The Green Room Lounge Lizard-Last night

With a budget of $800,000, The Finger lakes Grassroots Festival of Music and Dance was populated with about 10,000 festivalgoers and hosted over 70 acts playing on four stages. Roots, Folk, Country, African Chimeranga, Salsa, Native American infused Punk Rock, Afro-Beat, Columbian Cambria, and various hybrids using elements of the aforementioned as well as Rap, Jazz, Jug, Ragtime, Psychedelic, and most other musical genres you can think of, were offered for our aural pleasure and musical education. I wish I hadn’t missed the Grassroots Chamber Orchestra, The Gunpoets, The Horseflies, The Grady Girls, The Courtyard Hounds-otherwise known as 2/3 of the Dixie Chicks, or The Bubba George String Band-I heard the term “old time Thrash” uttered at the end of one of their banjo/fiddle tunes caught on video. I wish I had talked to Hiroshima Vacation-the Grindcore band that played. I wish I had gotten to the Fest early enough to take the Fiddle & Banjo Workshop with John Specker, or the “Music as a Vehicle for Change” Workshop with Jhakeem Haltom and Joel Blizzard of Thousands of One, or to take yoga with 200 other people, or have a natural healer (not of the snake oil salesman variety) try to heal me! There’s always next year’s Grassroots, and this area is rich, all year round, in these musical conglomerations. I’m glad I got to hear Richie Stearns play for us in the Green Room Lounge since I missed The Horseflies, and I’m glad I got to hear the bands and the Green Room Lounge jams that I did, talk to the people that I did, see some of the behind the scenes I was privy to, eat the food, have the drinks, & write the blogs.

Walking around the festival site as things were closing down seemed like a ghost town was in the making. The population went down fast. As venues closed, the crowd thinned. When the backstage lemonade ran out I knew we were near the end, but there were still enough people left to loosely pack (not an oxymoron!) the entire Infield area for the Donna The Buffalo final set, a jam, a see-you-next-year love letter to the very large extended family. They played a long time, well into the dark, for the winding down crowd.