TRUMANSBURG, N.Y. — Thousands of people flooded into the Village of Trumansburg this weekend for the 32nd Finger Lakes GrassRoots Festival of Music and Dance.
The annual event transforms the Trumansburg Fairgrounds into the site of four days of music and celebration, sometimes to the chagrin of the area residents. But many locals compare it to an extended family reunion held amid festival-goers from far and wide, and musical acts from all over the world.
Headliners at this year’s festival included singer and civil rights activist Mavis Staples, Tuareg singer-songwriter Bombino, the Zimbabwean Afro-funk group Mokoomba, the Cuban-folk band Cortadito, and numerous bluegrass and Americana groups, like Old Crow Medicine Show, or Molly Tuttle and Golden Highway.
Local acts fill festival stages too, like the funk group The Comb Down, and New Planets, the self-described makers of “other-worldy dance music.”
GrassRoots, founded in 1991, originally began as a modest fundraising effort to donate money to combat the AIDS epidemic, but it has since grown into a major cultural and community event for the Ithaca area.
Attendees and organizers shared their thoughts on the festival, community, and some of the memories they’ve made. The comments shared here were edited from interviews for length and clarity and can be found below the photo gallery. Navigate the gallery using the arrows on either side of the pictures.
Gallery of GrassRoots Festival of Music and Dance
All photos by Alyvia Covert for The Ithaca Voice.
Richie Stearns, co-creator and board president of GrassRoots
I’ve seen so many people that grew up here and how they live their lives, and it’s pretty cool. It’s like a big, really big community event.
When we started playing fiddle music in the early ‘70s, when we were little kids, we became a part of a community that existed all over the world, and ended up meeting people from all over the world that were doing the same thing. And we just wanted to pull all that into our festival and try to get like really great African bands in the beginning, and bands from India and Asia, native bands.
The first year, we weren’t interested in anything except making enough money to do it again the next year, and then give it all the way to AIDS work. People were just dying, left and right, and there was all this stigma around AIDS that made people feel like it wasn’t something worth getting behind. There was just a lot of hom*ophobia. It was just so wrong and everybody knew it, at least in this community.
I think we’ve done a really good job over the years. It’s not like we’re all like living off the land all year round so we can do it again and make more money.
And It’s pretty fun, but it sure is exhausting though.
Seth Palmer, attendee
You can take five years off of this and come back and see your same friends. And it’s just like you never left. It’s that kind of community.
I got a lot of friends reaching out to me helping me start some new businesses and giving me work when I need it. So I feel really connected. Not just in Ithaca, friends in Rochester and all over the country.
The business is called Ithaca Nut Butter. I always loved making peanut butter, and during the pandemic I wanted to make my own nut butter. So I started making it in my kitchen. And then a year went by. I kind of tossed and turned with the idea because friends were saying like, ‘You should sell this,’ and I just decided to go for it. I’m launching with a regular peanut butter, a chai peanut butter, and then a mixed nut peanut butter mix.
I want to give back to this community as much as they’ve given to me. And I think with everything that has come out of this city and the people who have started businesses here, and how much is given back to the people, and employed people, I want to do the same thing.
Christy Montana, attendee
“We actually spent a few years in Maine, but we came back here after the pandemic and we bought our house during the housing bubble.
“The man we bought the house from just a couple of years ago, he’s kind of a GrassRoots music man. Apparently, it was a band house. We were told to just expect folks who have been coming for years to park there. They’ll show up. Two years ago we had someone sleep on our couch. He was actually media. He was covering something at the festival.
“He was trying to park in front of our house and we have a fire hydrant right there, and we were like, ‘Come in the driveway!’ He ended up having dinner with us and stayed on the couch. Really nice guy!”
Neil Oolie, volunteer
I’ve been volunteering at this festival for…oh…20 years in different roles.
It’s not just about music, and some of it is really awesome, like Mavis Staples. It’s like, ‘Ah my god!’ I mean, when I was a kid — I’m gonna be 69 next Friday — when I was a kid, I was listening to this stuff.
The origins of the festival, GrassRoots Festival of Music and Arts, to support music and arts education in the fight against AIDS — that was the original thing, and I felt those things are really important.
I come out here, I get a little bit baked every year — a little bit sunburnt, but I’m having a good time. And I go for the old-timey music. Real old timers got together outside the hospitality bar in the middle of the night and played until the sun came up. Some of the old music is going away. I just love this place and I love doing it. I love to be part of it.
One day, I was sleeping back at the grandstand stage, and I woke up and someone had left their baby on me. I knew this baby when she was a bump inside her mother, I knew this person before she was born. Now that kid is like an adult, 20s, and that’s like — you don’t see that kind of personal history in our society very much.
There are a lot of things that I did where I know I made a difference to people, and that’s one of them — being involved with the people, being involved with this festival.
