It has been sadly a long-standing policy at Mountville that we can't allow pets, including human's best friends. But this weekend you’ll see Mountville Advisory Board members Amy & Stephen Brand walking around the grounds with Guess, their service dog in training. The Brands are volunteer puppy raisers for Mutts with a Mission (MWAM), and Mountville is a great training experience for Guess!

MWAM, founded in 2008, is a 501(c)(3) organization based in Virginia Beach that trains service dogs for disabled…

August 28, 2024

Our Mountville family is mourning the passing of our beloved Food Czar Chris Nicholson yesterday after a valiant battle with a rare cancer. He has been part of the Mountville "inner circle" for most of our 30 year history, and his spirit, warmth, wit and skills with food are all simply irreplaceable. No one more embodied the truism that making food for people is an act of love, and he truly loved the music, the people who made it, and the people who came together in community around it. 

When…

(Originally posted on Facebook by Maria de los Angeles, publisher of HeartCenteredDC)

Heartwaves

The 30th anniversary of Mountville Folk Festival  was my 5th anniversary attending this home-grown event down in Loudoun. And despite the heatwave, I felt all the heartwaves that come from returning year after year (even during the pandemic, online) to folks who feel like family. I told one of them that the festival was like my Cuban Christmas, because it's been years since I had a family Christmas, and that's…

We are still glowing over the amazing performances from 13 very different artists from across the spectrum of folk, roots and beyond! They come to Mountville knowing that our compensation is small at best, and yet trusting us to put them and their art in the absolute best light possible, and to a fantastic audience many of whom will be experiencing them for the first time.

So here are TWO free things you can do right now to help support these talented artists, and perhaps go see them again doing a full show…

We've written and spoken at length these past few months about the state of the music business for smaller artists, both in performance and recorded works. Our goals for Mountville 30 were ambitious to say the least, but they also felt vital if we want to continue having these kinds of experiences that we've grown to cherish. We knew that we were going to need help - a lot of it - to bring that vision to life this year.

In tandem with all of our generous Mountville family (thank you so much!), our goal was…

Lisa and Jim Taylor have been integral parts of Mountville since the beginning back in 1994; Lisa doing a spectacular solo set of her amazing songs, and Jim running sound. And Jim has been running Mountville sound every year since, guiding us through each new door as the technology got more advanced and the presentation more professional. Festival audio is a big challenge under the best of circumstances with the usual challenges of changing quickly from one act to the next. A veteran audio-video engineer…

This morning's gratitude is an inside job! Festivals happen because of volunteers - lots of them. They put their heart, time, energy and sweat (especially this year!) into doing a million things to make sure festival guests are comfortable, safe and have a great time. The work begins days before the Main Stage opens and continues for days afterwards. A loving army of helping hands!

And, they must be well taken care of as well. Our Saturday Performer/Volunteer Dinner planned and prepared by our longtime…

This morning's gratitude is for the visual presentation of Mountville. Over the years we've learned that the Mountville experience is really the confluence of several things - the music of course, and the people, but also the delightful visual ambience of the big sky over the gently sloping hill, the pond, the gardens and chicken coop, and of course now the beautiful pavilion. Around the solstice, the "Golden Hour" of lowering angled light changes the colors subtly almost from minute to minute - a visual…

Good Monday morning Mountville family! We will have lots to say and share in these coming days, but it feels right to lead with gratitudes. And there are LOTS of those to share!!

This first one is for the Volunteers. It takes an ENORMOUS amount of work to get a property ready for a festival event, to plan everything out, to get it all set up, and to actually make everything run smoothly during, and then cleaning it all up at the end. Various volunteers were putting in time working on the parking and camping…

WHEW! We will no doubt have much more to say in the next day or two, but we're pretty sure our collective mood is a blend of delirious euphoria, exhaustion, and perhaps even a bit of loving disbelief that it all went off exceptionally well! 

This Mountville was a challenge; as our Treasurer Rich Wilkinson said, we pretty much rebuilt the entire plane in flight right down to the fuselage since early April. To be able to shift our funding approach to try to do something meaningful to help performing artists…

It is the solstice, the earliest it's been in an absurd number of years. The day after Juneteenth, and the day after our friend Tom Prasada-Rao left to take his place among the stars. The day before the full Strawberry Moon, and the day before the 30th Annual Mountville. It must mean something; all the stars and planets aligning to make Tom welcome in the heavens with a big special cosmic show. For a humble dude with otherworldly gifts and the biggest most beautiful laugh, somehow it just fits. Tom's songs…

This is our blog for sharing all manner of news from Mountville, as well as relevant happenings and reposts from the music world and the occasional personal note from members of our leadership people. We are excited to have a forum to share that doesn't have to please social media algorithms! If you have questions about Mountville, check out our FAQ page.

Mountville has always been about bringing artists and community together, now more than ever. We are one of those smaller performing arts enterprises that Andrew McKnight is describing! We hope you'll read, and we thank you for continuing to support our little magical weekend of music and connection.

Read “Five Ways to Help Your Favorite Artist in 2024” here…