Six bands performed on stage at the May 2-3, 2026 Berkeley Bluegrass Festival. However, I want to focus on one of them and alert our readers to what I anticipate will be an amazing recording. In order to explain that, I have to tell you about the amazing fiddler Tatiana Hargreaves and the tunes she is unearthing from the late Tex Logan.

I’ll start with Tex Logan. He was a very influential fiddler, who wrote tunes and played with many people, including Bill Monroe. He hosted jams at his house in New Jersey. I grew up 20 or 30 miles away from there but, alas, had no idea those were going on then. Tex was also a brilliant scientist who worked at Bell Labs; when video of the memorial party for Tex Logan was shared, I learned a lot more about what he did there. There were lots of recordings released of Tex’ fiddling and far more that were not. Tatiana has been researching in archives and finding Tex Logan tunes that were not available, learning to play them, and teaching them to her bandmates.

Tatiana Hargreaves grew up in Corvallis, Oregon but now lives in Durham, North Carolina. I first encountered her at the Appalachian String Band Festival (Clifftop), where she was the youngest person to win first place on old-time fiddle at the age of 14 in 2009. I did not see the contest because the skies opened in a torrential downpour just as the finals started. It moved indoors, and most of us sought shelter from the rain. However, I did go to her CD release party there, and I had a nice talk with her dad. I first met Tati the second time that the California Bluegrass Association sponsored the Bluegrass Pride  music float and continent in the San Francisco Pride Parade. Tatiana is mostly known as a powerful old-time fiddler, but she also plays bluegrass, and she definitely has the chops to play Tex Logan tunes which Michael Staves, who played guitar with her and sang, called “gnarly.” Tati played some double fiddle with Brandon Godman in Caleb Klauder and Reeb Wilm’s band at the festival. Tati also thanked Laurie Lewis, whom Tati met when she was 8 years old, for encouraging her on her fiddle journey. Tati plays fiddle on one of Laurie’s CDs.

This show almost entirely consisted of Tex Logan tunes and songs, though they performed one Stanley Brothers number. Tex Logan’s daughter, Jody, was in the audience. Peter Rowan joined the band to sing “Diamond Joe,” which Peter learned from Logan. Haselden (Hasie) Ciaccio played bass, and an excellent banjo player, Evan Ward from the San Francisco band Jimmy Touzel’s Bluegrass Explosion, was also in the band. The audience went wild with all of the playing but especially with Tatiana’s incandescent fiddling.

I’m looking forward to seeing Tatiana fiddle soon at the California Bluegrass Association’s 2026 Father’s Day Bluegrass Festival in June. I don’t know whether she will do another Tex Logan show there, whether this will be an appearance of her band Hard Drive, or possibly both. Personally, I plan to snap up the Tati plays Tex recording when it is released,  and I will likely review it here.