The following is an extended version of the article that appears in our September 2024 issue.
Photo by Dave Parrish
One year, the flying Mayans swung around a lofty ritual pole in their “Danza de los Voladores,” causing an awed hush across Brown’s Island, and Chuck Brown and his go-go beats almost levitated the dance tent. Another year, Sen. Tim Kaine played harmonica and his wife, Anne Holton, flatfoot danced. Then there was the time that, as one witness recalls, country singer Rosanne Cash’s appearance “broke the festival.” But before all of this, the Richmond Folk Festival almost didn’t happen. Its inauspicious start came on a Friday evening in 2005, in slashing rain.
The Room Where It Happened
In a downtown conference room, Joseph T. Wilson, chairman of the National Council for the Traditional Arts, gazed around a table full of Richmond community organizations and business leaders. The representation included the event nonprofit Citycelebrations, Richmond Renaissance, the Riverfront Development Corporation, and the Richmond Metropolitan Convention & Visitors Bureau.
Wilson hadn’t seen enough progress made after the group snagged a three-year stint of the traveling National Folk Festival for Richmond.
With so many moving parts, it was becoming a logistical ballet. Julia Olin, who directed the seeding of the festival in localities across the country, says, “We presented the case — and we were getting really worried.”
Wilson punctured the silence with a pointed question: “Who’s going to own this thing?” The quiet deepened.
Businessman James Ukrop, who lets out a slight chuckle as he recalls the scene, says, “And everyone looked at everyone else.”
Then, Ukrop continues, Jack Berry, at the time with the downtown booster organization Richmond Renaissance, “raised his hand and said, ‘I will.’”
A VPM-produced documentary, “The Sounds of Culture, 20 Years of the Richmond Folk Festival,” includes an animated re-creation of this fateful meeting. It debuts on VPM PBS on Sept. 17 at 8 p.m. and will also be available on the PBS app.
So You Want to Have a Festival?
The primary movers were marketer and executive Wilson H. Flohr; former state delegate from Henrico, lawyer and lobbyist Bill Axselle; and Jack Berry Jr. — not to be confused with Berry from Richmond Renaissance — of the RMCVB, which later became Richmond Region Tourism. But a music man came to their rescue.
“We wouldn’t have a festival without [arts promoter] Joel Katz,” says Berry, the “mostly retired” former executive director of Venture Richmond, a successor to Richmond Renaissance that largely grew out of the festival planning. (Berry left Venture Richmond in 2016 to run for mayor, a race ultimately won by Levar Stoney.)
Katz already had a long relationship with the NCTA from his days booking artists for various venues. “I was aware of the National Folk Festival, and while working for the Virginia Alliance for the Performing Arts, I put together a proposal,” he says.
In 2004, a delegation led by Katz went to Maine for the 66th National Folk Festival in Bangor, the third and last sponsored there by the NCTA. Ukrop admits, “I’m not really a music enthusiast. But we enjoyed the festivities.”
Richmond Region 2007 (formed to commemorate the anniversary of the 1607 arrival of Europeans in Virginia) contributed $750,000 for the first three years to buttress the event. The NewMarket corporation opened its riverfront campus, which includes Historic Tredegar. The location provided a significant element that attracted the NCTA.
Baptism of Mud
On the evening of Friday, Oct. 7, 2005, Berry, the festival’s volunteer director, stood under a tent peering into rain blowing sideways. He counted 75 people. Most of them volunteers.
He thought: “This is a disaster.”
Yet the weekend progressed. The wet weather tapered, and some 7,000 attendees came to the swales of the NewMarket lawns, Historic Tredegar and muddy Brown’s Island.
Twenty years later, it’s likely that more than 200,000 festivalgoers will negotiate the pathways and hillsides. That number is around the population of the city, though they don’t all come from here. Which was part of the point.
One festivalgoer who says he’s missed only one or two of them and usually attends with his family, in heat and dust, ankle-deep mud or unseasonable cold, for the whole or parts of the three days, is Sen. Tim Kaine. He was Virginia’s governor when the event started. He credits the NCTA for seeding the festivals across the country and the significance here of the community coming together to keep the Richmond version going.
Kaine and his wife, Anne Holton, enjoy not only the traditional and bluegrass music on the Virginia Folklife stage, but new musicians and genres they’ve never heard of. “The international character is incredible and so much fun,” he says. They go both to listen and to participate. Holton is a good flatfoot dancer, and Kaine has, on occasion, joined in with his harmonica alongside such musicians as Dan Tyminski (the real singing voice of George Clooney in “O Brother, Where Art Thou?”) and renowned traditional fiddler Mark Campbell.
Getting Folked Up
Illustration by Robert Meganck
The festival’s marketing, and attendance, grew like an improvised piece of music.
The festival poster festooned with the names of the performers originated in somewhat guerilla marketing fashion by then Richmond magazine Art Director Jason Smith. That first image began as an illustration by Robert Meganck for a magazine story about the festival.
The magazine previously made a successful run of genre scene posters, and Smith thought the festival needed one. His enterprise couldn’t receive acknowledgement due to the sponsorship of the Richmond Times-Dispatch. For 2 1/2 days Smith carried to the festival a trash bag full of posters carefully wrapped in protective sleeves. The $5 price covered the cost of printing.
He gave posters to the musicians such as jazz and blues group Sankofa Strings, including singer Rhiannon Giddens; this was before her Carolina Chocolate Drops string band Grammy Award and a MacArthur “Genius Grant.” “They were excited to get them,” Smith says, adding, “because they weren’t that well known and they’d not often seen their names in print that way.”
On the last day before the last act of that inaugural year, the then-vice president of marketing for the RMCVB, Lisa Sims, announced the availability of the posters (Sims is the current CEO of Venture Richmond). Since then, they’ve become a festival mainstay. The posters have since led retrospective gallery exhibitions with work by several prominent Richmond artists. Smith and Laura Marr made the 2009 version, and through the years interpretations have come from creatives such as Matt Lively, Ed Trask, Hamilton Glass, Katie McBride and the late Wes Freed.
The posters led to variations on T-shirts and on the cans of beer brewed by Hardywood Park Craft Brewery specifically for the event. In celebration of the festival’s 20th year, Robert Meganck was again called upon to create the event’s poster art. His original piece for 2024 is reminiscent of the inaugural poster and was unveiled during a preview event at Studio Two Three in early September.
The Folk Feast benefit, which occurs a week prior, evolved from the ideas of the then-Magpie restaurateurs Owen and Tiffany Lane, with support from Thomas Arrington of Performance Foodservice and social media strategist Kira Siddall. This year’s Feast has, like many before it, sold out.
If one couldn’t attend all or parts of the festival, the public radio station WCVE, now VPM, stepped in to broadcast performances under the guidance of producer Steve Clark, who retired in 2019. “We were totally green,” he says. “Ours was just one part of an enormous amount of moving pieces.”
Host Peter Solomon, now with Jazz88 FM in Minneapolis, anchored the original team. He offers that even on radio one can get a sense of the splendid surroundings.
“There were times when I heard the broadcast, like with Dr. Ralph Stanley,” Solomon says. “You were listening to a concert, but echoing off Gambles Hill and the Virginia War Memorial and on the banks of the James River. I always enjoyed hearing the train come by. Some looked at it as an interruption, but it was evocative.”
Photo by Dave Parrish
The Bucket Brigade
The festival process requires the dedication of some 1,200 volunteers, of whom a core of around 200 tend to return each year.
“It’s important not to take [the festival] for granted,” says Berry. “No government agency is backing this.”
He adds that it wouldn’t — couldn’t — continue without the great efforts of volunteers.
The Folk Festival remains free due largely to the contributions individuals drop into orange buckets hefted by some 300 members of the Bucket Brigade. The amount raised this way equals or exceeds that of a corporate sponsor.
The Bucket Brigaders present stickers to those who give. Sims recalls how following a tradition established by the national event meant each day received a sticker. “The idea was people wanted to collect them for their jackets,” she says, noting they could wear them like merit badges. However, this proved extra work for the volunteers and eventually one sticker suited all.
Jamie Thomas, the festival’s third volunteer coordinator, joined the event with the Bucket Brigade in 2007 while an employee of the Ukrop-backed First Market Bank. He notes the advances in charitable giving technology. “Post-COVID we’re getting donations made through texts and QR codes,” he says. But patrolling with the buckets is, he says, incredibly fun, and participation is open to school groups and community associations. Thomas says, “This is something anyone can be a part of, and one of the most important components. Donations are the festival’s lifeblood.”
The team leader for the Virginia Folklife stage is Diane Muska. Her work goes beyond the festival as she’s always scouting for new volunteers and works a table at the Carytown Farmers Market to provide information and sign up willing hands. Some of the little tasks make a big difference. “Getting food tickets to the artists, sending out invitations to the after-party, putting lanyards on the credential, all that stuff,” Muska says. The multiple tasks of volunteers include filling information packets, transporting musicians, providing information and photography.
Players Remembered
Selection choices for inclusion in the festival start each November. Stephen Lecky, Venture Richmond’s director of events, describes it as a “lively social event,” where the ups and downs of the previous festival are examined and the process of considering performers begins. The 20-member planning committee is comprised of musicians but also those who go to other festivals or otherwise regularly see live music and possess expertise in certain genres.
Lecky reflects, “With such a large number of people, and through these many years, you realize that there is a passage of time and people, and suddenly somebody’s not there.”
The irrepressible musician and guest liaison Gary Gerloff, memorialized on a path sign, died at 58 in 2019. He enjoyed ferrying the artists around with characteristic gregariousness. Lecky nods, smiling. “If you were a musician from Timbuktu and you got to meet Gary Gerloff, well, that was a win for Richmond,” he says.
A number of personalities who shaped the festival in its earlier days who have exited the stage include Piedmont bluesmen John Cephas (1930-2009) and Phil Wiggins (1954-2024); beloved volunteer coordinator Francesca Parch (1944-2009), for whom the volunteer registration tent is named; and members of the programming committee, including musician and broadcaster Page Wilson (1954-2011) and the longtime chair of the committee, musician and promoter “Gentleman” Jim Wark (1959-2020). Joe Wilson, director of the NCTA for 28 years who spurred the festival’s organizers, director of the Blue Ridge Music Center in Galax and author of “A Guide to the Crooked Road: Virginia’s Heritage Music Trail,” died at 76 in 2015.
A Legacy Event
As the festival marks two decades, a new generation has come along that assumes the event’s always been around or that, since it’s new to them, it must be recent. Sims says, “I’m always surprised when I’m talking to people who not only haven’t been to the festival but haven’t even heard of it.”
Part of that is a function of more people moving into the area. Marketing remains key. Sims concludes, “That said, it’s not like the early days, when we had to explain not only what it was but where it was.”
Blues harmonica player and singer Andrew Alli has performed at the festival about six times, a few of those with his band The Mainline. The Richmond native says it’s his favorite among festivals because his hometown produces the event and through all weathers. “You are practically guaranteed one day of downpour,” he says.
Participating is enjoyable, but so is wandering through as a spectator and listener. This is a pleasure for the sights, the crafts, the music, and the river view. Alli follows the festival grapevine about the “don’t-miss” artists while also getting pulled along by the sounds. “This way I can hear and see music I never would’ve otherwise,” he explains.
The Richmond Folk Festival is a combination of music, dance, traditions, storytelling and food, all set against the backdrop of the James River. It’s an event that brings a smorgasbord of global culture to RVA. This year, attendees can hop between six stages to hear gospel from Cora Harvey Armstrong, Indonesian gamelan music performed by Peni Candra Rini and chirmía by Colombia-based Rancho Aparte, among many others. It’s an opportunity to experience tunes and cultures people may be unfamiliar with, as well as hear, taste, peruse or dance to traditional favorites.
Richmond music promoter Tim Timberlake observes, “How the festival happened and defied the odds, that changed the mindset of many Richmonders of what we’re capable of.”
The 20th Richmond Folk Festival takes place Sept. 27-29 at downtown Richmond’s historic riverfront. VPM PBS will air the documentary “The Sounds of Culture, 20 Years of the Richmond Folk Festival” Sept. 17 at 8 p.m., and it will be available via the PBS app.
