Just after lunchtime on Saturday, Gregg Harcourt and his wife Mary Wolverton will begin poking around the Katharine Cornell Theatre, managing the tangle of wires and soundboards that come with producing a major concert. For well over a decade the duo — both professional woodworkers by day — have been not only managing the A/V equipment, but have served as the organizers, promoters and occasional performers of a concert series that has brought some of the world’s biggest and most respected names in traditional music to Martha’s Vineyard. What began as an avocation has blossomed into a fully incorporated 501c3 nonprofit, and this Saturday Mr. Harcourt and Ms. Wolverton kick off the season with a show featuring a roster of homegrown talent headlined by Willy Mason.

“It was sort of an accident,” Mr. Harcourt said in an interview this week about the pair’s foray into the music industry. “We got so involved that we have a hard time not staying involved.”

The married couple traces the roots of their second job to their friendship in the 1990s with frequent Island musician Avi Lev, who in turn introduced them to the larger Celtic music community. The network of friendships led eventually to Paddy Keenan, a former member of the legendary 1970s Irish group the Bothy Band, and in 1996 they launched their first concert with Mr. Keenan in what would become the Island’s signature traditional music series.

Fifteen years later the couple now balances the work with Mr. Harcourt’s cabinetmaking business, run out of the cozy shop at his West Tisbury home, and the task of raising a young and very musical family; three year-old fiddler Mattie Glen Coltrane Harcourt Wolverton, who has introduced every concert since he was born, shares a name with a household musical favorite. Mr. Harcourt estimates that each concert when tallied up accounts for a full week’s work.

“There’s no money being made,” he said. “In the past I’ve done a little bit of whining about not making any money but we pretty much figure we’re going to about breakeven. The beauty of it is the music.”

That music has included a roster of all-Ireland champions — musicians whose mettle has been tested in the countrywide competition that Mr. Harcourt says with some understatement is “big over there” — including Katharine Cornell favorites Oisin MacDirmada and the fiddling duo, the Kane sisters, who will perform later this summer with Edele Fox, former winner of the coveted Irish TG4 Young Musician of the Year award. Accolades alone, however, are not what make a performer fit for a booking in the Katharine Cornell Theatre music series, Mr. Harcourt said.

“We want people who we feel are authentic. . . Is that the right word? No, you know what the right word is? We’ve got to like them,” he said laughing.

Although Mr. Harcourt and Ms. Wolverton’s background is in Irish music, they insist that the scope of their concerts ranges far beyond the Emerald Isle. Take this weekend, for example, when the Island’s own practitioners of traditional American and singer-songwriter styles take the stage. Later this year folk stalwart Bruce Molsky, whose repertoire ranges from coal country to Eastern Europe, will arrive on the Vineyard, trading in his own inimitable and eclectic brand of folk. And in October, banjo player Jake Scheppes will offer his own interpretations of 20th century Hungarian composer Bela Bartok.

To attract the likes of Mr. Molsky or Iowa folk icon Greg Brown to the modest Vineyard performances, Ms. Wolverton said there is rarely any salesmanship involved.

“Our pitch? We don’t have to pitch,” she said. “People want to come here because we have a good reputation of having the best musicians come, we pay people well and we treat them well.”

Mr. Harcourt admits that putting the concerts together is often a disorganized, shoestring affair, but he’s not unfamiliar with the demands of big show business. During the interview he produced the scrawled requests of one famous performer that they had to scramble to accommodate.

“Dinner for three, bottle of Jameson, ice, water, fresh fruit, salmon, bluefish,” the list read in part. But Ms. Wolverton, who has had the occasional pleasure of joining artists on stage, said such encounters have made their labor of love worthwhile.

“It’s been great meeting people,” she said. “Most of them are really sweet people and incredible musicians on top of it. Someday we hope to go to Ireland and visit the friends that we’ve made through all these concerts.”

In their own right Mr. Harcourt and Ms. Wolverton are musicians perhaps most recognizable to Vineyarders for the Wednesday night fiddle sessions that have become an Offshore Ale staple. They said they picked up the instruments on the job.

“We are kind of intermediate musicians,” Mr. Harcourt said. “We’re not great, we’re just — you’ve seen us at Offshore — we’re just okay, but we have a good time. Mary’s a pretty good fiddler.”

Ms. Wolverton developed the skill later in life after her first year on the Vineyard in 1993.

“I didn’t play the fiddle until I moved down here,” she said. “I went home after my first summer and I got my mother’s old fiddle from Iowa and brought it back with me and fixed it up because it was in bad shape. Then I started to sort of teach myself, then I went to Ireland about three or four times to take classes and that’s what really helped. The first year I went I met an incredible young fiddle player; he happened to be my teacher, Oisin MacDirmada.”

Since then the concerts have become woven into the young family’s story. The youngest, four-month-old Sunny Grace Wolverton Harcourt, came into the world it seems to accommodate the family’s passion.

“Last year we had a concert with Oisin one week . . . ” Mr. Harcourt began.

“I had the baby the next week,” Mrs. Wolverton finished. “The next week we had another concert with two incredible musicians from Ireland, CaoimhínÓ Raghallaigh and Brendan Begley. I was nervous because I was expecting a baby at any time. It could have come a week before or a week after and I didn’t want to be in the hospital during a concert, but he came at the perfect time. I didn’t miss either concert.”

 

KCT Concerts presents Willy Mason, Nina Violet, Dan Waters, Jemima James and Marciana Jones at the Katharine Cornell Theatre at 8 p.m on Saturday, March 5.