Ottawa's Black & Bluegrass Festival prepares to mark a decade of cross-genre mayhem

"Our friends Smoke Spell are gonna straight up light ya on fire!!!"

So reads the Ottawa Black & Bluegrass Festival's latest artist announcement, part of a series of unveilings that are slowly revealing the lineup for the festival's 10th iteration at Rideau Pines Farm on September 13th.

As you might have guessed, the Black & Bluegrass Festival doesn't play it safe and standard. In an era where artists and events are increasingly 'going niche', the Black & Bluegrass Festival has helped carve out a space "for bands who play a fusion of genres like Folk, Bluegrass and Punk Rock."

"The goal in mind was to create a scene with artists from in and around Ottawa that invoked this brand of off the beaten path, nomadic street music", the festival's website says of Black & Bluegrass' founding. "Hastily thrown together roughly two months ahead of time with 2 taxidermy art exhibits and 14 performances from all around Ontario, [the first festival in 2015], surprisingly, went off without a hitch."

Since then, the Black & Bluegrass Festival has grown, consistently offering performance opportunities for artists who share a similar aesthetic of unvarnished truth-telling: the "Street Punks, Blue Collars, Moonshiners, Poets and Bootleggers" from "the Boonies and Slums of the cities and country sides across Canada".

Such artists have included Oshawa folk-punk acts Hairy Holler and Zack Power, Ottawa's pure folk duo Moonfruits, Montreal Delta blues player Lucas Choi Zimbel, and Vancouver folk-punk band Devil In the Wood Shack.

So far, this year's lineup includes "New Orleans Country Blues" band Yes Ma'am, Montreal psychobilly trio The Lab Ratz, "SoulGrass-FolkRock" band Bastards and the Buzzards, and the aforementioned Montreal folk-punk act Smoke Spell.

If you want to make sure you'll be able to get in on the fun, you'll be able to grab early bird tickets starting April 1st.