The Richmond Folk Festival, it's an incredible.

weekend of music and cultures from all over the world.

Richmond is really one of the most successful folk festivals in the United States.

For a lot of people who live in Richmond, it's a sense of pride, because this is something that's happening in their city.

It has become a signature event for Richmond.

I think it's fun.

I think it's really great to see diverse crowds there.

And now we're looking at 20 years One hand Im amazed that we made 20 years, and then on the other hand like, well, of course we did.

This program has been made possible by And by the generous support of viewers like you.

Thank you.

Music When you do a festival of this size, you're building a small city.

You're bringing in everything you need.

We have our own water system.

We have our own transportation system.

Our own fuel situation.

I call it our own electrical grid.

Typically the festival is held the month of October.

Once that's done, by November and December we are hitting the ground running hard for the next year.

Our earliest discussions are about major infrastructure.

The large stages and their place around the site.

It takes quite a few months to really work out those big details.

And eventually, it starts to look like a picture.

My name is Colleen Arnerich For the Richmond Folk Festival, I'm in charge of the production of the festival.

The staging, sound, lights, hiring the crews that work on the stages.

I'm there a week before to make sure that all of our tents have come in.

There in the right place.

All of the stages are coming in and make sure that they get in the right place.

There's always something that just got a little lost in translation, a set of stairs that needs to move to the other side or, the stage needs to be, this far back from the tent because we've got to be able to move stuff behind the stage, When you get to the week of the festival, there are so many elements that are moving at the same time, that my brain is just constantly running through all of it.

Did I remember to say this late breaking piece of information to my backline vendor.

did I tell the stage crew that they don't actually need this piece of equipment, but they need this piece of equipment.

so much is coming at you at once and you have to just quickly process it and package it and turn it back around and get it to the right person.

Hey, how are y'all doing?

You've done a good job if you're unnoticed, if everything just disappears into the background, to welcome you to the 19th Richmond Folk Festival.

The Richmond Folk Festival occurs in a gorgeous setting in downtown Richmond by the James River, often on your stereotypical gorgeous fall weekend.

You've got some amazing river views with some awesome rapids and then you can turn over and look to the left or right and see the skyline of Richmond, Virginia.

Welcome to the festival.

How are you?

[Train Whistle] How long do you think is this train?

Very long.

So we just start or wait for it.

Start?

Okay.

Music Going through the heart of the city is the James River.

And alongside the James River, we have train tracks.

and their active tracks even during the festival.

It can sometimes create a little sound pollution when there's performances but its also a part of the show, because when the trains come through, there's an interplay.

People wave at the train and the train conductors will toot their horns or wave out the window.

At first it was like, they're going to mess up performance.

But now part of the background music the festival.

The Richmond Folk Festival is three days of music and food and people watching It is a celebration of the roots and culture of American music and traditional arts The National Council for Traditional Arts, it's really the premier national organization for presenting folk and traditional arts.

We are the organization that has produced the National Folk Festival since it was founded in 1933 We are the organization that brought the National Folk Festival to the City of Richmond in 2005 The National Folk Festival is the oldest running folk festival in the United States.

It's been going on since the thirties.

And then the seventies and early eighties, it was presented at Wolf Trap Farm Park in Vienna, Virginia, just outside of Washington, D.C. Their executive director at the time was a luminary, folklorist Joe Wilson.

and he said, Let's take this show on the road.

He would bring the National Folk Festival to places that maybe wouldn't first come to mind, you know, such as Lowell, Massachusetts, or Bangor, Maine, or Butte, Montana.

When the national comes to a town, they come for a three year commitment And the idea is that after three years, the national moves to a new community, But that community that they worked with continues the festival.

So here in Richmond, it was the National Folk Festival for three years and was very successful.

And then Richmond continues it on the Richmond Folk Festival It all started with Joel Katz.

He was the director of the Carpenter Theater and he'd gone to the festival when it was in Bangor and came back and said, my gosh, It's an amazing festival.

It's a national festival.

It would be a big coup for Richmond to get it.

So we went to Bangor, Maine, various groups of us, and saw it in action and thought, wow, this is very cool event and much different than we had anticipated.

The community building aspect was amazing.

What it had done for their downtown riverfront was amazing.

I just saw the number of people here and the spirit of it.

And so we came back to Richmond and helped get it started.

We actually had to bid on the National Folk Festival.

We put together a group from the convention bureau.

They put the bid package.

And it was very persuasive.

We came down, did a site visit, And lo and behold, we won the bid to bring the festival here for three years, and none of us had any idea what we just won and how big a deal it was and how much money we had to raise.

And how difficult it was going to be to pull it off.

Initially people were unsure about the festival.

Folk was challenge.

They were not sure that that was the right thing for Richmond.

When they first brought the idea to us about the Folk Festival, you know, we were like, banjos and quilts?

And, you know, I was like, this is going to be different.

We joke about folk, we call the F-word.

You know, when people hear folk, they often immediately think of Peter, Paul and Mary, and they think of somebody sitting with an acoustic guitar, maybe a banjo.

folk music can be acoustic, but it can also be electric, could be rural, it could be urban.

It can come from, ethnic communities as well as geographic communities.

It is a presentation of artists who are carrying on cultural traditions, musical traditions, dance traditions that are deeply rooted in the cultural life of the community, Music and that they have learned informally, that have been passed down to them from generation to generation by members of their family, by members of their church, by other members of their community.

This is the arts of the people.

It certainly is a platform for an amazing diversity of traditions.

But we also don't think of folk music as something that's fixed and static.

It really is something that's alive and forever dynamic and vibrant.

And each generation, each artist kind of puts their own stamp on it.

And I think folks needed to kind of weather the price tag a little bit and decide whether or not that's something they're going to do.

I wasn't sure it was going to happen, Music We been awarded the festival and we hadn't made much progress in organizing for it.

the chairman of the board of the NCTA called me on the phone And this is a mild mannered person, and he is yelling at me.

You guys haven't gotten this thing organized.

You haven't raised any money.

We're going to take it to another city if you don't get your act together.

And that made an impression on me.

we organized a meeting in Richmond right at the end of 2004.

I would call it a come to Jesus meeting.

First of all, people said well somebodys got to raise their hand and say, I'll take charge of this.

Who's going to sign the contract and be responsible for making sure everything gets paid for?

And that made everybody nervous.

It was a well over $1,000,000 event.

It is free to everyone and it is a massive technical undertaking.

and this was the final meeting.

If we don't get a name on a line today, somebody's on the hook for this, then we're not doing it in Richmond.

Everybody looked around the room.

Everyone looked at one another.

And so Jack puts up his hand and says, I'll do it.

It was going to take the entire community to pull this off.

And as long as everybody else is helping I'll pull this together and take charge of the fund raising Okay.

All right.

Now let's go.

Music The champion throughout this was Jim Ukrop.

It was in about 2000.

Two or three.

Jim, Ukrop had begun to dream about an arts event that would be long term arts event in Richmond.

Somehow Jim saw it.

He was able to envision this.

You know, he was such a cheerleader for the city, and believed in the city.

This idea just captured him.

He was very connected in the community.

Jim's endorsement was a good thing to have.

Music Richmond is very fortunate.

There is a very healthy corporate giving culture here.

Largely through Jim's enthusiasm, and others, they decided to go for it.

And if it had not been for Jim, I have no doubt it would not have happened.

We get to the first festival, high hopes everything's in place.

It was like the air of mystery suspense.

We didn't know who was coming, how this was going to play out.

Well, opening night 20 years ago was an absolute disaster.

It rained the entire weekend.

There was so much rain, so much mud.

There's a biblical deluge, It was horrible.

It was really horrible.

My God, you know, what happens if you throw a festival nobody comes?

I was sitting in the tent and I actually counted the number of people in the crowd.

And there were 45 people at the festival.

Half of those were probably volunteers.

And I'm thinking to myself, oh my gosh, you know, we've raised hundreds of thousands of dollars.

We've recruited hundreds of volunteers.

We have so many tents, we had to hire a company from Canada to bring them all in here.

And we got 45 people here.

I was freaking out.

Only certain stages were open because they were covered.

And we had to move acts around to be on these covered stages.

It cut down on the number of crowds because it was raining Which probably was a saving grace for us, and the fact that it kind of kept the numbers down as far as attendees, but it allowed us to kind of feel our way through it, We're having a great time.

We wish the weather was beautiful, but the music's great and it's making up for it.

How the rain and the mess, it was still lovely and still worked out very well and I still think people were blown away by the caliber of musicians and food vendors and craft vendors that we had.

But it was certainly not sunny and pretty and just like perfectly run, which is okay.

I know they've got a three year run and hopefully, continue on.

One of the concerns after that first one was the diversity of the audience The first year, two, three, it was a mostly older, mostly white crowd.

We were sitting in a wrap up meeting.

The head of the program committee at you know, started talking about diversity in the audience.

And I looked at them and I said, There's a type of music out of Washington, D.C.

It's a favorite of A lot of residents here in Richmond.

Go-go music.

Music I bet you if you were to book Chuck Brown, you would start to see a little bit more diversity.

It was going to give people the chance to say, wait, that's not bluegrass and quilts.

That's Go-Go music at the Richmond Folk Festival.

And they booked him.

And you could actually see a change in the crowd.

But we didn't want African-Americans to come to hear an African-American group.

And we didn't want white people to come listen to bluegrass.

We wanted everybody to come and to listen to everything and share each other's culture.

As that began to happen, the crowds just grew and grew and grew.

There always was and inclusion of all different types of music, but just getting the word out to people that, hey, all are welcome.

Music is music It's for everybody.

I would say having Chuck Brown at the 70th National Folk Festival here in Richmond, Virginia, was a pivotal point in the making of this festival.

So the transition from the National to Richmond, our goal was to keep the vibe as similar as possible.

We had started doing such great, hip things during the National and we just continue that, throughout the Richmond Folk Festival.

It was like a seamless transition.

It proved that we could do really big things really well and it gave us a shot of confidence, I think, to say, Hey, we think we can do this.

There was a celebratory feeling, certainly amongst the volunteers and the staff, who helped produce this festival.

When it became the Richmond Folk Festival, people repeatedly said, I never believed we could do this.

I never believed it would be just as good.

Can you look at your schedule again?

Yeah.

Oh, it's back over there.

I want to see what the bands with what bands are playing at Browns Island are next up.

So we make sure we go.

We do them first.

My name is Jim Bland.

I'm the owner of Plan Nine Records in Richmond.

At first we were asked to help sell the CDs or the artists that would bring their music to the festival.

once we heard about well, this is perfect for us.

Our store tried to have a lot of music from all over the globe we came, we were given a tent location and said, you know, where we're going to be selling the merch.

We'll bring it to you, you sell it, we'll collect it, you know, and the back end.

we've gotten a rhythm, and we know what it takes to do the tenting and our set up and our particular tents.

I'll get you to take, a load of CDs to the other store.

I'm sort of a team leader as well for the volunteers that show up to help us run the tents.

We have some people in the Merch Tent who've been with me for many, many years.

We have an official piece of art a poster that commemorates the event each year.

We use a local artist from the Richmond area We try to mix it up with different artists, different styles, you know, each year.

They can make a logo, they can make it look like they want it to look like.

And something that represents to them what the folk festival is about.

That's really seemed to make us unique from what I've seen from some of the other festivals.

The people who come to the Merch Tent, They're just so enthused about what they just heard.

They just got to have that music to take home.

They got to have a, you know, souvenir from the festival.

yeah, All right.

Thank you.

I like that we're a part of some of that so positive in the city the.

And to be a part of that is really something special.

It really resonates with me because love the music so much, so I get to experience it firsthand.

Music The folks that come to the festival, it's not one of these things where it's like, let me see who's playing at the festival and decide if I want to come.

People just come Most people come.

They don't even look who's playing until they get their little program when they get there.

I think that's what makes it exciting for people.

They're going to see something they've never seen before, artists they've never heard of before, potentially even musical tradition they didn't even know existed.

But they trust the festival.

They know it's going to be excellent.

There's something about the folk festival There's an energy there.

There's just a buzz.

It's a difficult thing to communicate to people until they come.

I feel good tonight.

Do you feel good?

Music It seems to rain every year.

We talked over and over about changing the dates because we just thought we were snake bit from the rain.

But people have adapted to the rain even from that very first year.

You may not have as many people come that day, but those that come, they come with their umbrellas they have on their rain boots, they have on their rain jackets and they have a ball.

it's a miss in the vernacular of the Richmond Folk Festival that it will rain, and we're okay with that.

We've learned how to make it work.

It sort of adds to it.

It's a good feeling.

You know, even when the weather is poor, people are just going to come out anyway and I'm going to be here.

Fiddle Music Every folk festival has the state Folklife area.

We have the Virginia Folklife area.

If you go to Bangor, Maine, would be a very different folk life area because it has to do with the culture Maine.

It's the same with every festival you go to.

There's a different look and feel.

The folklife area is sort of what gives it its personality for the state that it's in.

We really focus on Virginia artists.

We often work off a particular theme.

So we may have a building arts or sacred traditions.

And it's the one part of the festival that also includes a traditional crafts elements, Virginia Folklife area, that's essential part of the festival.

It's just not the whole festival.

So you can get your bluegrass fix, and I do every year, So right that's where I spend most of my time, actually.

Part of what's really exciting about the festival is that every year people are seeing something new.

They rarely repeat acts.

You know, it's like a time out of time, this festival.

There's something for everybody.

There's different types of vibes.

There's the very sort of quiet, intimate spaces and then there's just like intense rocking spaces.

There's a different energy on Friday night than on Saturday Music The other thing is the way the festival is programmed intentionally, is that at any one time on the seven stages or in the Folklife area or foodways, if you don't like something on one stage, you can go to the other and you'll find something you do like.

So tea leaves for us are a form of protection.

The artists that appear, our cultural ambassadors, and they're always explaining what they do and why they do it, where it all comes from, what it means to them.

these are resonating factors that change people's minds.

Everybody is just here because they want to be here.

They're here with open minds ready to learn and just enjoying what we have to share to them.

Theyll know what hula is about and what our culture is about and it's not the coconut shells and the cellophane skirts, but it's more about our natural environment, about taking care of our environment and how we're all connected.

And everything has life.

In this process, you're accidentally exposed to all sorts of things you never knew about or never thought you'd like.

and people come away with new favorite musics, traditions, material culture creations.

That's how it works.

Music and the arts in general, it really brings out the best in people.

a positive thing that we, just want to share.

If we can sing together, we can play together.

If we can dance together, then we can live together.

When we play together, we feel like music talks.

There's no language boundaries.

There's no limitations, no language barriers, culture shock.

They disappear.

So everything became very beautiful together.

Theres so much out there that is set up to divide us or to give us sort of two dimensional views of other types of people.

There's something about music and something about music presented in this type of setting that I think has a unique power to very quickly cut through that there's something about when people are moved by someone else's art that just gets there quickly.

It helps kind of soften the ground, I think for some of these other dialogs to have some impact.

I do.

I'm pretty sure of it.

Music Really and truly this is one of my favorite festivals.

the audience has always been so engaged in Richmond you feel how much this community loves this festival.

You know, they look forward to it and then they share their enthusiasm with other people who then come out and share their enthusiasm.

And, And it just draws people back.

They really want to know what we're doing every year.

It's hard to measure success when you don't necessarily have ticket sales Financial success is one thing, but also just seeing the pride folks have in an event, that's successful moments for me.

to just sort of see a bunch of smiling, happy people.

Well, I think it's grown because of its success.

Success breeds success.

Its done a lot more for Richmond than I ever thought it would.

This is Sunday at the festival, and if we don't have our stuff together by this point, we just won't.

One wrong thing, bathroom lines, or not enough food or not enough beer.

and it sort of changes the whole perspective, of the event.

But otherwise you just want people to come and just walk and feel like all this all works.

This is natural.

This is the right way to do things.

My role with the Richmond Folk Festival is all over the place.

It's everything from raising funds to get sponsorships and grants, it's going out and measuring fields to where stages can be placed Who's selling the most records and the most CDs?

Well, I will tell you, I just came from Browns Island and Nathan sold out Fortunately, I get to work with some people, both on the staff and on the volunteer level that sort of helped me put all these puzzle pieces together to make this festival happen.

I was involved in the inaugural National Folk Festival here in Richmond.

During the Richmond Folk Festival, they call me the Food Czar.

I am in charge of recruiting, contracting 30 to 35 food vendors for the weekend.

We get them loaded in, we get them set up, check in with them throughout the weekend, make sure they know everything is going right.

If there's an issue, to we try to resolve it.

We choose our food vendors based off of their menu a lot of times.

Whether they can move a crowd, how long they've actually been doing festivals.

You gotta have your balance of unique foods and your every day fair foods, your corn dogs, sausage, gyros, that type of thing.

So you gotta have a good balance.

For the Richmond Folk Festival, I am the marketplace manager.

The marketplace is an area where people can come and shop for homemade goods, pottery, jewelry, hand knitted items, a lot of fun stuff.

I am responsible For how many, vendors will be able to participate.

The layout.

I try to find something definitely handmade, something that's kind of unusual and things that people will enjoy.

So this is great.

Everything is running smoothly, much more fun for the staff, for the attendees, for the kids, the families.

This is great.

We're happy.

We're liking it.

Well, how are you?

I love your gwreath on your your what are they?

What's the proper name?

Not a wreath.

I call it a flower crown.

That's beautiful.

Thanks for coming out.

I have been involved with the festival since the very beginning.

How's everything going, ladies?

So what I do when I make rounds is I go through this area along here, check in on the staff for the festival, and around this time, I check my steps.

7157.

Are you keeping track?

Just we have about 1300 volunteers We have a lady who comes from England every year, to volunteer who used to be our winner for the most distance.

Another one of our team leaders, daughter lives in Hawaii.

You cold?

She comes every year to volunteer.

She deserves to feel cold.

Shes from the tropics.

Dave!

So this is Elizabeth and she's flown, what, 6600 miles to volunteer this year.

5 to 6000?

Yeah.

So like that.

She's in paradise on Earth and she comes every year to volunteer.

And it's a gorgeous day on the river.

We have people help with the stage construction and building the site out, about 200 people coming along Friday through Sunday Make a drop in the bucket!

Keep the festival free!

We have a team of roving bucket brigade people.

The bucket brigadiers is what we call them.

They carry around big orange buckets And it has small opening in the top for people to make deposits.

They make a drop in the bucket.

We have never charged any admission fee to the festival, and the bucket brigade really is an integral part of that.

And without the volunteers, their input and their love and their support, we really couldn't do it.

We all have one goal in mind, and that's to make the best festival, the best weekend that we possibly can.

Music The way the festival is traditionally programed is that the NCTA works with the local programing committee to choose the acts for the festival.

We have an amazing group of people that love music and love various types of music, and they decide what bands we have come and play.

The program committee is our representatives from Richmond area, a diverse group of folks.

Music is presented, genres are presented and we listen to music, look at videos, we vote on our, best choices.

It's a lot of planning meetings, sometimes late nights, long weekends, We just get that feeling of will this resonate in Richmond?

Will people enjoy it?

Or is it something we really think we should just present this because it's just too cool not to pass up, Music Most people don't realize how much expertise there is in Richmond in the music scene.

We've got people on that programing committee that know the difference between West African music and East African music and can lecture you on the subtleties.

there's a lot of expertise here and a lot of passion about this, The message we try to get out there that folk music is about cultures, but it's about, a particular culture anywhere on the globe.

And so that's what we try to present.

Those are the people who are carrying on that particular type of music.

they're the sons and the daughters and the cousins of those heritage artists who are taking it to a different place.

Personally, I love just being able to discover and see live of the music I've just seen in the committee.

The curation of the festival is key.

In Richmond, I think from the beginning, there wasn't really an event that brought everybody together.

I think that a primary goal in Richmond was always to present an experience for people there that was healing.

To have an area where people can all meet in the middle and just enjoy one anothers company, I never anticipated that was going to happen.

Weve had people that met at the festival who are now married.

You know, weve have a wedding at the festival.

Its an amazing unifying force.

I always joke theres been a child conceived at at the festival but... Dont air that!

Laughs I get excited when I see the attendees there running around or smiling.

You see people, kind of meandering along just, enjoying themselves and just having a good time.

I just think that there is a a contagious smiling effect that happens when you get there.

You rarely see people upset at the folk festival.

It's relaxed, and it's always like that.

And You can't help yourself but just be happy.

A friend of mine once said, you know, babies don't even cry at the folk festival.

Everybody's happy at the folk festival, which of course is not true.

But it, it's a pretty happy place.

You know, even when it's raining, it's still a pretty happy place.

Over the years the audience has become more and more diverse.

Thats something that I think this festival has really engendered.

that has, I think, really evolved over the years.

The growth of the audience 150,000, 180,000.

225,000.

I grew up playing a lot of NCTA festivals.

I think it's just a way of just showing so much connection.

You know, the music in itself, it's such a connector.

It brings people together, brings people joy.

I and I think there's something really special about that connection.

Y'all know what time it is?

Come on, y'all.

The Richmond Folk Festival has become this beloved institution.

This is a very long time for a folk festival to stay in a community.

They don't all last this long.

Sometimes they're three and done Here, it just goes on and on and on and has continued to grow.

This is a weekend that people mark on their calendars months out and know we're going to invite all our friends from out of town to this thing or we're going to cancel any plans we have because we are going to spend time at the festival.

You see the crowds and the folks out there clapping and dancing and, indicates a lot of joy.

I think that it's been fully embraced by the city, because for everybody.

I really feel like we're really at the beginning of what the Richmond Folk Festival can be.

people just enjoy the festival.

Families who brought their little kids to the first one Now their kids are grown and they're coming with their kids now.

Its become such a rich tradition.

I think it's just going to continue to grow.

I've never missed a single day of the Folk festival and I never will.

I've never missed a day.

Its so ingrained in the Richmond community that I feel certain that this will always be a part of a Richmond.

A lot of people love this festival.

You see that come through because it is Richmond, it is ours, and we're very proud of it.

Music Music This program has been made possible by And by the generous support of viewers like you.

Thank you.