Laurie Lewis article, San Francisco Chronicle

Laurie Lewis garners fans with grace, not glitz

Joel Selvin, San Francisco Chronicle Senior Pop Music Correspondent

Sunday, February 14, 2010

One of the highlights of the annual Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival every year takes place out of the sight of the public, at the cast-and-crew dinner and jam session on the Saturday night of the three-day free concert in Golden Gate Park, where Berkeley bluegrass bandleader Laurie Lewis presides over a roomful of the greatest musicians in the field.

With gracious good humor and the kind of feather-touch command only a woman could wield, Lewis will point her fiddle bow into the crowd and summon to the stage musicians far better known than herself: "Emmylou, come up and sing one."

"It's a private thing," she says, "but it's been incredible fun. It's good because it's become one of the things artists playing Hardly Strictly look forward to play. It's too much fun, not that I don't work my ass off."

The rest is at
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/02/12/PKL91BOUI6.DTL