GRAMMY® nominated Missy Raines was named 2020 International Bluegrass Music Association Bass Player of the Year, for the 9th time, more than any other bass player in the history of the organization. Missy Raines has proven herself without doubt as an iconic bluegrass instrumentalist. But with her newest release, Royal Traveller, Raines has stepped into the spotlight as a songwriter for the first time. The album digs deep into Raines' family life and her upbringing in West Virginia. Featuring previous and current members of her live band, as well as cameos from other bluegrass greats such as Stuart Duncan and Tim O'Brien, the album is a gorgeous look into the perspective, history, and musical influences of one of Nashville’s most beloved musicians, Missy Raines.

Royal Traveller was nominated for a GRAMMY® for “Best Bluegrass Album” and is Raines' third album for Compass Records. It’s the first produced by Compass' owner and founder, and renowned banjo player Alison Brown. "I went into this project with Alison with the mindset that I wanted to stretch myself and see what I could do. I think we achieved what I was looking for, which is something further reaching and bigger than what I would have accomplished on my own," says Raines.

In 1998, Raines became the first woman to win IBMA's Bass Player of the Year award and she went on to win the title repeatedly for the next several years. Royal Traveller highlights this particular piece of Raines' history with the stand out track “Swept Away”, which features the 5 first women to win IBMA instrumentalist awards, Raines, Brown, Sierra Hull, Becky Buller, and Molly Tuttle. “Swept Away” was named 2018 IBMA Recorded Event of the Year.

Missy’s version of the iconic Flatt & Scruggs “Darlin Pal(s) of Mine” (from Royal Traveller), was named 2019 Instrumental Recording of the Year by the IBMA. The tune features Alison Brown on banjo, Todd Phillips on bass and Mike Bub on bass.

In 2020, Missy shared IBMA’s Song of the Year award along with co-writers, Becky Buller and Alison Brown for “Chicago Barn Dance”, a song written specifically for the Chicago-based band, Special Concensus, and their latest album of the same name.

With her new album, Raines tells her story with a vulnerability and bold honesty that rings clear, spoken through beautiful arrangements and well chosen musical collaborations. With nods to many of the varied and challenging chapters of her life, the songs speak volumes of Raines tenacity and musicianship, and her ability to rise to bluegrass fame despite the various confinements of the times. The listener is presented with a striking window into the up and down ride of a very royal traveller, the one and only Missy Raines.

While you’re sitting around the table with your friends and family this week, make your plans to come to the Ogden Music Festival, June 3-5, 2022 (Tickets are on sale Thursday, November 25 at 8:00 AM with special Holiday Pricing through January 2, 2022) and snOwFOAM with The Lil Smokies, January 28, 2022 at The Monarch (Tickets on sale NOW). As always, kids 16 and under are free to everything we do.

OFOAM is grateful for YOU!

There was only one prize-winning teenager carrying stones big enough to say thanks, but no thanks to Roy Acuff. Only one son of Kentucky 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 and 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.

See the photo of a fresh-faced Sam Bush in his shiny blue high school graduation gown, circa 1970. Tufts of blonde hair breaking free of the borders of his squared cap, Bush is smiling, flanked by his proud parents. The next day he was gone, bound for Los Angeles. He got as far as his nerve would take him- Las Vegas- then doubled back to Bowling Green.

"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.'"

Having performed at Coachella and an NPR Tiny Desk Concert, this Latin GRAMMY-winning, New York-based ensemble is one of the finest all-female mariachi groups on the planet. The group began as a trio named for the delirium-inducing Mexican flower used as a love potion for generations. As it has grown in notoriety, the band has expanded to as many as ten members depending on the setting, forming a truly global ensemble with musicians hailing from Mexico, Puerto Rico, Dominican Republic, Cuba, Australia, Colombia, Germany, Italy, and the United States. Their highly anticipated new album Indestructible, produced by 11-time Grammy-winner Rafa Sardina (Stevie Wonder, Lady Gaga, Rodrigo y Gabriela, among others), premiered via NPR First Listen, where NPR's Marisa Arbona-Ruiz said: "Flor de Toloache's new bilingual album Indestructible pushes the boundaries of mariachi music and its instruments through reimagined pop covers, originals and original collaborations."

Indestructible follows Flor de Toloache's critically acclaimed and Latin Grammy Award winning sophomore release, 2017's Las Caras Lindas and features a number of notable collaborations, including the all-female new flamenco quartet Las Migas, critically acclaimed and multi-platinum singer-songwriter John Legend, Latin Grammy/Juno winner singer-songwriter Alex Cuba, true R&B star Miguel and accordion virtuoso Josh Baca from Los Texmaniacs.

Announced as one of the official selection of WOMEX 2019, the world's biggest showcase for world music, Flor de Toloache performed over 100 shows in 2019, touring Japan for the first time!

The New York ensemble and beloved press-darlings were also invited in 2019 to perform as special guests for the Grammy Museum's inaugural Latin Music Gallery Exhibition ribbon-cutting ceremony also paying a special homage to Linda Ronstadt with a magical mariachi presentation at the 42nd Annual KENNEDY CENTER HONORS.

OFOAM can't wait for the return of Amy Helm after she wowed us at snOwFOAM 2020. This time she's joined by her full band.

Singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Amy Helm’s third album, What the Flood Leaves Behind, is her most autobiographical yet, both in content and creation. Out now via Renew Records/BMG, these 10 songs represent a gathering of ideas and experiences, friends and collaborators. Yet, the album also marks a landing — a pause for the traveling musician and mother of two young boys who was seeking clarity in her calling and career.

After making multiple albums and performing in far-flung places, Helm returned home to Woodstock’s Levon Helm Studios just before the pandemic to record What the Flood Leaves Behind and reclaim a sense of self. 

“Going back to the place where I learned so much about how to express music, how to hold myself in music, how to listen to music,” she begins, “it was humbling in a funny way. I could see clearly where I came from and where I am now in my life. I was singing from a different place now and for a different reason.”

An impressive group of friends and collaborators joins Helm on What the Flood Leaves Behind. With musical polyglot Josh Kaufman (whose credits range from Taylor Swift’s Folklore to the Grammy-nominated Bonny Light Horseman) producing and contributing on piano, guitar, and mandolin, the record brings Helm’s powerful, emotive vocals to the forefront of the album. 

“We tried to make it about her voice and about the musicians responding to her and not the other way around,” explains Kaufman. “I wanted her to feel like she had that freedom to be herself on the recordings and she just filled up the whole room. Her singing was coming from this deeply rooted place of family and music and wanting to convey a beauty.”

In fact, Helm considers Levon Helm Studios itself to be “the tuning fork” for the record — an ethereal, elemental component that helped her and musicians Phil Cook (keys, harmonica), Michael Libramento (bass, organ, percussion), Tony Mason (drums), Daniel Littleton (guitar), Stuart Bogie (saxophone), Jordan McLean (trumpet), and her son Lee Collins (congas) summon courage and comfort. 

The songs themselves reflect Helm’s inner strength and personal growth. Some might even sound familiar: “Cotton and the Cain" is a pensive homage to those who raised her, whom she calls, “the village of brilliant and talented people who were also wrestling with the grips of addiction.” A fan favorite that previously took on many styles when performed live, the song is now buoyed by her soaring soprano atop a whirring Wurlitzer. “Are We Running Out of Love,” a freak-folk drone in the hands of Swedish guitarist and songwriter Daniel Norgren, becomes an acoustic, urgent plea. Additionally, the album features collaborations with a number of prominent and prolific songwriters in roots music like Elizabeth Ziman (Elizabeth and The Catapult), Mary Gauthier, Erin Rae, and more. 

But it’s “Verse 23,” the song from which the album title is derived, that encapsulates What the Flood Leaves Behind. Written by M.C. Taylor (Hiss Golden Messenger) specifically for Helm, the song opens gently as she beckons, “Turn to Verse 23, read the words on the page.” It’s a Psalm of David that declares, “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.” 

From there, the vivid, narrative verses swell, building up to a chorus with deep resonance for Helm. She repeats back the lyrics: What the flood leaves behind is what we've got to make. “I like that reckoning,” she says, “of the good and the bad and everything in between.”

Throughout the record, Helm sings stories of life’s relentlessness. But like she extrapolates from “Verse 23,” the most productive, and often the most healing response, is to create. As a result, What the Flood Leaves Behind serves as a defiant form of self-expression, as Helm steps fully into her own light.

4th Annual snOwFOAM featuring The Lil Smokies, turning their lively grassicana sound into music that appeals to the masses

Get your tickets now, $20 in advance, or $25 day of show. As with every event presented by OFOAM, kids 16 and younger are FREE!

TICKETS

Proof of vaccination or a negative test within 48 hours is required for entry. Local testing and vaccination opportunities can be found HERE. 

Drawing on the energy of a rock band and the Laurel Canyon songwriting of the ‘70s, The Lil Smokies are reimagining their approach to roots music on Tornillo , named for the remote Texas town where the album was recorded. Produced by Bill Reynolds (The Avett Brothers, Band of Horses), Tornillo is the band’s third studio album. Formed in Missoula, Montana, The Lil Smokies have built a national following through constant touring, performing at Red Rocks, LOCKN’, High Sierra, Telluride, Bourbon & Beyond and more.

You don't want to miss this year's snOwFOAM!

Ogden Friends of Acoustic Music (OFOAM), in partnership with community partners is seeking the support from local Weber County businesses and individuals for Dia de los Muertos en Ogden and any profits from the event will provide scholarship funds to worthy high school graduates and students already enrolled in higher education in the Ogden/Weber County area. We all understand the life-changing impacts of an education. 

Funds will be gathered by OFOAM, a 501-c-3 nonprofit organization with a mission to provide music education to community youth, and any profits will be distributed to Weber State University, Ogden Weber Technical College, and other local vocation/trade schools to support students of Latinx heritage, particularly Dreamers (DACA recipients) and first generation college students who attend these institutions.

Please consider a minimum donation of $100 to Dia de los Muertos en Ogden and Sponsor a Dreamer Scholarships. Using the drop down, you may note where you'd like your donation to go. If your donation is in honor of or in the memory of someone, please note that in the comments section.

DONATE NOW

If you have questions about the scholarship program please email . All donations are tax-deductible. You will receive a receipt for tax purposes. OFOAM is a 501c3 nonprofit, tax ID: 27-256950.

On behalf of Ogden Friends of Acoustic Music, our community partners and the Latinx youth of Weber County, GRACIAS for your consideration of this request and for your investment in the future of these students and our local community.

THANK YOU TO OUR SPONSORS!

Thank you for your interest in our Mercadito. Please fill out the application to be considered as a Vendor.

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Ogden City School District Art and Music students from Kindergarten to 12th grade showcase art, music and dance. 

A panel of esteemed judges will select showcase winners. 

Artwork will be for sale.

We wish to thank the art teachers and students of Ogden School District.