Name: Bellingham Folk Festiva | Old Growth Graveyard (Ryan McKasson & Colin Cotter), Bronwyn McKasson
Start: 2025-01-24T18:00:00-08:00
Location: 202 E. Holly Street , 98225

Welcome to the 2025 edition and the 11th annual Bellingham Folk Festival!
Longtime partners in crime, Ryan McKasson and Colin Cotter find themselves back in the thick of a creative collaboration spanning many years, bands, gigs, productions, late nights, tours, missed flights, fiddle camps, adventures, time away, and journeys home. “Old Growth Graveyard” is the most recent distillation of their artistic partnership; a compelling curiosity first glimpsed in a late-night fiddle camp jam session among the California redwoods in 2019, OGG gained definition in post-gig hotel room recording sessions later that year when Ryan and Colin were on tour together, eventually coming into focus through a series of immersive creative sessions spread across 2020 and 2021.
A somewhat whimsical diversion for two musicians known best in Celtic and Americana circles for fiddle and acoustic guitar, Old Growth Graveyard features McKasson a lot more on viola and Cotter bringing in the electric guitar and voice. From the moment that they stumbled across the unique combination of the viola’s throaty richness, the electric guitar’s undeniable edge, and the human voice, the two were smitten and immediately took to the mixology of grafting together the electric and acoustic sonorities with a vengeance. This new chapter in their creative journey takes new and familiar music on quite an adventure, giving two musicians – each established in their musical idioms – plenty of room to play around.
The two met over 20 years ago at Valley of the Moon Scottish Fiddling School (where they are both now faculty members), and have spent a good part of the last two decades joining forces to launch creative projects, traveling all over the country making music together, and eagerly feeding off each other’s energy. Indeed, when McKasson and Cotter are on stage together, you hear decades of friendship, collaboration, immersion in music, and shared passion for free expression form a foundation from which playful, evocative, unpredictable songs and tunes take flight.