James Reams bringing energy to Folk Festival

The Ambassador of Bluegrass, as James Reams has often been called, has played concerts all over the country, from his home state of Kentucky to his adopted hometown of Brooklyn, New York.

But in the five years he has called Arizona home, the closest the Phoenix-area resident has gotten to a Tucson gig has been just outside the city limits, playing the Marana Bluegrass Festival a couple years back.

This weekend, he and his band The Barnstormers are the featured guests on the Saturday night main stage lineup for the Tucson Folk Festival downtown, opening for headliner John McCutcheon.

“It’s a nice little festival,” Reams said last week when reached by phone at his Litchfield Park home on Phoenix’s far west side. “I think Tucson is an amazing city and what is cool about it is that it has a little bit of everything out there. Chris Bianco opened his pizza restaurant down there. You have a great music community. You have great characters who come from somewhere else like Ted DeGrazia and they leave a great legacy. ... And Tucson really supports its music.”

Back to homepage

Subscriber Login

Keep reading with a digital access subscription.

Subscribe now

Reams, who has been performing bluegrass 20-plus years with his band, tours nationally, which sometimes makes it hard to do gigs closer to home. But the stars seem to have aligned pretty nicely for this weekend’s show, he said, “so I am so excited to come to Tucson.”

“There will be some sparks flying,” he said of what we can expect when he and the band — Arizona champion fiddler Michael Rolland, former Lost Highway mandolin player Billy Parker, banjo dynamo Evan Ward and upright bass player Dan Meyer — take the Plaza Stage at 8 p.m. Saturday, April 30. “We don’t take anything easy. I feel that bluegrass music is sort of like the equivalent of gypsy music and it should be filled with passion and improvisation.”

Reams has been performing music since he was a child growing up in Kentucky, but he didn’t start doing it professionally until he was in his late 30s while living and teaching in Brooklyn. He became known as the bluegrass ambassador for his steadfast devotion to traditional bluegrass and his role in promoting the music in New York City. Among the marks he left on New York is the Park Slope Bluegrass & Old-Time Jamboree festival, which has been around 15 years.

He moved to Arizona in 2011 after retiring from teaching, and settled near his mother, who lived in Sun City West on Phoenix’s far west side. It didn’t take him long to become immersed in the state’s bluegrass scene, including becoming chairman of the Arizona Bluegrass Association. He also is a member of Tucson’s Desert Bluegrass Association, he said.