The Back Porch Bluegrass Spectacular ft. Sam Bush + The Brothers Comatose

Signature Sounds + The Iron Horse presents
The Back Porch Bluegrass Spectacular ft. Sam Bush + The Brothers Comatose at The Back Porch Festival
Academy of Music
Saturday, March 20, 2027
7:30pm

Premium Tickets on sale 11/6 
Remaining Academy Tickets on sale 11/13
Ramble Passes on sale 11/18 at backporchfest.com

The Back Porch Festival was founded in 214 as a one day event at The Academy of Music Theater in Northampton. It has since grown to a 3-day festival featuring 60 artists at 10 venues across Northampton presented in partnership with The Iron Horse. The Back Porch Festival is pleased to present The Back Porch Bluegrass Spectacular ft. Sam Bush + The Brothers Comatose as the Saturday night headliners of the festival.

Sam Bush

There was only one prize-winning teenager with gumption enough to say, “thanks, but no thanks” to Roy Acuff. Only one son of Kentucky both finding a light of inspiration from Bill Monroe and his Blue Grass Boys and catching a fire from Bob Marley and The Wailers. Only one progressive hippie allying with like-minded conspirators, rolling out the New Grass revolution, and then leaving the genre’s torch-bearing band behind as it reached its commercial peak.

There is only one consensus pick of peers and predecessors, of the traditionalists, the rebels, and the next gen devotees. Music’s ultimate inside outsider. Or is it outside insider? There is only one Sam Bush.

On a Bowling Green, Kentucky cattle farm in the post-war 1950s, Bush grew up an only son, and with four sisters. His love of music came immediately, encouraged by his parents’ record collection and, particularly, by his father Charlie, a fiddler, who organized local jams. Charlie envisioned his son someday a staff fiddler at the Grand Ole Opry, but a clear day’s signal from Nashville brought to Bush’s television screen a tow-headed boy named Ricky Skaggs playing mandolin with Flatt & Scruggs, and an epiphany for Bush. At 11, he purchased his first mandolin.

As a teen fiddler, Bush was a three-time national champion in the junior division of the National Oldtime Fiddler’s Contest. He recorded an instrumental album, Poor Richard’s Almanac, as a high school senior and in the spring of 1970 attended the Fiddlers Convention in Union Grove, NC. There he heard the New Deal String Band, taking notice of their rock-inspired brand of progressive bluegrass.

Acuff offered him a spot in his band. Bush politely turned down the country titan. It was not the music he wanted to play. He admired the grace of Flatt & Scruggs, loved Bill Monroe - even saw him perform at the Ryman - but he’d discovered electrified alternatives to tradition in the Osborne Brothers and manifest destiny in The Dillards.

“I started working at the Holiday Inn as a busboy,” Bush recalls. “Ebo Walker and Lonnie Peerce came in one night asking if I wanted to come to Louisville and play five nights a week with the Bluegrass Alliance. That was a big, ol’ ‘Hell yes, let’s go.’”

Bush played guitar in the group, then began playing mandolin after recruiting guitarist Tony Rice to the fold. Following a fallout with Peerce in 1971, Bush and his Alliance mates - Walker, Courtney Johnson, and Curtis Burch - formed the New Grass Revival, issuing the band’s debut, New Grass Revival. Walker left soon after, replaced temporarily by Butch Robins, with the quartet solidifying around the arrival of bassist John Cowan.

“There were already people who had deviated from Bill Monroe’s style of bluegrass,” Bush explains. “If anything, we were reviving a newgrass style that had already been started. Our kind of music tended to come from the idea of long jams and rock-&-roll songs.”

Shunned by some traditionalists, New Grass Revival played bluegrass fests slotted in late-night sets for the “long-hairs and hippies.” Quickly becoming a favorite of rock audiences, they garnered the attention of Leon Russell, one of the era’s most popular artists. Russell hired New Grass as his supporting act on a massive tour in 1973 that put the band nightly in front of tens of thousands.

At tour’s end, it was back to headlining six nights a week at an Indiana pizza joint. But, they were resilient, grinding it out on the road. And in 1975 the Revival first played Telluride, Colorado, forming a connection with the region and its fans that has prospered for 45 years.

Bush was the newgrass commando, incorporating a variety of genres into the repertoire. He discovered a sibling similarity with the reggae rhythms of Marley and The Wailers, and, accordingly, developed an ear-turning original style of mandolin playing. The group issued five albums in their first seven years, and in 1979 became Russell’s backing band. By 1981, Johnson and Burch left the group, replaced by banjoist Bela Fleck and guitarist Pat Flynn.

A three-record contract with Capitol Records and a conscious turn to the country market took the Revival to new commercial heights. Bush survived a life-threatening bout with cancer, and returned to the group that’d become more popular than ever. They released chart-climbing singles, made videos, earned Grammy nominations, and, at their zenith, called it quits.

“We were on the verge of getting bigger,” recalls Bush. “Or maybe we’d gone as far as we could. I’d spent 18 years in a four-piece partnership. I needed a break. But, I appreciated the 18 years we had.”

Bush worked the next five years with Emmylou Harris’ Nash Ramblers, then a stint with Lyle Lovett. He took home three-straight IBMA Mandolin Player of the Year awards, 1990-92 (and a fourth in 2007). In 1995 he reunited with Fleck, now a burgeoning superstar, and toured with the Flecktones, reigniting his penchant for improvisation. Then, finally, after a quarter-century of making music with New Grass Revival and collaborating with other bands, Sam Bush went solo.

He’s released seven albums and a live DVD over the past two decades. In 2009, the Americana Music Association awarded Bush the Lifetime Achievement Award for Instrumentalist. Punch Brothers, Steep Canyon Rangers, and Greensky Bluegrass are just a few present-day bluegrass vanguards among so many musicians he’s influenced. His performances are annual highlights of the festival circuit, with Bush’s joyous perennial appearances at the town’s famed bluegrass fest earning him the title, “King of Telluride.”

“With this band I have now I am free to try anything. Looking back at the last 50 years of playing newgrass, with the elements of jazz improvisation and rock&roll, jamming, playing with New Grass Revival, Leon, and Emmylou; it’s a culmination of all of that,” says Bush. “I can unapologetically stand onstage and feel I’m representing those songs well.”

The Brothers Comatose

Don’t let the name fool you—The Brothers are anything but Comatose.  From day one, the band's ethos has always been simple: "You're here, we're here, let's party!" Now, as the stages and audiences have grown, nothing has changed; only the parties are much, MUCH bigger.  Bursting with relentless energy, lightning-fast picking, and a crowd-first attitude, the genre-blending outfit has turned their brand of high-octane acoustic music into a must-see movement. 

Hailing from Cailfornia, the band has had a long-held reverence for the traditions of bluegrass music.  But being in their own ecosystem, so far away from the epicenter of bluegrass, they haven't been constrained by these same traditions.  The result has been the emergence of "GOLDENGRASS," a term the band has fully embraced and used to describe this unique style of music, born out of bluegrass, but with the undeniable freedom and rock n' roll attitude of California.  

At the heart of the band are brothers Ben and Alex Morrison, whose songs incorporate the best aspects of modern Americana music: poignant lyrics sung in close, blood harmony that create compelling, memorable melodies and conjure up images of well worn highways and and the vast American experience.  The recent addition of the band's first "sister," Addie Levy, rounds out their rich blend with her clear, Appalachian-soaked high harmonies and a driving mandolin chop steeped in bluegrass .  Soaring above it all is the controlled mayhem of Philip Brezina's violin, whose improvised, blistering solos bring the rawness and rebelliousness of a rock n' roll guitarist.  And underneath it all is Steve Height on upright bass, whose unwavering, workman-like thump will make you swear (or wish!) you were at a back porch hootenanny drinking out of a jug.

From down-home bluegrass/folk festivals, to mainstream pop/country festivals, to the stage of the Grand Ole Opry, the Brothers Comatose have earned their reputation as the go-to for folks who want to kick up the dirt and bask in the good vibes of their live shows- an experience that proves bluegrass isn't just a tradition to be preserved, but a celebration meant to be blown wide open.

NOTE: This show is presented as part of The Back Porch Festival but is NOT included in the purchase of a standard Ramble Pass. Tickets to see The Bluegrass Spectacular ft. Sam Bush + The Brothers Comatose do not include a Ramble Pass. Ramble Passes will be available 11/18 at backporchfest.com