Music for the Masses

Warren Playing with Jimmie Dale Gilmore and the Wronglers at Hardly Strictly Bluegrass 2010 (photo by Shelly Prevost)

Tricia Gibbs still remembers the inaugural Hardly Strictly Bluegrass festival in 2001, as her father Warren Hellman looked out from the stage at dusk before Emmylou Harris took the stage.

“He had no idea how many people would come and he was looking out in the field and the whole meadow was filled with people and I could notice in his posture that he thought that was really cool,” she says. “And all of a sudden this guy who didn’t really have much claim to bluegrass — other than just loving it — was talking to 10,000 people introducing Emmylou Harris.”

This weekend will be the first year the annual Golden Gate Park free festival soldiers on without its founder, the man widely known as “the billionaire who loved bluegrass.” After Hellman died of leukemia last year, he left funding in place for his family to continue the much-loved festival for as long as 15 years.

“It’s funny because every year he never thought people would come,” says Slim’s Presents general manager Dawn Holliday, who books the festival every year. “He would ask us, ‘Do you think anyone’s gonna come this year?’ And we would think, ‘Haven’t we gotten over this question already?’”

When the festival started more than a decade ago, Hellman had two objectives: He’d made his millions as a private equity investor in San Francisco and wanted to give back to his favorite city with a free concert in Golden Gate Park. But he also, not so secretly, wanted to lure his heroes, like Hazel Dickens and Emmylou Harris.

At this weekend’s festival, in between sets by performers like Steve Earle, Emmylou Harris and Elvis Costello, recordings of Hellman’s banjo picking will be heard in the house music, and there will be kiosks for people to give testament in oral histories to the man who founded the festival that attracts more than 600,000 fans every year. There will also be multiple tributes to Hellman throughout the weekend, one with his family and grandchildren singing a song with Hellman’s band The Wronglers, another with Steve Earle singing “Warren Hellman’s Banjo,” a song he wrote on a plane ride to his friend’s memorial concert.