The Bluegrass Island Music Festival, aka Outer Banks Bluegrass Festival, is a four- or five-day festival presented on Roanoke Island at Manteo. Since 2012, it has grown to become a major annual event on North Carolina's Outer Banks and one of the premier music festivals in the state. We attended the 2024 festival, which began with a Wednesday evening show with several bands at a second waterfront park in Manteo, and had previously been in 2015.
The festival benefits from its location at Roanoke Island Festival Park, where there is a large permanent stage.
The concert area is behind the park's history museum, where a large lawn and the stage abut the Intracoastal Waterway.
Through the window at the back of the stage, you can see cottages across the water in Nags Head, as well as the occasional boat, paddleboarder, parasailer, etc.
For 2025, the festival is to eliminate reserved VIP seating in the blue chairs positioned front-and-center before the stage. (Though often empty during the day, they filled up in the evenings.) Instead, 70 seats onstage will be the primary perk of the VIP package. Meanwhile, for those interested in sitting close to the stage, the festival encourages ticketholders to place their chairs early and allows them to leave chairs in place overnight, something other festivals discourage.
Each evening, ropes that were up during the day came down so people could get closer to the stage.
In 2024, the festival presented traditional bluegrass acts during the day and more progressive acts like Donna the Buffalo (below), Scythian and Infamous Stringdusters at night.
A coffee vendor was popular and busy during 2024's chilly festival weekend.
Another feature of the park is access to the water via a boardwalk and a couple of piers.
Another popular side activity at the Bluegrass Island Music Festival is two-hour cruises with a lunch buffet, open bar and artist performances and meet-and-greets. The 2025 schedule shows a cruise each day of the festival, and an email announced a new, larger boat, the Albemarle Queen (below), a paddle-wheeler, which according to its website, can accommodate up to 110 guests in the parlor and on the upper deck.
The Wednesday evening show in 2024 was for free and was held at George Washington Creef Memorial Park, which is opposite the Roanoke Marshes Lighthouse in downtown Manteo.
If you can find lodging in or near downtown Manteo, all of the bluegrass festival's venues are within a reasonable walk, and there are several good restaurants, as well as shops, parks, the waterfront and other attractions available downtown.
If you're coming from farther away, parking at Festival Park is limited and requires a VIP pass. There's free parking throughout downtown, and the festival provides an off-site parking lot that is served by a $5 all-day shuttle.
The two days of the festival that were presented were rainy, which made the large tent at the back of the lawn popular.
A plus of the park's permanent facilities is the availability of indoor restrooms at the rear of the museum.
In a feat of fortunate timing in 2015, we caught Rhonda Vincent arriving for her two nights at the festival.
The OBX Bluegrass Festival is also well known for announcing at least a partial lineup for the next edition of the festival almost immediately after each year's show.
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