Highlights from San Francisco’s free festival

Hardly Strictly Bluegrass returned to San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park this weekend, celebrating its 25th year with three days of free music and familiar joy.

Founded in 2001 by the late financier and banjo enthusiast Warren Hellman, the festival has grown into a Bay Area institution – part civic ritual, part pastoral escape, and part logistical miracle. Admission has always been free, true to Hellman’s belief that music should be a public good.

This year’s lineup blended legends with fresh voices. Emmylou Harris – the only artist to perform every year since the festival began – once again anchored a bill that also featured Jeff Tweedy, Rosanne Cash, Patty Griffin, Lucinda Williams and Steve Earle.

The anniversary weekend began Thursday, Oct. 2, with a tribute to Harris at The Masonic, where longtime festival favorites including The War and Treaty, Shawn Colvin, Griffin, Williams and Rodney Crowell set a tone of nostalgia and renewal.

On Friday, Oct. 3, the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band delivered what may have been its final Bay Area performance.

The Long Beach group, celebrating six decades together, turned its Swan Stage set into a heartfelt farewell – moving through Bob Dylan’s “Girl From the North Country” and its signature hit “Mr. Bojangles” before closing with a powerful pairing of “Will the Circle Be Unbroken” and The Band’s “The Weight.”

Under rare, steady sunshine, fans picnicked, played with their dogs, and soaked in the sound.

Shawn Colvin offered an intimate, precision-tuned performance on the Rooster Stage, pairing ’90s classics like “Sunny Came Home” with the haunting “Shotgun Down the Avalanche.” On the Banjo Stage, Margo Price brought grit and humor, trading verses with Crowell on “Don’t Let the Bastards Get You Down” and tipping her hat to Janis Joplin with “Mercedes Benz.”

By Saturday, Oct. 4, the mood softened.

Wilco frontman Jeff Tweedy filled Lindley Meadow with new songs from his sprawling 30-track album “Twilight Override,” performed with his sons Spencer and Sammy.

“It’s a lot of new material,” he told the crowd. “I appreciate you sticking around and listening to us.”

Rosanne Cash, joined by husband John Leventhal, delivered a poised, career-spanning set tied to her new retrospective, “The Essential Collection,” and a Nashville museum exhibit, Time Is a Mirror.

Steve Earle introduced a new bluegrass band and leaned into five decades of songwriting with “Guitar Town” and “Copperhead Road.”

“From this point, I will put a bluegrass band on this stage for as long as this thing keeps going,” he said. “It’s called Hardly Strictly Bluegrass, not Hardly Any Bluegrass.”

Earle mostly sidestepped politics this year – until closing with Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land,” slyly revising a verse:

“On that sign it said Trump Tower,
On the other side it said ‘Made in China,’
That sign ain’t for you and me.”

The crowds, as ever, were part of the magic. Tens of thousands filled Hellman Hollow and the surrounding meadows, spreading blankets under the eucalyptus and braving the city’s unpredictable mix of fog, wind and sun.

Hardly Strictly remains a uniquely San Francisco ritual – massive yet communal, where families, friends and strangers share the same grass without tickets or turnstiles.

Photographers from The Chronicle will be on the ground all weekend, capturing the artists, the atmosphere and the fleeting moments that make Hardly Strictly Bluegrass unlike any other festival.

This article originally published at Hardly Strictly Bluegrass 2025: Highlights from San Francisco’s free festival.