Mama Magnolia plays Juniper Jam for the first time on Saturday, Sept. 2.

ENTERPRISE — Juniper Jam brings a day of original music to the Wallowa County Fairgounds on Saturday, Sept. 2, 11 a.m.

Tickets are $30 at the gate or $25 in advance at Joseph Hardware, The Bookloft and M. Crow, or online at juniperjam.com. Kids ages 12 and younger get in free with a ticketed adult.

Here’s a look at two bands that are joining the festival this year.

Brad Parsons

For the past two years Parsons said he’s been playing with The Quick and Easy Boys, who have a set of their own at Juniper Jam.

“I’ve known them a really long time,” Parsons said. “They are the first band friends I made when I moved to Portland in 2008.”

This summer has been busy for Parsons, he said, touring around the Northwest both with The Quick and Easy Boys as well as a few solo shows. A few weeks ago he took the stage at Terminal Gravity Brewing, part of the pub’s Creekside Sessions concert series.

“I’ve done a lot of shows in Wallowa County the last couple of years, but I’ve been coming here a long time — I think the first time was for Tunesmith in 2006 or 2007 — right before I moved to Portland,” he said.

He moved to Portland in 2008 when it was where young, Northwest musicians flocked. His friend and fellow Lewiston native Jay Cobb Anderson, a member of both the bands “Fruition” and “TK and the Holy Know Nothings” encouraged him to join the scene.

“There were a lot of bands coming out — The Decemberists, Blitzentrapper, Sleater Kinney — the town was really starting to be on the national map,” he said. “Nobody could get a job in 2008, but it was a good time to be in Portland.”

Wallowa County was on the circuit for up and comers like Parsons in the late 2000s and later. Parsons and Anderson even did a show together at Lear’s Pub on Enterprise’s Main Street.

“I remember the temperature outside was 1 degree — doesn’t get that cold in Lewiston or Portland,” Parsons said.

Solo or with a band, he’s become a regular in the county and in 2020 he recorded some of his songs at the OK Theatre, produced with Bart Budwig.

“I had all these old songs that and I wanted to record new versions, plus a couple of new ones, and it was a chance to work with Bart,” Parsons said.

He even borrowed a couple of Budwig’s former bandmates for the sessions, Cooper Trail and Nevada Sowle. During the early months of the pandemic was not a good year to release an album, so the yet-to-be-named album is not released, but Parsons said he will be putting out several records in the next 12 months including an album called “Slow Poke” set to be released around Oct. 1.

Three years ago Parsons said he and his wife moved to Astoria, at the encouragement of another musician friend, Justin Ringle, member of indie folk band “Horse Feathers.” Parsons said he still plays in Portland every couple of months, including one of the city’s music destinations for 35 years, the Laurelthirst Public House.

“The Laurelthirst, in my opinion, is one of the places to go see music in Portland — in the West, really,” he said. “It’s a great scene and I’ve never seen bad music there.”

Many of the bands that grace the Juniper Jam and OK Theatre stages, as well as the local pubs, have performed or even got their start at the Laurelthirst, like “Fruition.” Lewi Longmire is one of the pub’s owners and a member of “TK and the Holy Know Nothings” who appeared at Juniper Jam in 2018.

Parsons said he missed the road during the pandemic and struggled to release music, but now that venues are open, life as a musician has become even sweeter.

“I feel like I’m doing so much better this time around — my priorities are different,” Parsons said. “You can get into this place that it doesn’t matter how well you are doing, it’s never enough. Now it comes down to, I’m really lucky I get to do this. I’ve never had a better time playing music.”

Mama Magnolia

A newcomer to Juniper Jam is the band Mama Magnolia with roots in jazz, layered with rhythm and soul.

Lead singer and principal lyricist Megan Letts describes the six-piece band as “indie-soul.”

“We all come from an educated music background and lean into the things we love about this genre and it develops an incredible sound,” Letts said. “We are very inspired by, and live in, a modern world, but when you go back to the origins of soul — jazz and rock and roll — the indie-soul label seems to fit.”

Appearing all over the West this summer, Mama Magnolia has graced the stages of festivals like “Rhythms on the Rio” in south central Colorado, “Sawtooth Festival” in Stanley, Idaho, and the upcoming “Whale Rock Music and Arts Festival” in Paso Robles, California.

Letts said she writes about 90% of the lyrics, but the band works together to create their sound.

“Thomas (Jennings) and I have the majority of the songs’ origins, but we have a fully democratic arranging process,” she said. “We each arrange our own parts and everyone has written a song we’ve performed.”

The band has been together for about eight years, Letts said, and formed in Denver when they were all going to music school at the University of Denver Lamont’s School of Music school and had a desire to play original music.

Letts, along with guitarist Jennings and trumpeter Carrie McCune, are now based in Seattle.

Between her bandmates and those of the bands her husband Jay Cobb Anderson plays in — “TK and the Holy Know Nothings” and “Fruition” — the relationships and collaborations with other musicians all over the West is far-reaching.

“One of the blessings of being in the Pacific Northwest and being back here in this music scene is everyone respects each other’s art and wants to see their friends succeed,” Letts said. “You don’t find people within this community trying to cut each other down — it’s really collaborative we are all really lucky to have this found family.”

Those collaborations are evident at Sawtooth Festival, where guest appearances are the norm and five and six-piece bands suddenly have a horn section and backup singers. Letts plays a few shows a year with a popular side-project that evolved out of the festival circuit — “Side Boob,” along with Shook Twins Caitlin and Laurie, familiar faces both at Juniper Jam and the OK Theatre. The relationships with other bands, many familiar to Wallowa County music fans, was called upon for the festival to beat all festivals — her two-day post-wedding festival in Felton, California.

“We got married on a Thursday and Friday, at the Felton Music Hall, we had TK and the Holy Know Nothings and John Craigie and Friends who played a Tom Petty Tribute and the next night we had the Shook Twins, Mama Magnolia and Fruition,” she said.

As her friends and collaborations have expanded over the last few years, so has her exposure to different styles of music.

“One of the really cool benefits of falling in love with a songwriter is it opened up my world to different genres I knew, but I wasn’t listening to,” Letts said.

Being married to Anderson has also influenced her song writing, which she said started out “free form,” pairing the sounds of words with the melodies she wrote.

“Now I make sure there is substance to the words I’m writing,” Letts said.

Her lyrics are featured on the band’s first full-length album released in October 2022, “Dear Irvington,” produced and engineered in Fort Worth, Texas.