When Chuck Poling first became a master of ceremonies on the bluegrass-festival and street-fair circuit 15 years years ago, an old-time emcee gave him advice he has embraced ever since.

“You are only onstage for a minute or two at a time, but you want to be the best-dressed person on that stage,” he was told. “You want to look like you own the place and everything on it.”

Anybody who stops by the Rooster Stage during Hardly Strictly Bluegrass from Friday to Sunday, Oct. 6-8, in Golden Gate Park can see Poling living that advice. For the three-day outdoor event, he will have three elaborate outfits topped by three hats, each reflecting the theme of that day’s lineup. He commands attention, and it helps that he has the voice of an all-night singer in a country band, a long Dust Bowl face, flowing Buffalo Bill hair and a slim frame.

“Chuck is fabulous,” says Nancy Bechtle, sister of the late festival founder and benefactor Warren Hellman. “He really likes the entertainers and the audience, and has a way of saying the right things that will connect the audience to the performers.”

In the complicated jigsaw puzzle that is Hardly Strictly Bluegrass, stage hosts are a crucial corner piece. With a constant flow of golf carts shuttling 100 performers — like this year’s acts Brandi Carlile, Dan Auerbach, Henry Rollins and Ozomatli, along with festival regulars Emmylou Harris and Steve Earle — to seven stages throughout Golden Gate Park, and three-quarters of a million festivalgoers migrating from stage to stage, someone has to help keep the peace.

“Most of the audience is coming for music and they aren’t always familiar with the artists they are about to see,” says Dawn Holliday, music curator for the annual free festival. “The emcee’s job is to give them just enough information for the audience to feel comfortable. It’s like a preview, but not enough to give the story away.”

It is a tradition that reaches back to vaudeville, and forward through Ed Sullivan and his “really big shew,” to Wavy Gravy’s hoarse “breakfast in bed” promise at Woodstock.

When Van Morrison recorded his “Night in San Francisco” album at the Masonic in 1993, he brought his own emcee, Haji Ahkba. Lines like “How about this band? Are they hot or what?” made it onto the album along with a musician’s credit for Ahkba.

The longest-running local emcee was probably Bill Graham, who introduced his own acts at Winterland, the Fillmore and the Oakland Coliseum. Before each Day on the Green, Graham would gather the concert crew around and tell them, “Your job is to be the garnish,” recalls Tim Lynch, an usher for Bill Graham Presents back in those days.

Now Lynch coordinates Hardly Strictly’s emcees, all unpaid, and imparts that same message.

And Poling can live with being the garnish, though he squeezes the most out of his brief stage appearances. “I get my 15 minutes of fame every day,” he says, “two minutes at a time.”

An ad copywriter by trade, Poling, 57, plays mandolin, and his wife, Jeanie, plays guitar in Jeanie and Chuck’s Country Roundup. The second year of the festival, when it was still known as Strictly Bluegrass, they performed. Hellman caught their set and came backstage to introduce himself.

Hellman played banjo in his own band, the Wronglers, and Poling started emceeing for them at festivals.

“I’d introduce them as five talented musicians and a banjo player,” Poling says, recalling that Hellman liked that kind of humor.

After Hellman died of leukemia in 2011, Holliday called Poling to offer him the honor of emceeing, along with Paul Mann, at the memorial concert in the parking lot on the Great Highway. Poling arrived suitably mournful in what he calls his “preacher outfit.”

“I guess that was my audition,” he says.

Later that year, Poling got the stage-host gig at Hardly Strictly Bluegrass and chose the Rooster Stage because it is hidden away in a narrow valley, “where the magical, unscripted moments happen,” he says.

He’s been there for five years and is by now such an institution that the stage manager for musician and festival staple Conor Oberst once put a tambourine in Poling’s hand and shoved him out on the stage.

Poling always arrives at the stage an hour early and talks to managers for each performer before he introduces them. That’s how he knew that Rosanne Cash does not like to be introduced as the daughter of Johnny Cash. That’s how he also knew that Jason Isbell wants no introduction.

One year he stopped by Patty Griffin’s tent with his usual greeting, “Hi, I’m Chuck, your emcee.” Out came Robert Plant, the Led Zeppelin caterwauler, to enlist Poling in a scholarly talk about the best country-western singers from the 1950s.

“Me and Bob,” Poling recalls, “talking about Don Gibson.”

In his first year as a stage host, in 2012, Poling made a spontaneous request of the audience that has now become tradition.

Sometime each afternoon, between sets, he takes the microphone and reminds the audience of Hellman’s legacy. Then he counts down — one, two, three — and the Rooster stage erupts in a chorus that rises out of Hellman Hollow and up to the heavens.

“Thanks, Warren!”

Sam Whiting is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: swhiting@sfchronicle.com Instagram: @sfchronicle_art

Hardly Strictly Bluegrass: Noon-7 p.m. Friday, Oct. 6; 11 a.m.-7 p.m. Saturday-Sunday, Oct. 7-8. Free. Hellman Hollow, Marx and Lindley Meadows in Golden Gate Park, S.F. www.hardlystrictlybluegrass.com/2017

Check out Chuck Poling’s wardrobe: http://bit.ly/ChuckPoling