I went for most of Friday and Saturday and stopped by today (a difficult feat unless you live in the neighborhood) to hear Earl Scruggs pick.

The standout acts for me were the Carolina Chocolate Drops on Saturday--Rhiannon Giddens is an amazingly versatile singer, and on Friday, T-Bone Burnett & friends. I trusted that he would have excellent taste in friends, and yes, he did--the Punch Brothers, who I was really there to see, Steve Earle, Karen Elson, and a pair of women who knocked my socks off with their singing, the Secret Sisters. (I had never heard of them before, but they can count me as a fan now.)

This is my third year of attendance. I thought last year's crowd was unusually large because Steve Martin was there, but this year there seemed to be just as many people. It's wonderful to have such a great free festival in my neighborhood but they really need to consider moving part of it to the Polo Fields next year because it's just getting impossible to move. Not to mention, the stage at Marx Meadow is in a very non-ideal place, hard to get in and out of and the shape makes it difficult to see the stage from most places even if you manage to make it into the meadow. I am hoping the high attendance numbers for a second year in a row will help persuade the organizers to move the large stages to the Polo Field and the smaller ones to Speedway. (That is the setup at the Outside Lands festival in the park, which I have been to twice, and has a much smaller crowd.)

In any case it is nice that Warren Hellman provides all this. The festival has grown from 10k to 700k over 10 years, and I think it is definitely broadening the musical tastes of people in the city. On the other hand, it's a directly contributing factor in my picking up a banjo earlier this year, so maybe that offsets any good the festival has brought to the world. ;)