An Interview With My Grandmother, Who Knows Everyone In Bluegrass Music

An Interview With My Grandmother, Who Knows Everyone In Bluegrass Music

Winfield is a sun-bleached spot of a city in the middle of southeastern Kansas’s farmlands. It’s unremarkable except that it is the home of the Walnut Valley Festival, a long-running bluegrass festival that hosts the National Flatpicking Championship.  My grandmother, Jane Laughlin, worked at the Walnut Valley Festival—”the Festival,” as we call it—for more than 40 years. The Festival is an outdoor acoustic music festival that attracts musicians…