calendar that now spans from the beaches to the county’s northern farmland.
April 6 falls in the heart of that spring festival window, when Baldwin County’s weather is at its most reliable and the outdoor event season runs at full stride. Families planning their weekend can make a full day of the festival, arriving when the gates open at 10 a.m. for the early sets and staying through the Amanda Cook Band’s closing performance in the late afternoon.
Proceeds from the day will go directly to the school’s academic programs, the stated purpose behind the festival’s long run. For the Stapleton community, the equation is simple and well worn: a Saturday of good music, good food and good company, and a school that heads into the final stretch of its academic year better equipped because of it.
Organizers encourage attendees to check the school’s announcements for any weather-related updates as the date approaches, and to bring chairs, sunscreen and cash for the gate. With six bands, food trucks and a full afternoon of activities on the schedule, the 2024 edition of the Bluegrass Festival aims to continue a tradition that has made a small school campus in Stapleton one of Baldwin County’s favorite springtime destinations.