THROUGH THE LENS: Newport Folk Festival 2024

The 65th edition of the Newport Folk Festival was a humdinger. This year’s installment of the venerable fest that keeps renewing itself year after year featured poetry reading, impromptu dancing by fest grande dame Joan Baez and Rhiannon Giddens, Gillian Welch duetting with Sierra Ferrell, two separate performances of Bob Dylan’s “Maggie’s Farm” by Beck and Molly Tuttle, and the Grateful Dead drag tribute band Bertha. As noted in last year’s coverage, even with new twists, the tradition of Newport carries on.

Veteran photojournalist Jim Brock was at Fort Adams State Park again to cover Newport Folk Fest for the column. Here’s his report.

Newport Folk Festival 2024 by Jim Brock 

This year’s Newport Folk Festival, perhaps the most enduring and important music festival in America, brought banjos and hip-hop, queer country and “Truckin’” in fishnets and shocking pink, sustainability and kindness, blues legends and deep roots, all bundled with the debuts, unannounced surprises, and personal discoveries I’ve come to expect since my first Newport Folk fest 10 years ago.

Newport Folk is a village that embraces community and tradition without force feeding “we’re all in this together” messaging, curated under the devoted eye of fest producer Jay Sweet and set against the stunning backdrop of Rhode Island’s Narragansett Bay and the nearly 200-year-old stone walls of Fort Adams. 

A family vibe is all around. It’s in the whimsical “Woo-Hoo” signs handmade by Nan Parati outside the gate to the harbor-side walk into the festival grounds. It’s in the sea of 1,800 bikes racked up for the 10,000  attendees and the pedal-powered Quad Stage. But, above all, it’s in the music.

“’Cause everyone’s a libertarian, ’til the brown water floods their home,” Billy Bragg bitingly sang on the fest’s second day. That line, from Bragg’s “King Tide and the Sunny Day Flood,” stayed with me, as did much of what I heard from his set on solo guitar and occasional keyboard. It was classic Newport, unplugged but amplified. In-your-face songs for an in-your-face moment. But that’s just a small slice of what makes Newport Folk what it is, and what keeps it going stronger than ever as it hits its Medicare-age stride.

There were many other delights I’ll hold on to: Molly Tuttle & Golden Highway, Shovels & Rope, Allison Russell, and Rhiannon Giddens all did what they do so strikingly well, in a setting that they clearly love.  Giddens gamely pushed through sound problems at the start of her set, going a cappella for an impromptu rendition of Janis Joplin’s “Mercedes Benz” to buy some time. The whole fest was buzzing after Sierra Ferrell’s set, and it was a joy to hear Gillian Welch and David Rawlings together on the Newport stage again for the first time in nine years. Then Welch joining Ferrell’s set, saying “I feel underdressed,” and took the joy even higher with their duet of “Handsome Molly.”

There was the goofball depth of singer-songwriter Steve Poltz (I can’t unhear his story involving a childhood guitar teacher, a wooden leg, and a glass eye), and the musical tales of John Craigie and Langhorne Slim. For his surprise set at the Quad Stage, Beck channeled his inner vintage Newport and wore a ’60s era Dylan coif. Joan Baez read her poetry, danced on stage with Giddens, and just hung around, all of which was pure Newport.

I was most immediately smitten, however, from the opening notes of The Oh Hellos, siblings Maggie and Tyler Heath’s band that’s been around since 2011 and I was hearing for the first time. I’ll fall for an Irish-inflected, Texas-based twin fiddle-and-banjo nine-piece band any day, and they’ve been in my heavy rotation ever I saw their set. That’s Newport Folk in a nutshell for me.

Perhaps the most meaningful part of shooting Newport Folk were the portrait sessions I did each day. While pretty brief (five minutes, tops), the shooting locations within Fort Adams are characters in themselves. Spaces frozen in time, full of cracked walls and brick, bathed in soft natural light. It’s an environment that can bond artist and photographer, and when it clicks, the results will show in the images.

It may sound cliché, but Newport Folk really is a family and the festival is one big family picnic. With no other West Coast photographers in sight and having missed last year due to health issues, I felt like the long-distant cousin welcomed back to the family reunion. 

Kindness, and dare I say, love, prevail on and off the stage, from the dancing volunteers, staff and crew who’ve worked the festival for decades, and the generations of grandparents to grandkids who attend. Newport Folk will make you think, make you feel, open your ears, and hopefully not just listen to the music, but to each other as well.

Welcome to the family. Newport Folk 2025 is set for July 25-27.

Click on any photo below to view the gallery as a full-size slide show.