Golden Gate Park at 10:30 a.m. was shrouded in fog. A pair of Cooper's hawks, birds of prey with wingspans of several feet and black-and-white striped tails, wheeled overhead, stark against the gunmetal gray San Francisco sky.

A winding line had already formed at the coffee-and-doughnuts tent set in the middle of the open space between the two dirt paths. Groggy festival-goers who were willing to spend $12 on a cup of drip coffee and a specialty mochi pastry waited for their turn to pay.

At the end of the field, jangly twangs and brrraps echoed from the Banjo Stage, one of the stages at the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass music festival, as the first artists of the day began their sound check under the dull roar of the growing crowd. In the dirt parking lot amid the eucalyptus groves, dozens of other bands had parked white vans with thousands of dollars worth of equipment.

The festival spans three days, six stages, a good portion of San Francisco's biggest park and brings out hundreds of thousands of people each year. It's a huge draw for both natives of the Bay Area and tourists from as far away as France and Australia.

The lineup, which in previous years has included MC Hammer, Robert Plant, Johnny Cash and Dolly Parton, is eagerly anticipated by the San Francisco festival crowd in the months leading up to the event.

The food trucks are legendary. Parking is a nightmare. The merch is as pricey as anything else in the city – $32 for a baseball cap and $45 for a poster. The most recent tax returns available show that the event expenses for the foundation that funds the festival were over $5.5 million in one year.

Admission is free.

Hardly Strictly is an anomaly in the modern age of bluegrass music. Other bluegrass mega festivals held this or next year could cost a single fan more than $100 just for general admission. Bluegrass festivals were historically jam sessions – cheap or free – with food, drink, lodging and entertainment for a whole family. Now, as festival prices across the country skyrocket, bluegrass fans and musicians are beginning to be priced out of their own genre.

What is bluegrass, anyway?

"It is a form of commercial country music," said Travis Stimeling, professor of musicology at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and bluegrass artist. Stimeling, who uses they/them pronouns, considers bluegrass to fall into the same broad category as the music that most Americans are familiar with hearing on country radio. That description, while not inaccurate, doesn't come close to touching on the cultural influence of bluegrass.

The music draws from a variety of American traditions, Stimeling explains. A man from the so-called "bluegrass" part of western Kentucky named Bill Monroe is credited with creating one of the genre's first groups, the Blue Grass Boys. Minstrel shows, racist productions where white musicians would mock Black culture and wear blackface to entertain their audience, fed into the creation of bluegrass as a genre in the 1940s.

But musical elements came from other cultures, as well. The banjo, one of the five pieces in a traditional bluegrass band, was originally a Caribbean instrument with African roots. Fiddling – the working class American version of violin – came from the Irish and Scots immigrants, while the mandolin is a Spanish Moor instrument. Even the guitar can be traced back to Mexican immigration to Appalachia.

Today, while bluegrass is spread across the country and the globe – Europe's number one bluegrass festival Bluegrass in La Roche being an example – fans still tend to be Southern, a Bluegrass Today 2012 special report found. Of American bluegrass fans, 36% have attended a live bluegrass show of some kind within the last year of that study.

The Data USA engine found that Kentucky, the birthplace of bluegrass music, had a poverty rate of nearly 18% in 2018, more than five percent higher than the latest national rate. Kentucky's median household income in 2020 is almost thirteen thousand dollars less than the national median income in that year.

Across the border, West Virginia's poverty rate is just over 17%. Its median household income is around $48,000 in 2020, nearly seventeen thousand less than the national median.

The Appalachian region in the period of 2017-2021 had a mean income that reached just 79% of the U.S. national average, based on a survey by the Appalachian Regional Commission and Population Reference Bureau. In 76 Appalachian counties in this period, almost a third of children lived below the poverty level. Overwhelmingly, people living in the rural counties of the region experience more poverty and less access.

The community that bluegrass grows its roots out of still lives below the poverty line. In defiance of that, bluegrass in the United States has become an expensive hobby to have.

"Festivals are even more expensive [than bluegrass shows.] A weekend pass for one person is about $150, that's kind of the standard fee across the country. So if you're gonna go for three days, that's a family of four, you're now looking at 600 bucks. Plus you got to pay for camping, or a hotel," Stimeling said.

They're not wrong. Hardly Strictly, while hosted in one of the most expensive cities in the world, is free and open to the public. Other mega-festivals range from $100 for a full-festival pass (Summerfest) to between $389 and almost two thousand (Stagecoach), depending on the number of perks you want.

Smaller festivals are also seeing inflated prices. To attend either the Spring Bluegrass Festival in Florida and the Walnut Valley Festival in Kansas, a bluegrass fan has to shell out over one hundred dollars per adult. The International Bluegrass Music Association's World of Bluegrass, hosted in Raleigh, North Carolina, costs between $100 and $140 this year for their two day pass. In Colorado, the latest Telluride Bluegrass Festival sold general admission four day passes for $370 per person.

"That's not something that working class audiences normally have the opportunity to do," Stimeling said. "Certainly not people at the lower end of the income bracket."

One billionaire's party

Despite the rising cost of bluegrass, one mega festival remains notably free. It's not due to government subsidies for the arts or community collaboration – it's the work of one very wealthy man.

The annual Hardly Strictly Bluegrass festival, founded by billionaire investment banker Warren Hellman in 2001, is an enormous production put on in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park. Originally the Strictly Bluegrass festival, "Hardly" was added to the name in 2004; at around that time, the variety of musicians who performed at the free festival expanded from only bluegrass to other genres as well.

Warren Hellman at Hardly Strictly Bluegrass in 2003. (Photo courtesy Corbin Pagter)

"There's a lot of people here in the Bay Area that have been big influences on bluegrass music," said Corbin Pagter, leaning back in a worn desk chair in his office. Pagter is a family friend of Hellman who grew up in the Bay's bluegrass community. His workspace is cluttered with banjos and guitars, overstuffed filing cabinets and cork boards bursting with pinned photographs.

Hardly Strictly is subsidized by Hellman – when he was alive, he paid for it as a personal birthday present to himself, and after his death his estate handles the financial details.

"He had it for the public, out in Golden Gate Park and just did it as a philanthropic [event]," Pagter said, gaze intense as he considered his words. Because of Hellman's contribution, the festival has remained free and open to the public for 23 years and is projected to last about another ten.

But it wasn't always that way.

The original birthday celebration that Hellman threw for himself was a private party at his residence in the Bay Area. "Warren thought so much of bluegrass and early bluegrass that he would fly these [musicians] all the way from the East Coast in his private plane to play a yearly party," Pagter said. He plays a few twanging notes on a five-string banjo decorated with gilt and mother of pearl before setting the instrument back down.

Hellman's party, now huge and open to the public, is one of the largest bluegrass festivals in the country and the only free mega festival. Despite the lure of live music with no entry fee, the festival has one incredible barrier: it's held in San Francisco, an extraordinarily expensive venue, with astronomical food, drink, lodging and merchandise prices.

It is, after all, the legacy of one billionaire's private soiree. And it begs a question – when bluegrass festivals are either expensive to get into or difficult to afford once a person is there, why would a bluegrass fan spend all that money to attend?

For the 'betterment of society'

"I think live music is a super important aspect of life. I just think witnessing live music, dancing to live music, creating community around live music – for me it has added incredible richness to my quality of life," said Lindsey Dyer, a festival goer from the Northern Californian city of Sebastopol.

She wrangles her young child with one hand, wiping their face and adjusting their collar, while bopping to the acoustic guitar playing from the Tower of Gold Stage. A man carrying a rack of colorful headbands winds his way past through the crowd.

Over the decades that bluegrass music has developed, many festivals got their start as community-oriented events. Stimeling described festivals that include classes in how to bake biscuits or how to play fiddle; Pagter too talked about being a child around bluegrass culture and later growing up to see other children brought into the same culture. Exorbitant ticket prices create a barrier to growing up in that community.

Dyer agreed, squinting against the midafternoon sun and shielding her eyes with a hand. "I'm grateful for a festival like Hardly Strictly because it is free. It's incredibly accessible," she said. "I've been coming to this festival for over 10 years … And I just feel like because of the accessibility, everyone's more at ease, and there isn't as much pressure as there is at some festivals where you're paying hundreds of dollars to go there."

Nina Cornejo, a festival goer, felt the same way as Dyer. "Having access to free live music is super important, especially for like, in the sense of building a community amongst people and making people connect," she said. She's wearing round, John Lennon-style dark glasses despite the slightly overcast skies. Earlier, a woman in the crowd had placed two tame yellow parrots on her shoulders while she posed for pictures.

Cornejo's long dark hair falls into her lap where she's sitting cross legged in the grass amid the sprawl of humanity, a can of Modelo Oro in hand. "All of this [accessibility] are positive things for the betterment of society and getting along," she said.

An American Medical Association study has shown that music improves a person's quality of life, especially in times of stress – such as economic instability, political unrest or pandemics. Limiting access to music, especially for people who live near or below the poverty line, means that the average bluegrass fan ends up leading a poorer life.

Throughout the weekend-long festival, people chatted and shared water bottles, blankets, recipes. In some ways, despite being funded by a well-intentioned billionaire, Hardly Strictly Bluegrass really did seem to create a community for San Franciscans.

As Sunday evening wound down, the sunset painting pink and orange across the treeline, Emmylou Harris, a Hardly Strictly regular, began a set of rather mournful songs, the music rolling over the noise of the crowd.

The festival was all but over. Next year, the fans will return – there might be less of them, eating their $32 plate of noodles. Until next September, bluegrass in the Bay would be smaller, less accessible, probably not free.

"Where the ragged people go, looking for the places only they would know," Harris sang into the cool San Francisco evening. The first groups began to peel away from Banjo Stage and disperse out of the park, humming to themselves as they leave.