About Us
The Crooked River Gathering is a bluegrass festival in Maine featuring camping, music, and homesteading/DIY skillshares and demonstrations. More than a festival, it is a celebration of the community built around bluegrass and old time music, farming, homesteading, and artisan creativity. You are ‘part of the show’. The event takes place over four days, and features live music, vendors, food trucks and craft beer, and educational workshops, community meetups, and skillshares.
The event is hosted by The North Atlantic Arts Alliance, a 501c3 charity organization whose mission is to enrich our rural Maine communities through arts performance, education, and the support of local agriculture, business and sustainable practices. If you are interested in being part of the Founders Circle for this event, please reach out to us directly.
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The history of ordinary folks building community around the things you can do in your own backyard is strong in New England: Learning songs by ear on acoustic instruments, and playing tunes all night around a campfire. Breaking bread with new friends, or feeding your family through what you grow. Bartering, repairing and reusing, foraging. Embroidering, wood working, blacksmithing, caretaking animals, and reading the forest. Painting, contradance, fiddle tunes. There is so much going on right under our noses, and when we come together to share what we love, we create something new.
This gathering is new in 2025, but in many ways it has already been happening for centuries–in dance halls and granges, coffee shops and community gardens, farm fields and factory tenements. Plus, the team that produces this event also has over 70+ years of combined experience running Maine festivals and events. We’re starting small, and grassroots, with a regionally based lineup of performers, workshop hosts, demonstrators and meetup hosts. If you have something you’d like to officially teach or share with others, or would like to volunteer to build the event, check out the participate page! Or, just grab a ticket and come check it out. Grow with us, and in twenty years you’ll get to say “I was at the first one!”
Why Crooked River? Crooked River is our affectionate nickname of the woodland that hosts the event. The far southwest corner of the woodland sits on a high bank called the Eagles Nest that looks out on a sharp “crook” of the Ossipee river. “Crooked” is also a reference to a term from bluegrass and old time music in which people are teaching each other a new tune, and the structure has an unexpected twist (usually a chord change) that needs to be remembered, and a “crooked tree” is one that has been strengthened by adapting to find the best source of light (@Molly Tuttle). Therefore, “Crooked” best embodies our connection to the land, to bluegrass music, and to finding the light wherever we can.