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Buzzing down city streets in downtown Greensboro in his golf cart, Josh Sherrick surveys the placing of signage, tents, and stages that are being prepped for the impending North Carolina Folk Festival that takes place this weekend.
For the last three weeks, Sherrick and his crew of City staff and volunteers have spent long days – some of which span from 8 am to 8 pm – putting in the work to get the City’s biggest downtown event ready. For Sherrick, who serves as the business services manager for Creative Greensboro with the City of Greensboro, the process of getting things up and running is one of the best parts of his job.
“I love the build, man – I love this,” Sherrick said. “This is some of my favorite times, and this is why I go work other festivals, because I love to be around it. It’s a big formula to put all of this together, and to do this as part of a team of people that speak the same language and feel the same feeling, it’s really awesome.”
The festival, which is produced in partnership between the City and NC Folk Festival, is more than just a tremendous project for Sherrick, it’s also something he helped bring to the city. Sherrick originally discovered the National Folk Festival on a flyer he came across during a trip to Nashville, and that’s when it hit him: Why not bring the festival to Greensboro?
After a phone call, and a bidding process that involved a site visit, Sherrick was given the go-ahead and had a year to plan everything out – it was a process of trial and error, and seeing where things fit and how best to make things work.
Since that first festival back in 2015, things have changed – such as its downtown footprint – but as time goes on, the challenges of putting together a three-day festival have largely stayed the same, but have also progressively gotten easier, Sherrick said.
“It used to be planned a lot less efficiently, so it was a lot more like, ‘Hey, I need eight folks and eight Parks and Rec staff would come over and then we would just figure out what tasks we have to do … we were really bootstrapping it with the people we had on staff,” Sherrick said. “This year it has been really kind of nice, because we’re so prepared and so ready for it that it hasn’t been as stressful as it was in the past.”
This year the festival will have four main stages located within a short walking distance of one another in downtown, where a lineup of bands and musicians representing folk music from around the world will showcase their styles.
And just like any festival worth its weight, the NC Folk Festival will see heavy hitters perform as the festival’s headliners. On Friday night, multi-instrumentalist and influential bluegrass musician Sam Bush will take to the stage, while North Carolina native and grandfather of funk George Clinton will bring his Parliament-Funkadelic collective to Greensboro in what Sherrick expects to bring in large crowds.
“There is something to it when you see families and you see a diverse audience all together,” Sherrick said. “… It’s the one time where you truly have a large scale mass mixture of the people of our community – all colors, all races, all ages. It’s unbeatable and its un-replicable, you can’t manufacture it. You just try to create something and hope it resonates with different people in a different way, and when you see that happen it’s priceless.”
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