John Craigie has mastered the art of creating live shows that feel more like intimate conversations than performances. Infusing humor, wit, and poignant storytelling, his shows are a space where audience members feel like old friends. Whether he’s headlining solo or sharing the stage with longtime collaborators, Craigie’s ability to make his crowd laugh, reflect, and connect is second to none.
“[. . .]John Craigie is funny. Not just a funny guy, but downright hilarious. His understated sense of humor, bolstered by fun impressions of people he’s interacted with and sly commentary on real stories, makes his shows as laughable as they are singable.” — Don Brubaker, Santa Barbara Independent
At this point, there have been quite a few good shows in the rearview…
As a tried-and-true performer, he has regularly sold out solo tours in addition to hitting the road with the likes of Langhorne Slim, Brett Dennen, Mason Jennings, Bella White and Jack Johnson. He has picked up fans with sets at Newport Folk Festival, Pickathon, Edmonton Folk Festival, and High Sierra Music Festival.
Ultimately, Craigie’s story continues with more shows and music.
Catch John Craigie & The Coffis Brothers on the Main Stage on Friday, October 17th at 7:15pm. Listen and learn more here!
Laurie Lewis & The Right Hands will be closing out Saturday, October 18th at 9:00 pm. Already performing with phenomenal musicians Brandon Godman, George Guthrie and Hasee Ciaccio, Lewis will now be joined by special guest Sam Reider as well!
We were already counting down the days, but now we are begging Father Time to hurry up!
This is your sign to get your 4-Night or 3-Day pass. All ticket types for Fall 2025 are on sale now! Tickets here OR by calling us at 209.984.8630 M-Th, 10:00 am-3:00 pm.
If you purchased a 1-Day Saturday ticket to see The Del McCoury Band, you are now eligible for a refund or exchange. Please contact us at the office M–Th, 10:00 am–3:00 pm at 209.984.8630 or by email at info@strawberrymusic.com.
David Jacobs-Strain is a fierce slide guitar player, and a song poet from Oregon. He is known for both his virtuosity and spirit of emotional abandon. David displays a range that ties him to his own generation and to guitar-slinger troubadours like Robert Johnson and Jackson Browne.
“I try to make art that you can dance to, but I love that darker place, where in my mind, Skip James, Nick Drake, and maybe Elliot Smith blur together.” — David Jacobs-Strain
David tours with Bob Beach on Harmonica. Their live show moves from humorous, subversive blues, to delicate balladry, and then swings back to swampy rock and roll.
David & Bob have performed many times at music festivals and taught at camps around the country to include: Philadelphia Folk Festival, Juan de Fuca, Strawberry Music Festival, Redding Roots, Bear Creek, Falcon Ridge and Kate Wolf.
We are excited to welcome back David Jacobs-Strain & Bob Beach to Strawberry on Friday, October 17 at 2:15 pm on the Play Stage. Tickets and tunes at the link in our bio!
Like the wood, water, and stone of the Sierra Nevada Mountains from which they hail, their sound is sculpted by a timeless aggregate of people and place. This four-piece string band is on a resonant exploration of the human condition with the singular mission to make music that acts as a conduit for genuine connectivity. The resulting collection of original material has taken shape in rowdy and resilient tales of love and loss, intermingled with passionately precise instrumental interludes.
Please join us in welcoming The Brothers Strong to the Strawberry Main Stage on Saturday, October 18 at 11:00 am. Listen and learn more here!
The world-class musicians in Big Richard — Bonnie Sims (mandolin, guitar) , Joy Adams (cello), Hazel Royer (bass, guitar), and Eve Panning (fiddle) — initially convened in 2021 for a festival date. The quartet showed up to the one-off like it had been together for years, bursting with jaw-dropping virtuosity, playfully irreverent stage banter, stunning four-part harmony, imaginative arrangements, a refreshingly eclectic repertoire, and a healthy dose of lady rage.
“Their wealth of experience across musical genres – bluegrass, country, jazz, classical, rock, and beyond – opened the door for writing, recording, and performing music that pushes beyond parameters while remaining firmly planted in tradition.” — Alison Richter, The Bluegrass Situation
Quickly things morphed into something way bigger than a one-and-done appearance for the Colorado-based, neo-acoustic supergroup. The sellout club shows and the confirmed festival dates across America drastically changed its members’ lives. Now, Big Richard is poised to penetrate the Americana music world and beyond. To date, the quartet has issued 3 singles, the “Live from Telluride” album, and their debut studio album, “Girl Dinner” arrived in January of this year.
Please join us in welcoming back Big Richard to the Strawberry Main Stage on Sunday, October 19 at 9:00 pm. Listen and learn more here!
Volunteers must be willing and able to abide by Strawberry’s Ticket Terms and Festival Rules. We are looking for individuals who are reliable, punctual, conscientious, and will enjoy playing a role in the Strawberry community.
Strawberry is only possible because of our volunteers. Thank you for your interest in volunteering at the Fall 2025 Strawberry Music Festival!
A banana popsicle, that is, from the popsicle cart at the Strawberry Music Festival—a core childhood memory for the Harvey girls! Bonus points if you get it dipped in chocolate and nuts.
That said, we first learned about the festival several years before any Harvey girls appeared on the scene. While trying to get home from the New Orleans Jazz Fest in the early 90s, Michael got stranded in a small hotel by a storm of epic proportions. The first floor flooded, roads were impassable, and all flights were grounded. (As far as we know, no bodies in any local cemeteries floated to the surface, although that does actually happen in New Orleans during major floods!) In one of those serendipitous encounters that keep life so interesting, Michael struck up a conversation with a stranded Jazz Fest couple who told him about Strawberry. It immediately went on the “must go someday” list.
Nestled in the Sierra Nevada, the Strawberry Music Festival launched in 1982 and has been going strong ever since. For decades, the festival was held twice a year over Memorial Day and Labor Day weekends at Camp Mather, near Yosemite. Then, in 2013, the largest wildfire in California’s history to that point broke out near enough to the festival grounds that organizers were forced to cancel the event. Although Camp Mather itself was spared, San Francisco County authorities and festival organizers realized that inviting thousands of people to a remote mountain retreat with only a narrow road in and out would make safe evacuation in the future too risky.
The disruption and relocation to a new venue might have tanked almost any other event, but the festival proved amazingly resilient thanks in no small part to its founding ethos—the Strawberry Way—an ethos that deeply permeates the festival to this day. The commitment of staff, volunteers, and a diverse audience allowed the festival to rebound and thrive. Long before Burning Man, the Strawberry Way emphasized kindness, community, and a strong leave-no-trace sustainable mindset. Given the focus of this newsletter, you will not be surprised to learn that the Strawberry Way and Leaving a Clean Wake have much in common… More on that in a moment
The Harveys first attended Strawberry in the fall of 1997 when Vienna was three and Rhiannon had just turned one. We flew from Seattle to Sacramento, rented a car, and—with only a vague idea of what to expect—joined nearly 7,000 attendees in the night-before lineup along the winding road in.
Once inside the festival grounds, the hunt was on for a campsite. Experienced attendees headed for their favorite spots. We followed our noses to a flat area under trees near a meadow and pitched our tents. (Actually, “tent,” singular. Ginny and the girls enjoyed the tent while Michael slept in a bivy sack!) We found ourselves next to an experienced father and daughter camping in their van and quickly struck up an enduring friendship.
For the next several years, that same spot and those same friends became festival touchstones for us and we attended regularly until we set off on our boat trip. (As it turns out, getting from Central America to northern California is a lot more challenging than getting from Seattle to NorCal!)
Almost immediately, we found ourselves ensconced in “The Strawberry Way.” Everyone gave a warm “hello” to everyone. In addition to the music unfolding on multiple stages, programming included non-stop activities for families with toddlers and young kids: face painting, arts and crafts, nature walks to find frogs, a parade, swimming in the lake. Teens got to set up their own radio station to broadcast during the event alongside the official festival “Hog Ranch Radio.” Impromptu acoustic jams wafted through the air into the wee hours of the morning. As dusk settled over the venue, free-range kids of all ages played with glow sticks in the meadow adjoining the main stage with parents generally confident that their children would find them before dark.
No surprise, families with young kids remain Strawberry mainstays, and years later those kids return as adults with kids of their own. Couples have gotten engaged and babies have been made at Strawberry (although as far as we know, no babies have actually been born there!).
And the music, oh the music! For the same reason that reading a print magazine is so much more satisfying than reading an algorithmically generated selection of digital news, attending a music festival curated by a creative team with a strong vision always delights and surprises. Alongside the well-known headliners over the years—John Hiatt, Emmylou Harris, Bela Fleck, Mary Chapin Carpenter—we listened to countless acts we never would have heard of otherwise. That first year, for example, we were blown away by Nickel Creek, already virtuosos at ages 16 and 17, opening the evening set on the main stage. Ours were not the only jaws that dropped during their set.
After many years away, we made a glorious return to Strawberry in 2024. It was our first time at the Nevada County Fairgrounds, but the new-to-us location proved to be lovely and the spirit of Strawberry had carried over uninterrupted. We spent five glorious days in an RV, reveling in our return. We discovered new bands and revisited some we knew and loved (the Banana Slug String Band, anyone??). We ate lots of popsicles and tried not to melt in the heat of the day, only to layer up for the much cooler nights.
Like Leaving a Clean Wake itself, the Strawberry Way isn’t a prescriptive checklist—it’s a way of being in the world that informs how we show up. It’s grounded in awareness, care, and mutual responsibility. And like Leaving a Clean Wake, its flexibility and adaptability help explain why it has endured so long and so well. It is hard to overstate how deeply affirming and restorative it is to spend time enmeshed within a community deeply committed to a shared ethos that prizes a genuine regard for your fellow beings and the world around you. While our Clean Wake maxim may not be known, its spirit lies at the heart of Strawberry and is fully embraced by organizers, attendees, and musicians alike.
But it’s not just us who feel like something magical happens at Strawberry. From the beginning, we’ve been particularly struck by the fact that just about every single act gives some kind of acknowledgment during their set that Strawberry is and has something special. Performers consistently gave shoutouts to the festival organizers, sound engineers, staff, and volunteers; the audience; the location; and the overall feel of the whole thing. Meanwhile in the audience, we cheered enthusiastically for everyone on stage, and everyone got a standing ovation at the end of their set.
This year, possibly the most enthusiastic audience participation, though, was for the Banana Slug String Band as they returned to the Strawberry main stage to celebrate a whopping 40th anniversary as a band. The Banana Slugs are known for kids’ songs that spread positive environmental messages and science lessons disguised in funny lyrics and costumes.
Adults in the audience had made signs: “Need a hug? Hug a slug!,” “SLIME ME,” and the like. Everyone, no matter the age, committed to dancing the Water Cycle Boogie (and, based on our personal experiences, we can guarantee that a lot of people had it stuck in their heads for quite a while afterwards). People (including us) reminisced about seeing the Banana Slugs years ago, including some fond memories from many adults of being among the kids who got to go on stage with the band.
Beyond the Slugs, the performers over the past two years have continued the sterling music quality that Strawberry is famous for. Headliners like Dan Tyminski and Aoife O’Donovan & Hawktail shared the stage with newcomers and lesser known acts like Yasmin Williams, Abby Posner, Brianna Mai Colliard & the Desert Marigolds, Rob Ickes & Trey Hensley, and Water Tower, this latter possibly the most energetic bluegrass band we have ever beheld. Their performance on the main stage rocked the house, but their set at Amy’s Orchid Lounge, Strawberry’s 21+ after-hours club, was absolutely over the top. If you get a chance to see any of these performers live, take it.
We could go on and on extolling the festival and the Strawberry Way: the “Strawberry Stroll” where it’s actually fun to wait in line early in the morning to claim your spots in the music meadow; a ubiquitous focus on sustainability (no single use plastics, encouraging attendees to bring their own reusable cups); the Straw-bar-ry daily happy hour hosted for free by a family who sets up near the entrance gate every year just because; adults without kids who nonetheless stay to cheer for the kids’ parade…
Not dissimilar to the readjustment we had to make when returning to life ashore after four years of sailing, with its leave a clean wake ethos, there is always a bit of a letdown when leaving the festival and returning to the real world. Rhiannon notes the culture shock when people don’t automatically smile as they wish each other “happy Strawberry.” But with more than forty years of history behind it, we are confident that the festival will endure—and that, at least twice a year, any one of us can get a glimpse of what life might look like if kindness, mindfulness, and leaving a clean wake were the norm rather than the exception.
If you ever get the chance, we promise that making the pilgrimage to Strawberry will more than repay the effort it takes to get there. If you’ve been to Strawberry (or a festival like it), let us know in the comments—we’d love to hear your memories. And if you decide to go, who knows? Maybe we’ll be there to wish you a “Happy Strawberry!”
Painted Mandolin is a plugged-in acoustic quartet of original compositions, reupholstered covers, and reimagined medleys. The concept of PM — whose name references the Garica/Hunter composition “Ruben and Cherise”— was born out of mutual love and direct affiliation to the musical leanings of Jerry Garcia. Featuring Joe Craven, who was percussionist and fiddler for the Grisman/Garcia project, plus Matt Hartle, Larry Graff, and Dan Robbins.
Joe Craven is a creative educator, record producer, actor/storyteller, emcee, weekend poet, and fashion insultant. Matt Hartle is the lead guitarist of Painted Mandolin, the China Cats, and various other Dead projects. His signature style, a vast knowledge of the Grateful Dead canon and beyond, brings a fearless and soulful address to the sound of PM. Larry Graff, also of Banana Slug String Band fame, lends his maturity as a band leader, songwriter, and musician, contributing to Painted Mandolin’s creative edge. Dan Robbins is a full-time professional bassist, educator, and recording artist since 1997, bringing a lifetime of knowledge and skill to both upright and electric bass.
Instrumentals, high energy grooves, and vocals shared by all, the quartet features a backwoods toolbox of acoustic guitars, banjotar, mandolin, fiddle, hand and mouth percussion, and upright and electric bass that create a sound of memories, traditions, and innovations all in a fresh jam that Jerry would like… Painted Mandolin thinks you will too.
Catch Painted Mandolin on the Main Stage at Strawberry on Sunday, October 19 at 7:15pm. Listen and learn more here!
Who likes having an RV Hookup Site at Strawberry? 🙋🏾♀️🙋🏻♂️🙋🏼♀️
Partial (electric & water) AND Full (electric, water, and sewer) Hookup Sites are still available for the Fall 2025 Strawberry Music Festival! Fill out an RV Hookup Site submission form here or call our office M-Th, 10am–3pm to make your reservation while sites are still available.
As a reminder, ALL camping tickets include DRY camping with any size or type of vehicle or tent. RV Hookup Sites are an additional charge to the camping ticket and require the purchase of at least one 3-Day camping ticket for the Fall 2025 Strawberry Music Festival.
