Last week during the World of Bluegrass conference in Raleigh, the IBMA announced that 2024 would be the last year that WOB would be held in that city. It has been there for about a decade, moving from Nashville. When that move was announced, I pretty much decided that I would not be attending due to the driving distance from Detroit to Raleigh, about 14 hours one-way. That meant that I would have to take off two extra days just for driving, and the job I had at the time didn’t give me that much vacation time.
Of course, I later dropped my membership with the IBMA due to political reasons, but have continued to get emails from them, and since the association is central to the bluegrass music industry, whatever it does gets around as news to all bluegrass fans. The strange thing about this announcement was that the IBMA did not announce where it will be moving the WOB convention in 2025. I can remember when it announced in Nashville that Raleigh would be its next location for three years, then the contract kept getting renewed for three-year extensions. It was originally in Owensboro, Kentucky, moving to Louisville in 1997. It then moved to Nashville from 2005 to 2012, and then to Raleigh starting in 2013. COVID wiped out the convention completely in 2020, was brought back in a smaller capacity in 2021, and a hurricane half-ruined the 2022 edition. One can only assume that the past three years had some sort of impact on the decision to relocate.
On many of the bluegrass news websites and chat groups, the big debate is where WOB will happen starting in 2025. Chris Jones even wrote a humorous take about the future location in his Bluegrass Today column (https://bluegrasstoday.com/from-the-side-of-the-road-new-home-for-world-of-bluegrass/). I may even consider re-attending if the IBMA takes up Chris’ suggestion of holding it at Galesburg, Michigan!
If you follow any of the debate, more cities are suggested than I can ever find on a map. Will it go back to Louisville, Owensboro, or Nashville? Perhaps, but I doubt it will go back to Music City, even though Nashville has set itself up as a perfect convention city over the past two decades. The other two Kentucky locations have built themselves up to be more convention-friendly over the past few years, but it is still a “maybe” for either one.
A new location? Most likely, but where? Hard-core bluegrassers would go to war-torn Ukraine if they knew Del McCoury would be headlining. The United States is such a large country that no matter where the convention was held, it would be a long distance for some people. One also has to consider convention center availability, the amount of hotels available, highway access, airport access, hospitality and dining, smaller venues for showcasing, and cooperation with local authorities. I am sure that IBMA has a verbal agreement with some location, else they would have not made the announcement. Perhaps making the announcement, they hoped to get some bids on locating it at particular cities. It all just seems that there is a lot going unanswered with little time to fully prepare.
The IBMA has moved away a lot from its original traditional values over the past few years, which again made me leave the association. Who knows? Maybe the 2025 WOB will be in New York or San Francisco, if only to show how progressive the association has become. It would be a shame if the association would continue to ignore its most sacred traditions that the founders such as Bill Monroe, Flatt & Scruggs, Jimmy Martin, and the Osborne Brothers bought forth — that there are family and Christian values within the bluegrass community, and that while its music is now appreciated world-wide, there is still that precious heart and soul of the genre that continues to live in the east-central region of the country.
In the meantime, we still have the SPBGMA conference in Nashville this January!
Chew on it and comment.
Luegra 