Lowell Folk Festival is largest free traditional U.S. fest
America’s largest free traditional folk festival, with performers on six stages and hundreds of thousands of visitors, will be July 23 through 25 in historic downtown Lowell.
Just 30 miles northwest of Boston, live music, ethnic foods and folk crafts take over the old industrial city on the Merrimack River for three days. The free fest is 25 years old this summer.
Most of the festival takes place within the Lowell National Historic Park.
Lowell was a cradle of the American industrial revolution in the 1840s, with sprawling textile mills that later supplied uniforms and blankets in the American Civil War, the Spanish-American War, World War I and World War II.
Some 200,000 people attended last year’s event, a festival spokesman said.
All festival music venues are free and the street food -- both ethnic and mainstream -- is cheap and mostly tasty. The city has some 105,000 residents.
There will be more than 1,000 on-site volunteers and some 200 staff persons for the three-day festival. There’s a budget of approximately $1 million.
This year’s returning acts include the Hot Club of Cowtown from Texas, North Carolina’s Jeff Little and Chicago polka star Lenny Gomulka. Bluegrass-music star Allison Krause is one of many who have played the festival.
Musical styles include Cajun, bluegrass, Celtic, Chicago-Push polka, Blue Ridge piano , Jamaican reggae, western swing, gospel brass, Irish, kosher gospel, south Indian dance, Franco-American via Vermont, Puerto Rican salsa/bomba y plena, R&B soul, Korean, Egyptian and Arabic music and dance, urban dance, Andean and Quebecois.
Local organizations prepare and sell foods that represent their heritage, with proceeds going to local programs.
After economic decline in the 20th century with mill closings, Lowell has reinvented itself as an up-and-coming center for arts and student life, high-tech businesses, desirable and relatively inexpensive old buildings and a home for alternate entertainment like the folk festival.
Historically a city of immigrants who worked in the mills, Lowell is now one of the nation’s largest centers for Cambodians and other Southeast Asians. There’s even a Cambodian government consular office in Lowell. The city’s Cambodian population has been estimated at more than 30,000, many in the Lower Highlands neighborhood.
Previous waves of immigrants have included Irish, Germans, Poles, French Canadians, Dominicans, Italians and members of other groups who worked long hours for low wages in the textile mills.
Posted by Dan Sheridan
