Guitars, fiddles and food donations come together during Bluegrass Battles Hunger this weekend.
Admission to the event is a can of food or cash donation for the Second Harvest Community Food Bank in St. Joseph.
“All the fundraising and efforts that go toward putting this concert together really bring a great community festival for the community to enjoy and to bring another activity to downtown, (which), all summer long, is just thriving with great music entertainment,” Chad Higdon with Second Harvest said. “The nice part about this is that anything that’s really leftover, is donated back to the food bank to help individuals that are struggling with food insecurity.”
Higdon said the idea for the 7th annual event began as part of a Leadership St. Joseph project.
“This group really gravitated toward the idea and from there we formed a new non-profit organization and started raising funds and all the legal fun stuff that you had to do,” Higdon said. “In the end, we put together an event and brought some people in and you had a new group of people who were interested in supporting something like this because they also knew something wasn’t taking place like that. It’s just had a lot of energy and a lot of interest and it’s really grown (and) I never thought we’d be here after seven years, this is fantastic.”
Seth Campbell plays the upright bass as part of Julian Davis and the Hay-Burners, a group that’s appeared on America’s Got Talent and will be performing at Bluegrass Battles Hunger.
“Talking from an artist’s point of view, the people that are running this really have shown a genuine interest in bluegrass music and showing great bluegrass bands and presenting that to our town,” Campbell said. “I think everybody just wants to help spread the love of bluegrass and a lot of people don’t really think about what bluegrass really is, they might dismiss it and think, ‘Oh, it’s just hillbilly music, a bunch of guys with banjos on porches,’ but you actually find a lot of beauty in it and I think that’s why the artists do this. (Event organizers) pick out bands locally, also some from Kansas City and some from as far away as Portland, Oregon, they get a good spread.”
The weekend kicks off at 8:30 p.m. on Friday at Coleman Hawkins Park at Felix Street Square in St. Joseph. A Kid’s Jam session takes place at 1 p.m. on Saturday and performances begin at 3 p.m.
Through the past six years of Bluegrass Battles Hunger, over $11,000 has been raised and 4,800 pounds of food donated to Second Harvest.
For more information and the full schedule of band performances, click here.