Metamora

What an experience!

Yesterday, Saturday, September 6, 2026, your favorite Appalachicana band took the stage at the 27th Annual Metamora Music Festival in Metamora, Indiana. It was awesome!!

This was our first invitation to this sort of “festival,” and “eclectic” is perhaps the best word to describe what went on there.

Let’s start with the town itself: Metamora, Indiana. It calls itself a canal town, and sure enough, a little canal runs right through the place. Though no longer used for transportation, the canal—like the Erie Canal in the Northeast—was once used to move goods through the region. Now it’s mostly a beautiful little embellishment to a very cool little town not too far from Indy or Cincy.

It’s also home to some pretty weird-looking ducks, but I digress.....

The buildings are mostly small, well-maintained, and still in use, many of them looking to be around 100 years old or more. There are all sorts of little music venues and cool shops scattered throughout town. We didn’t get to explore nearly as much as we would have liked, but there was one particularly intriguing store I really hope to see someday. This little shop was JAMMED—and I mean packed to the brim—with super-weird cookie jars. Who ever thought there would be a store devoted to such a thing? I forgot to mention they have an abandoned old set of railroad tracks that run along the abandoned canal, where they have these weird railroad cars that give folks rides up and down and back and forth....

But I digress... Again....

The Music Festival itself brings music aficionados from all over the region—mostly Ohio, Indiana, and Kentucky, from what I could tell. And in just the block of time we were there, not counting your favorite Appalachicana band, we heard a remarkable variety of music.

There was a folk guitar-and-fiddle duo from Northern Kentucky, a banjo-and-vocal duo from Cincinnati, and a really cool—and this one is hard to describe—folk/jazz band from Oxford, Ohio. Their instrumentation included various percussion, mandolin, dobro, harmonica, upright bass, jazz fiddle, jazz guitar, and a terrific female vocalist who sounded as though she had just wandered in from a 1930s speakeasy.

There was also a very good blues guitarist from Indianapolis who played a really cool slide-blues style that reminded me a little of Leo Kottke—except he was a considerably better singer than Kottke!

And it has to be mentioned here that, among the solo acts, Nero’s Fiddle’s own Dean Phelps mesmerized the crowd with a short solo set featuring his great storytelling songs and impeccable Travis picking. We were awfully proud of him.

All in all, we were very proud to share the stage with so many talented folks.

And yes, it was HOT. But the intense heat was made considerably more bearable by a huge tent that shaded audience and performers alike. Even with the heat, it was a great experience.

We, Nero’s Fiddle, likely traveled farther than most to attend, but it was well worth the trip—and really, it wasn’t that far. Maybe two and a half hours.

This writer definitely plans to return to Metamora sometime when he isn’t working, because there’s a lot more of that little town I’d like to explore.

But we’d also be mighty happy to come back and work again next year.

And maybe next time I’ll finally get inside that cool cookie-jar store. Oh and I want to take the little train ride that they run up and down the canal...

(Special thanks to Nancy Miller, President of Nero's Fiddle Auxillary Unit, for taking this photo.)