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Winchester music artist Rachel Sumner and her trio (Rachel Sumner & Traveling Light) won this year’s Telluride Bluegrass Band Contest.
“We’re a scrappy do-it-yourself kind of band,” Sumner says.
Originally from California, Sumner came to the area 14 years ago to attend Berklee College of Music and never left. She stopped playing with her previous band (Twisted Pine) to be a soloist just as the pandemic started.
“So, I got a job,” she says, “working at the Passim School of Music . I’d been doing live sound at Club Passim where and I taught songwriting in their school. Now I’m the school’s manager.”
Sumner describes the contest.
“There are 12 bands in the preliminary round and we all performed at a free stage in a town park,” she says. “We played an instrument, followed by a slow song and then a fast one. The aim was to wow the judges and the crowd. We even made our own jumpsuits to wear.
“We got to the final four round and played on the Telluride stage — it’s the biggest blue grass stage in the country,” she says. “We played three songs and we won! We were the first trio to ever win the contest.”
The prize is the coveted opening slot at next year’s Telluride Bluegrass Festival, which will take place June 18-21, 2026 in Colorado, Sumner explains. And they get to record an EP there.
She describes their music as “not quite blue grassy, but string band acoustical. A lot of my songs are centered on women and their stories. My favorite is ‘Radium Girls Curie Eleison.’ It went viral and was on the Grammy ballot.”
Playwright D. W. Gregory wrote a play about the ‘Radium Girls.’ It was about women who painted radium dials on watches and were dying from licking their paintbrushes.
The play is often performed at high schools and they use Sumner’s song.
When asked where the trio can be seen, she said they play around the area and are starting a West Coast tour this month. And they’ll be playing at Club Passim on Sept. 12.
Sumner doesn’t spend as much time writing songs as she’d like.
“Between managing the trip, advertising our concerts, planning rehearsals,” she says, “I’m pretty busy.”
She and her partner Ian Fitzgerald (also a singer/songwriter) opened for each other in Nashville and they moved to Winchester five years ago.
“I love Boston,” she says. “I felt called to be here and I’ve created a family at Passim. This is home for me.”
