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Stey first heard about the festival when she moved to Bethel from the Lower 48 in 1983. However she waited eight years before she got the nerve to play.
"I played in Bethel, but Juneau was 'The City' and I didn't feel like I knew anybody here," she said.
But by 1991, after playing in the all-female Beat Around the Bush Band, Stey was ready. She credits her friends Knute (Mike) and Heather Tonga, who were involved in bluegrass and old-timey music, for getting her to the festival.
"They're at fault," she joked.
Stey made the approximately 1,000-mile journey with the Tongas that spring with just three bluegrass songs that she planned to play at post-concert jam sessions.
During her visit, she stayed with Jamie Brown, who was a mutual friend of the Tongas. One night, Brown hosted a dinner party.
"Jim was invited over as a dinner guest. And I knew that he was a fiddle player then," Stey said in an interview along with her husband last month.
"That's not true. You came over to my house," Jim Stey said.
"Well, we disagree about that," Martha Stey said. "But Jamie then brought me over here (to Jim's house) for a jam. But Jim and I were just acquaintances until when I moved (to Juneau) in 2000.
"I needed a place to rent, and he had an apartment to rent. So I came, and ... fell in love with my land lord and that was that," she said.
The couple married in 2002 and lives in downtown Juneau.
That first folk festival was important to Martha Stey for another reason. It marked her first meeting with Sims. The two later formed the Glacial Erratics, a band also featuring Kim Barlow and Andrea McColeman.
   
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