Bluegrass & Country Music Makers Association

A non-profit founded by Bob Fisher, Grover Jones, Louie Ashe, O.C. Helton & Roy Morgan. These men started a bluegrass band called The Whitehorse Mountaineers in the mid-1970s. Sam and Bertha Nations met and married in North Carolina and moved to Darrington in the 1940s. They called their band The Combinations. Like their friends in The Whitehorse Mountaineers, Sam and Bertha were also founding members of the Bluegrass and Country Musicmakers Association. The band grew out of local jams by transplanted Tarheels in Darrington that started drawing so many people they decided to host the first annual Darrington Bluegrass Festival in 1977 at the rodeo grounds. In the 1980s, the land immediately east of the rodeo grounds became available, so the Bluegrass and Country Musicmakers Association purchased it and started working to make it an outdoor amphitheater. The Darrington Bluegrass Festival now had its own home. The Bluegrass & Country Music Makers Association is a local nonprofit which runs the festival still to this day, more than 40 years later.