The Finger Lakes GrassRoots Festival of Music and Dance begins Thursday, July 22 and runs through the weekend. Photo by Heather Ainsworth
Four days. Four stages. Almost 80 bands and artists. All are good reasons that the Finger Lakes GrassRoots Festival of Music and Dance lives up to its motto, “a music lover’s paradise.”
All are good reasons, too, that 10,000 fans descend on the Trumansburg Fairgrounds each year, for the region’s largest music fest, which this year runs Thursday-Sunday, July 22-25. What they get is a musical potpourri of old-time, world beat, sacred string, country, bluegrass, Cajun, Zydeco and even rock ‘n’ roll, in an extravaganza that brings together musicians from around the world and up the street.
Among this year’s prestigious headliners are country legend Merle Haggard, the reggae elder Burning Spear, Atlanta hip-hop act Arrested Development, jam-rockers Rusted Root, bluegrass outfit Railroad Earth, Zimbabwean Oliver “Tuku” Mtukudzi, and host band Donna the Buffalo.
Joining the main acts are scores of no less talented touring bands, including festival regulars Keith Frank and the Soileau Zydeco Band, Keith Secola and the Wild Band of Indians, and gospel sensation the Flying Clouds. And that barely scratches the surface of a lineup that includes a veritable who’s who of local area treasures and GrassRoots favorites (See my accompanying Arts Cover story on a round-up of this year’s musical acts).
But for the thousands of attendees, GrassRoots is far bigger than any particular musician, and for many the festival has done more than bring a world of music to town. Now in its 20th year, GrassRoots has forged lifelong friendships for some, served as a standing family reunion for countless others, and for a younger generation of music lovers, helped to put the town of Trumansburg on the map.
When the gates open at noon Thursday (tickets for one-day and four day passes are available at the gate: one-day passes range from $30-45, and full weekend passes are $110 for adults, $65 for youth 13-15, and children 12 and under are free with a parent or guardian; please see www.grassrootsfest.org for more info), attendees enter a place where the line between audience and participants are blurred, and where the fairgrounds feel less like the site of a concert than of a community.
Beginnings
The seeds for GrassRoots were sewn more than 20 years ago, when the band Donna the Buffalo invited two other Tompkins County acts to get together and perform a benefit concert to support the fight against AIDS. Gathering at The State Theatre, The Horse Flies and Johnny Dowd’s Neon Baptist performed a show that had both a social and a musical component.
In 1991, the band expanded its invitation list to include 10,000 Maniacs and Ani DiFranco as well as a group of “dance” bands – Zydeco and old-time, honky tonk and Latin – to join in the festivities, and moved the whole event up to the fairgrounds.
In stark contrast to most summer festivals, which represent brands as much as they do bands, GrassRoots was modeled after the fiddle festivals founders, the Puryears, admired as children.
“Lollapalooza hadn’t even started when we put together the first GrassRoots,” Jordan Puryear said earlier this spring. “So the models that some of us had been to were Clearwater and the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival and fiddlers’ conventions.”
As Jeb Puryear explained, the festival’s founders sought to create an atmosphere that drew on the eclecticism of the Phil Ciganer curated Great Hudson River Revival Festival in Croton-on-Hudson. “There are so many folks who get together it becomes hypnotic, there’s such a sense of expansive well being,” Puryear noted. “This is how people feel the love.”
Like in Croton – also called Clearwater – GrassRoots is a gathering where all music is local, even if it hails from the far corners of the globe. The Horse Flies, who will be absent for the first time in the festival’s 20-year history, are the perfect embodiment of this cross-cultural exchange.)
“It was fueled by the AIDS crisis at first,” Jeb Puryear noted. “But soon, it became a focal point for positive energy for tons of people around.
“We were interested in creating a musical event that had a social purpose on top of it, and they become equally important,” he added. “We were creating the groundwork for a really long thing. With each year, it grows further and further into the local fabric.”
Over the last two decades, GrassRoots has slowly expanded, to become both a cultural and economic juggernaut. According to an economic impact study issued by the national non-profit organization Americans for the Arts, the four-day festival is an oasis for local businesses as well as music lovers, generating approximately $4.8 million of total economic activity in 2008. And over the years, Grassroots has raised thousands more dollars for a series of good causes including AIDSwork of Tompkins County, The Ithaca Free Clinic, Doctors without Borders and a long list of local, regional and national charities.
GrassRoots now
The festival features two large performance spaces, The Grandstand and the Infield Stage, as well as the Dance Tent and the Cabaret Hall, which functions as nightclub. In addition to the music, the festival offers an Art Barn that exhibits the work of more than 40 area artists; a Healing Arts area that offers 20 ways to relax including reiki, massage, meditation and reflexology, and two youth areas that entertain younger festival attendees with story hours, puppet shows and arts and crafts workshops. Since 1996, a Kripalu trained and certified yoga teacher has led a 9 a.m. session for beginners and adults.
Some new developments this year include a Movement and Workshop Tent that will join the Healing Arts neighborhood, offering classes like a banjo workshop by Lydia Garrison and Joe Damiano, singing lessons by Solstice’s Elisa Sciscioli, and classes on composting.
Tom Burchinal, the lead singer of Ayurveda, who will be performing for the second time this year, will offer a combined voice and body movement session at 1 p.m. Friday.
“I’ve been teaching voice lessons for some time, and as I was working with students, I started realizing how yoga could be incorporated into the vocalizing process,” Burchinal said. “Singing is a full body experience and yoga is all about that.”
Another new change is “Next-Door Camping” which will allow festival attendees to pitch tents on Rabbit Run Road, just behind the back gate for a flat rate of $135, first-come, first-serve. On average 20 percent of attendees camp on site, and many others come and go day to day.
This year, the youth areas will be next to each other and expanded, back in the Infield area.
“One of our biggest priorities has always been to have a family-friendly festival,” Executive Director Rosa Puryear said.
Often likened to a family gathering, GrassRoots brings together familiar features while gently introducing new elements each year.
“What really makes the festival distinctive is the community aspect,” former marketing director Megan Romer said.
“It’s an all-year round preparation,” Puryear said and the event itself is like building up and tearing down a small city each year. “And we experience the same things that a little town has to deal with, from figuring out where people will sleep and eat, to guaranteeing safety and security.”
Sheriff Peter Meskill, who provides policing outside the event, commended festival organizers and in particular Puryear.
“The people that have been running the organization over the last few years have been really great, and it has been really good working with them,” he said. There has been great communication between law enforcement and the festival, and it makes for a smooth event year after year.
“It’s a well-known, well-established festival, and this new group has really brought it to the next level,” Meskill added
As for advice to festival-goers, he cautioned them to have a pleasant, but safe time.
“Outside on the street, if it looks like parking is illegal, don’t park there,” Meskill said.
Further, he cautioned against drinking and driving and advocated a designated driver.
Later, Meskill noted that he would be inside of GrassRoots, not working, but enjoying himself.
“I’m usually around. I always like listening to the music, even if I’m working.” He paused. “You know, I’m interested in Merle Haggard so I’m hoping to get in there on Thursday night.”
Volunteer spirit
A large part of that community spirit derives from the broad based volunteer ethic. To paraphrase a well-worn aphorism, GrassRoots takes a village. True to its name, the festival succeeds each year in large part due to the good graces, benevolent spirits, tireless dedication and elbow grease of the groundswell of its some 1,300 volunteers. Talk about grass roots!
“GrassRoots is like a little city,” Executive Director Puryear said. “It’s a team effort. All of the attendees, all of the crew chiefs that volunteer their time, and all of the others that lend a hand to make it what it is.”
Some of these individuals, who are on staff, focus on pre-festival set-up; others, like Stephanie Holzbaur and Suse Thomas focus on working the event itself (both work in hospitality, at the Grandstand Stage and Infield Stage, respectively).
Still others, like Katy Walker, who is in charge of all of hospitality and has been since the first festival, begins work a week in advance and works through the last hours of the Festival. Along with her two daughters, Mellissa Goldsmith and Meghan Wood, and many volunteers, Walker constructs an entire kitchen and eating area in a barn, and then feeds up to 2,500 performers and staff members.
That barn, which now stands as a full working kitchen and dining hall, originated as a pot-luck Walker and a few friends threw together for the first few festivals. But as Walker explained to me last year, in between fielding questions from a line of volunteers, “it became clear that it would be better to pull together the organization in a more formalized way.” It now exists as a well-oiled machine, with more than 100 volunteers and many Hospitality sub-organizations under the auspice of Walker and Ithaca Bakery’s Gregar Brous’ crew.
“Our first meal is Thursday lunch and that is 400 people. By the time we get to Saturday dinner, it has been as much as 2,500,” Walker explained, quickly noting that this year she hopes to max out at 2,000.
Walker and the other crew chiefs work to a certain extent as independent contractors, with their volunteers under them. This model, Walker explained, “stems from the idea – forged at the very beginning – that what worked best is to identify people who would take on an area of the festival as that crew’s chief. There is of course a high level of interaction, but in the end I have ultimate responsibility for my area and she trusts that I will do it well.”
This volunteer spirit has kept a continuity with the festival and increased the collective atmosphere. Annie Campbell, whose Toivo will perform Sunday at the Cabaret Hall, has provided the program art for 20 years.
“I’m not sure if they actually asked me or if I volunteered to make posters,” Campbell joked from her home in Mecklenberg. “I imagine that I volunteered and they didn’t have any other suckers. The first one was so ridiculous that they must have decided to work with me for the next year.”
Campbell’s work is like the festival itself, playful and approachable. Visually stunning, the programs feature brightly colored animal creatures she calls “monsters” performing instruments.
“I used to try to draw what the festival felt like,” Campbell noted. “I don’t pick an actual act or band, but just a moment I remember. I allow my creativity to take over.”
Other aspects of the Festival operate in the same way. When ideas are suggested, and executed, they are often incorporated into the festival’s tradition. The Art Barn began when two art students proposed an exhibition. The Dance Tent, for many the focal point of the festival, was an early suggestion as well.
Alan Vogel, who has helped out with construction since the beginning, still supervises the erection of stages and commissions smaller projects. Tommy Mann, who has been in charge of security since the third festival, supervises that crew.
“I don’t think anyone in their wildest dreams thought we would get this big,” Mann said over coffee a few weeks back. “It is literally the biggest event in Tompkins County.
“Every year, I get there and I’m just blown away by the incredible volunteer effort,” he added. “And after every year, how well it turns out, it never ceases to amaze me.”
Festival attendees
According to organizers, about 80 percent of festival-goers are repeat visitors, a figure Puryear jokingly calls the “recidivism rate.”
“There is a sense of ownership that doesn’t really play a role in most summer festivals,” Romer said. As a result, festival organizers feel “like the audience are our bosses.”
At the end of the day, the significance of a festival relies not on the caliber of its headliner but by the quality of its constituents. It is the milieu, not the marquee that makes a gathering memorable; community rather than celebrity. Try to conjure up a mental image of Woodstock: for the most part the focus would surely center on the crowd and not the stage.
“It’s not really a concert for famous bands,” Jordan Puryear said. “It’s nice to have one or two, but it’s really a certain type of band, a certain type of music that makes sense.”
A considered mix of the global and the local, the festival elucidates connections between zydeco and reggae, hippies and Touregs. At GrassRoots, all music is dance music, and it’s dance music from every nook and cranny of American culture. Dropping by Trumansburg this week answers the question not only what the next American music will sound like, but what community can feel like.