HOUSE PARTY

By ANN WRIGHT

Ann.Wright@gjsentinel.com

Banjo player Clinton Knorpp swears the rain began pelting twice as hard just as the Still House String Band jumped on stage.

It was the cold mountain kind of rain that’s not fan friendly, and the stage was the setting for the first round of the Telluride Band Contest at the Telluride Bluegrass Festival back in June.

But despite the rain and their nervousness, one day later the Grand Valley band played in contest’s final. Then, with the sun shining, Still House String Band joined three other bands on festival’s main stage.

Fourth place was announced, and it wasn’t Still House.

Then third place was named, and dobro guitar player Kyle Elliott thought, “Man we’re in the top two! Whoa!”

“And in second place from downtown Denver …” “And we knew. It was, Oh my ….!” Elliott said.

The Still House String Band won the prestigious Telluride Band Contest.

BAND BEGINNINGS

The Telluride Band Contest, which was instrumental in launching the likes of Greensky Bluegrass, Gregory Alan Isakov and The Lil Smokies, was something Knorpp has watched for years.

Knorpp has attended the festival at least 10 times, and “I gravitated toward watching the band competition when I could,” the banjo player said.

He watched bands warm up across the street from the first round stage in Elk Park, then see how they performed. “You could almost tell right away, oh that band is going to win. There was always a standout,” he said.

He eventually began calculating, what does it take to have a winning band?

For the Still House String Band, it started out, in part, more than 10 years ago at local bluegrass jams.

Jams are where Knorpp met Elliott, and Elliott met mandolin player Kyle Lockhart.

Knorpp and Lockhart met at 2 in the morning when Lockhart was playing his mandolin outside of Quincy Bar on Main Street.

“Hey, you know I play the banjo,” Lockhart recalls Knorpp saying.

“Are you good?” Lockhart replied, razzing Knorpp about three-finger picking. “Little did I know, he really was great.”

ADDING HARMONY

Still House String Band took its name from Peach Street Distillery, aka “The Still” to Palisade locals, where Knorpp, Elliott, Lockhart and other bluegrass players became something of a house band.

When Everett Merritt moved to the valley in 2022, he noticed the band was lacking an upright bass player. “So I reached out to them. …. and it worked out well,” he said.

But in February, when Merritt couldn’t make a gig, they asked Jeanette Adams to fill in.

“We had a great time,” said Adams, who had started playing the bass on a lark in elementary school and ended up getting a music degree in college. She had met the members of Still House at a small music festival few years ago.

Two weeks later, she got a call from Knorpp: “We want you in the band.”

Merritt, who plays multiple instruments, moved to guitar. Adding Adams gave the band three-part vocal harmonies with Merritt, and Knorpp as lead singer.

FIGURING OUT THE MIC

Of the four previous bands that have won the Telluride Band Contest, Knorpp, Elliott and Lockhart knew them all and had previously played with them or one of the members of the bands.

Knorpp began thinking about entering the contest, “man, I’m playing with all these people. … We are at this level. We should do it.”

The thing that makes Telluride tough is that every band must crowd around one microphone. Only the bass can be plugged in for amplification. For bluegrass, “it’s kind of the classic way to play,” Merritt said. It’s the “best way to show your chops.” But it also was daunting given that all vocals and instrument sounds other than the bass must be picked up by a solitary, stationary mic. Still House started practicing and recording their original music using one mic. And they quickly learned they had a banjo problem. “It’s inherently a loud instrument,” Elliott said. Knorpp used padding to subdue his banjo’s volume, and then the band created choreography for each song. Every member needed to know when to lean into the mic or to the side,

See PARTY, page 3B ➤

The Grand Valley’s own Still House String Band performs at the Thursday Night Concert Series at the Civic Center Memorial Park on Aug. 15

Photos by LARRY ROBINSON/ The Daily Sentinel

Clinton Knorpp plays the banjo and sings alongside his band mates with the Still House String Band during a performance for the Thursday Night Concert Series at the Civic Center Memorial Park on Aug. 15.

Jeannette Adams plays the bass alongside her band mates with the Still House String Band during a performance for the Thursday Night Concert Series at the Civic Center Memorial Park on Aug. 15.

Kyle Lockhartt plays the mandolin alongside his band mates with the Still House String Band during a performance for the Thursday Night Concert Series at the Civic Center Memorial Park on Aug. 15.

. Continued from page 1B

when to play loud and when to back off.

“It’s an intricate dance. That’s what you end up doing,” Knorpp said.

And during all this, Still House found time to open for the Sam Bush Band in May.

RAINY FIRST ROUND

The band was told that it’s never good to draw No. 1, referring to the drawing that happens to determine the band order for the first round of the festival.

“I was the one who drew the first day, and I drew No. 1,” Knorpp said.

“Oh, great,” was Elliott’s semi-doomed reaction when he was told.

It threw things off at the get-go, and instead of having hours to wait and prepare, they needed to hustle down to Telluride’s Elk Park right away. And it was raining.

“Oh, no, I need to do my pregame!” Elliott remembered Lockhart exclaiming. “So at 9 a.m., he’s out pregaming with a beer.”

Short pregame done, the band scrambled to get the park as rainy turned to pouring. They nervously warmed up, and then noticed there wasn’t much of an audience.

And then they were announced and took the stage to play the required three songs: instrumental, slow vocal and fast vocal.

“You only have three minutes per song. You can’t dilly-dally,” Lockhart said.

As rain drummed into the stage cover, Still House played their instrumental song based on Nitty Gritty Dirt Bands’ “Blues Berry Hill” and two songs Knorpp wrote: “The Colorado River Song,” about a bike trip Knorpp took in 2008, and “Travel On,” dealing with the loss of loved ones.

“It felt like this is the best we can do right now,” Adams said.

“We made a strategic decision to save all our best stuff for the finals,” Knorpp said.

It was a risk to save those songs for the finals, since there was no guarantee of making it.

By the time the last band in the competition played, it was afternoon, the sun was out, the audience was energized and people were dancing.

SUNNY SECOND ROUND

Saturday arrived with a Colorado signature blue sky and Still House drew the No. 2 spot for that day’s finals on the festival’s large main stage.

Everyone was nervous. It was very intimidating walking out on the main stage, Elliott said.

The audience was certainly larger than it had been the day before. Fortunately, it included some of the band’s fans from the Grand Valley.

They started out with the instrumental “Frets and Regrets.” With its solos and interesting chord progressions, “I think everybody has good energy in it,” Merritt said.

Then Knorpp introduced the band and the song “Hard Life,” which prominently features Adams and the bass.

“I love that one,” Adams said. While Knorpp wrote it long before Adams joined the band, she wrote a little solo that was added to the song in preparation for Telluride. “That is one of those moments in my life that I’ll never forget,” Adams said.

They finished with the upbeat “She Only Likes Me When She’s Drinking” that includes a prominent dobro solo from Elliott.

As they played they could hear their music bouncing off Telluride’s canyon walls.

There were some goofs, and afterward Lockhart wasn’t overly confident. Knorpp had the opposite feeling.

“I walked off the stage feeling we did the best we could do,” he said. “In my mind, we may win this, but there were a lot of nerves.”

JOY OF THE WIN

All four bands were lined up along the edge of the stage. Fourth was announced, then third, then second and then they knew.

Knorpp’s arm shot into the air in victory as nervous anticipation erupted into pure joy on the band members’ faces.

“I kind of just got a little weak in the knees,” Lockhart said. So he grabbed Knorpp and picked him up — “That’s kind of a skiing thing,” Lockhart said with a nod to his days as a ski jumper.

All five of them were hugging, and jumping. “Beyond joyful,” Adams said. “Over the moon.” “I was really surprised,” said Merritt, who grew up attending the festival. “It’s the most beautiful stage there is really. Such an iconic piece of bluegrass history. It was really such an honor to be up there.”

“I didn’t really have a thought for a day or so,” Knorpp said. “I don’t really know. It’s hard to describe. It was … a big deal.”

CONSIDERING THE NEXT ACT

With their win, Still House received $750 cash, a recording package, van rental and a performance spot at the 2025 Telluride Bluegrass Festival.

It’s that performance spot that the band is most excited about.

It’s about being on the stage where “Telluride royalty” has played, musicians such as Sam Bush, Jerry Douglas and Béla Fleck, Lockhart said.

“We’re not at this point trying to become a nationally touring band. We all have deep connections here,” said Knorpp, who recently became a father and started his own law firm last year after being a Colorado deputy public defender for 10 years.

Winning Telluride hopefully has opened the doors or gates to some festivals and venues, said Elliott, who is the father of two.

The band also is looking forward to taking advantage of the recording package so they have an album for fans.

“One thing that it has done for us is validated our original tunes and our original arrangements,” Knorpp said.

“You know, we’re a little older than some of the bands. We’re all in it because we enjoy it and we’ve enjoyed it since we were really young. It wasn’t cool back then. You didn’t tell people in the ’90s that you were listening to bluegrass on the school bus,” Lockhart said.

“Everything kind of worked out,” he said.

Hundreds grabbed their lawn chairs and put on their listening ears, while others danced, at a performance by the Still House String Band, winners of the 2024 Telluride Blue Grass Band Contest and locally based out of the Grand Valley, during the Thursday Night Concert Series at the Civic Center Memorial Park on Aug. 15.

PHOTOS BY LARRY ROBINSON/ The Daily Sentinel

Kyle Elliott, right, plays the dobro alongside his band mates with the Still House String Band while performing at the Thursday Night Concert Series at the Civic Center Memorial Park on Aug. 15.

Everett Merritt plays guitar with the Still House String Band during a performance for the Thursday Night Concert Series at the Civic Center Memorial Park on Aug. 15.

The Still House String Band, winners of the 2024 Telluride Blue Grass Band Contest and locally based out of the Grand Valley, performs for hundreds during the Thursday Night Concert Series at the Civic Center Memorial Park on Aug. 15.