The Triad is blessed to have Greensboro's NC Folk Festival. Here are more NC fests.

I’d planned to spend last Sunday afternoon catching up on some paperwork and mowing my lawn for hopefully the last time this year.

But while Bess and I were eating lunch, she said, “Why don’t we just spend the whole afternoon at the Folk Fest?”

Yes, the NC Folk Festival was in downtown Greensboro.

We headed straight to LeBauer Park, where we listened to Tyler Ramsey, the former guitarist for Band of Horses. Ramsey left the band about eight years ago to raise a family in Asheville and be his own boss, which means writing and performing his own music and touring when he wants to. While he played and sang, a silver-haired couple danced near the stage.

Ramsey thanked them for dancing. He said he wished he’d written music more suitable for dancing, but his music was just fine.

After the show, we left the leisurely pace of the LeBauer Park lawn for the CityStage, where people were already jockeying for choice seats under the big top.

We found some good ones in the first section, not too close, and listened to a musician from the Ivory Coast named Peter One, who performed by himself and also with a huge band.

Then it was the Chatham Rabbits — Sarah and Austin McCombie, a husband and wife singer-songwriting team who live on a nearby farm and trade witty banter and barbs between thoughtful and catchy songs. I’ve seen them at MerleFest, but this time they’d brought a great band to back them. They have a big local following, including a friend of ours who’s seen dozens of Rabbit shows and even made a denim skirt for Sarah.

The main event was The Steep Canyon Rangers, who did not disappoint. The Grammy-winning bluegrass band features Greensboro native and Grimsley High graduate Graham Sharp on banjo, along with Mike Guggino on mandolin, Aaron Burdett on guitar, Nicky Sanders on fiddle, Mike Ashworth on drums and Barrett Smith on bass and guitar.

One of the highlights Sunday was when the Rangers were joined on stage by Brenda Joyce Evans, the great-granddaughter of Elizabeth Cotten.

Cotten was born in 1893 in Chapel Hill, and as a little girl she started writing songs and taught herself to play a guitar strung for a right-handed player. But she was left-handed, so she turned the guitar upside down, playing the bass lines with her fingers and the melody with her thumb. In doing so, she would influence every genre of music.

She was discovered while working as a housekeeper for the composer Ruth Crawford Seeger, who was married to Pete Seeger’s father, and she didn’t start performing in public until the age of 60.

Cotten won a Grammy when she was 90 and was posthumously inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

On Sunday, Evans sang her great-grandmother’s song “Shake Sugaree,” which she’d sung on the original recording in 1967, when she was 12 years old. Evans was later a backup singer for Diana Ross on “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough” and would form a Motown group called Undisputed Truth.

Then, accompanied by the Rangers, Evans sang “Freight Train,” which her great-grandmother wrote and which has been covered by Bob Dylan, Jerry Garcia, Joan Baez, Doc Watson, Peter, Paul and Mary and many others.

The Steep Canyon Rangers finished the show with one of their original songs, which morphed into the Allman Brothers’ “In Memory of Elizabeth Reed.”

If you don’t think a bluegrass band can rock, you should have been there.

The Triad is blessed to have the NC Folk Festival — and for it to be free.

More opportunities

The Steep Canyon Rangers are playing the Greenfield Lake Amphitheatre in Wilmington on Friday, then heading over to Knight Theatre in Charlotte on Saturday.

They’ll be hitting the road with longtime collaborator Steve Martin — yes, that Steve Martin — this fall for gigs in Las Vegas as well as some places where not everything that happens there stays there. Martin will be bringing along his buddy Martin Short, and they’ll be performing with the Rangers and presumably solving any murders that happen along the way.

The Steep Canyon Rangers also have a gig in the Outer Banks on Oct. 18 at the Bluegrass Island Music Festival in Manteo, without Martin and Short, and another at East Carolina University on Jan. 17.