Set for downtown Tahlequah on September 5 and 6, this year’s installment of the long-lived Bluegrass & Chili Festival includes a Friday night performance by the all-woman band, Sister Sadie. The group’s fiddler is Deanie Richardson, an acclaimed musician who performed and recorded with a number of country-music stars – including, in the ’90s, chart-topping vocalist Patty Loveless.
And that connection reminds Dell Davis of a story.
“Patty came to the festival [in 1997], when we were still in downtown Tulsa,” remembers the event’s longtime director. “That was back when the in-ear monitors were a pretty new thing, and the musicians kept coming over and saying, ‘We’re picking up some radio station. What frequency are you guys on?’ And we were like, ‘We don’t have any radio stations broadcasting live from here.’ Come to find out, they were picking up the music from the ballet, which was going on at the PAC next door to us.” She laughs. “Ballet and bluegrass – that was interesting.”
Some would also say that the pairing of bluegrass and chili is just as interesting. Davis might agree; it’s one of the few things about the annual festival that wasn’t her idea. As she notes, back in the late 1970s, Downtown Tulsa Unlimited – an influential collection of local merchants and businesspeople – decided to stage “some sort of bluegrass event” in the fall, as a kind of counterbalance to Mayfest, held every spring. But the folks at DTU decided that, in addition to the music, they needed a food component. So someone came up with the idea of adding a chili cook-off, and, in 1979, in downtown Tulsa, the first Bluegrass & Chili Festival arose.
It remains the only one to ever happen without Dell Davis’s involvement.
“That first year,” she says, “I only attended. The second year, they called me, because I was at [radio station] KVOO, and they knew I knew the bluegrass thing. So that’s when I became involved. I did all their entertainment, their booking, for nine years after that. I didn’t take the whole thing over until 1990, when I came on board as the director.”
At the time she began her association with the festival, she had been doing her bluegrass-based radio program for several years. Her immersion in the genre, however, stretched much farther back.
“I grew up in this music,” she says. “My dad was a player, and for years, he and my uncle did a show every Saturday night called the Country Social. It was in Checotah. And all these great bands would come in to this old tabernacle building; it kind of reminded me of the Grand Ole Opry. So I was two years old and going to bluegrass events. I spent every Saturday night of my teenage years at the Country Social. I’ve known nothing but music my entire life.”
Applying her knowledge of and fondness for bluegrass and country, Davis and her staff built the annual festival into one of the biggest of its kind. And then, a decade or so after becoming director, she found herself guiding it out of its downtown Tulsa home and into a smaller nearby city.
“We left Tulsa in 1999, after 20 years,” she recalls. “DTU at the time was losing some city contracts, so the organization was not going to be able to continue. Well, they knew how much passion I had for the event, and they said, ‘If you want to take the name and move it somewhere else…’ Basically, it was kind of like, ‘Knock yourself out.’ So we went to Claremore and spent 18 years there.”
Then, as Davis remembers it, “All of a sudden it was like, ‘We don’t want this anymore, and you don’t have a job anymore.’”
At that time, in addition to doing the festival, Davis had been working for the Claremore Chamber of Commerce – a sponsor of the event – for 16 years. When she left the position, and Claremore, she found that the Bluegrass & Chili Festival had no shortage of suitors.
“We had 21 cities that wanted us to move the festival there,” she says. “Wagoner had a mayor at the time named A.J. Jones, and he said, ‘If you come here, we’ll back you 100%. We need to get our little town on the map.’ He was very convincing – and he did exactly what he said he was going to do. We did six there, and then, unfortunately, he lost an election.”
So the peripatetic days for the fest began again.
“Pryor asked, and so we said, ‘Okay, we can move to Pryor. Have festival, will travel.’ But then our dates conflicted with their county fair, and they felt like that hurt the fair, so they wanted me to move the date. I said, ‘If we do, we’ll lose our vendors. We’ll lose our entertainers. We’ve had that date for 44 years, and we can’t move it.’
“It’s always been the weekend following Labor Day, because [the longtime Tulsa event] the Great Raft Race was on Labor Day,” she adds. “When we were in Tulsa, that’s the reason we went with the week after.
“So we went to Pryor but couldn’t make the date work. Tahlequah had called us and wanted to do it last year, but we’d already made the commitment to Pryor. They said, ‘If anything comes up, we want it in Tahlequah.’ So that’s how it’s happening. We’ve had good support there with sponsors and volunteers, and I know so many musicians from that area. I think this is going to be a great move for us.”
According to the event’s website, bluegrasschilifest.com, this year marks the festival’s 45th anniversary. (Because of the pandemic, there was no live event in 2020.) Dell Davis has worked on 44 of them, and she shows no signs of stopping.
“Well, if you asked my friends and family, they’d probably tell you it’s because I’m crazy,” she says with a laugh. “But I just have a passion for the music, and I think live music is so important. The cost of concert tickets has gone up so much that we’re losing a lot of people who can’t go to a live-music thing. There’s nothing like sitting out there in the audience and getting involved with the band playing or the singer singing.”
Those who head for downtown Tahlequah the weekend following Labor Day – Sept. 5 and 6 – will get plenty of opportunities to do just that. Once again, the free event will feature three musical stages – in addition, Davis notes, to the chili cook-off and “the car show, the tractor show, the children’s area, the festival market, all that fun stuff we’ve done for years. And it’s all been free since day one.”
Headliners this year include Rhonda Vincent, Authentic Unlimited, the Cleverlys, the Grascals, Sister Sadie and others, joining the regional acts on the bill. “Bands like Acoustic Freight Train, the Smith Brothers – they come out and support this event. Otherwise, it would make it difficult for us to have the quality of entertainment we have.
“Really, there’s a ton of people who make this happen. It’s not just me. I would never take credit for the whole thing. I actually have some volunteers who were volunteering before I took over, and then after I took over. So I’ve got volunteers who’ve done 35 years.”
She laughs again.
“You know,” she concludes, “they should get a gold medal.”
