Elephant Revival Veteran Bridget Law Produces 2018 Sister Winds Festival
by Adam Perry for Westword 8/20/2018
Elephant Revival veteran Bridget Law – who is producing the tenth-annual Sister Winds Festival, taking place at Mishawaka Amphitheatre on Sunday, August 26 – says she’s seen things move in a positive direction for women since she entered the Colorado music scene just over a decade ago.
“I remember back in the early days, when Bonnie [Payne] and I were joining in bluegrass jam sessions, getting invited to sit in with people,” Law says. “I don’t think it was ever overly noted that we were some of the first women who were invited to be a part of those situations, but I think it certainly helped that we could just kind of join in and didn’t really change the way that the men were playing.”
“If you have a singer [at a jam session] and she sings really soft and tender, everybody has to, like, back out of the way and make space for that,” Law explains. “We didn’t necessarily do that. We came into the scene as a fiddle player and a washboard player and just sort of joined in and played all the fast music and got into it. Eventually they started going, ‘Oh, that girl on the washboard – she can really sing! Maybe we should give her a chance.’ It started opening up doorways, and then they were curious about what other women were doing. There was a gateway there that helped.”
Law is hard at work creating more gateways with this year’s Sister Winds Festival, which will feature a surprisingly diverse lineup, from bluegrass and singer-songwriter fare to Whippoorwill’s country-rock, Qbala’s fierce hip-pop to the soulful indie-rock of Erin Roberts’ Porlolo.
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Adam Perry 