Since its inception in 2008, Bluegrass Underground has become an international concert destination and the host of a thirteen-time Emmy award-winning music series on PBS. The show has previously hosted musicians like Del McCoury, Widespread Panic, Jason Isbell, David Grisman, Edward Sharpe and The Magnetic Zeros, Leon Russell, and Old Crow Medicine Show among many others. Good news arrives today for fans of Bluegrass Underground, with the series’ creator and executive producer, Todd Mayo, announcing today that the program has found a permanent home. The show has previously taken place in the Volcano Room—a cavern 333 feet below McMinnville, Tennessee—for the past nine years. The series will now take place in The Caverns—a collection of underground caves at the base of Monteagle Mountain in Tennessee’s Cumberland Plateau.
Go In-Depth With Bluegrass Underground As They Wrap Season VII Filming For PBS
As program creator and executive producer, Todd Mayo, noted in a press release, “This is a dream come true to find a cave system that expands and improves the live and televised musical experiences of underground performances we have been curating since 2008. . . . Our new home at The Caverns will enable us to add infrastructure with permanent power, professional audio and lighting with enhanced food and beverage concessions that have never before been possible, including a longtime request from our patrons: cold beer.”
However, the move will not only suit guests in-person, with the room’s singular natural acoustics, larger capacity, heightened accessibility for patrons with physical disabilities, and permanent electric infrastructure throughout the year. As television producer Todd Jarrell adds, “In the past, we taped the entire 12-episode season over one weekend due to the difficulty and expense of bringing literally tons of cabling and show gear a quarter mile into the cave. . . . The Caverns’ permanent infrastructure presents us the flexibility to match calendars with some of the world’s greatest performers, enticing them underground to offer our fans a ‘deep down’ lifetime experience throughout the year.”
With this change, be sure to keep an eye-out on Bluegrass Underground’s upcoming calendar, which is sure to be chock full of a number of very special guests to kick off the program’s inaugural year at the new venue. However, outside of the program itself, Mayo is still looking to the future. The Caverns are part of a connected cave system that spelunkers flock to due to their beautiful formations, pristine condition, giant rooms, and expansive circuit of underground rivers. As Mayo notes, “In time we’d like to sustainably develop and share portions of these amazing caves for both educational and recreational purposes, allowing a wider audience to enjoy and learn from the underground beauty of Tennessee.”
[Photo courtesy of Shelly Swanger]