‘It’s like a family reunion’: Green River Festival celebrates 40th anniversary with biggest crowd yet

GREENFIELD — The Green River Festival keeps getting a little bit bigger every year.

That’s according to John Sanders, the owner, talent buyer and festival manager of the Green River Festival and DSP Shows. This year’s festival, the 40th event since its inception in 1986, drew the biggest crowd yet, with an estimated 4,000 to 4,500 attendees on Friday, and between 6,000 and 7,000 festivalgoers for both Saturday and Sunday.

The festival’s anniversary year was graced with mild weather, with temperatures in the upper 70s and winds to break up the warm sun — a change of pace from the persistent heat of the 2025 festival, and the tornado watches in 2024.

Part of local culture

This year’s lineup featured artists from across genres, including major crowd draws like the Brooklyn-based band Geese on Sunday night.

Some of the other lineup leaders included Charley Crockett on Friday and Spoon on Saturday. While some national and international names made their way to Franklin County, local acts like Mal Devisa, Eavesdrop, LuxDeluxe, Splendid Torch and June Millington all brought their western Massachusetts roots to the Roundhouse Stage.

Of the four stages, at least two were always in use. To make sure that one act wasn’t overpowering the other, only one of the two bigger stages — those being the Sundial Audio Main Stage and the Dean’s Beans Stage — would be in use at a given time.

“I love music, and that’s why I do this,” Sanders said. “I want an opportunity to present as many artists as possible … but we also want to have really amazing, engaging emerging artists, who maybe are headliners in the future.”

One of these emerging artists was Luke Tyler Shelton, who performed songs from his recently released EP “Blue Sky.” Besides performing his own music, Shelton plays guitar for Malcolm Todd. As his own front man, however, this was not only Shelton’s first time playing in western Massachusetts, but his first time playing on the East Coast.

What’s different about the Green River Festival compared to other festivals in his home state of California, he said, is that the music comes first.

“Where I’m from … it’s all built up around everything else except for the music,” Shelton said. “This feels very wholesome. There’s people that really care about music and care about artists they’ve never heard.”

This wholesome, family-friendly feeling extended past the music. The Art Garden’s craft and children’s tent was among the busiest spots throughout the weekend, with a lively parade throughout the fairgrounds Saturday evening, featuring the inventive arts and crafts that families put together throughout the day.

By Sunday afternoon, the crafting opportunities had proven to be especially popular.

“We’re running out of everything, which, usually we run out of a few things, maybe, but this year we’re going to run out of almost everything,” Laura Iveson, co-director of The Art Garden, commented on Sunday. “As soon as we opened yesterday, we had easily 50 people and it just went up from there.”

The Art Garden has been a fixture at the Green River Festival for more than a decade, and this year, Iveson and Co-Director Jane Wegscheider emphasized the impressive intergenerational turnout, including for the parade.

The crafting area, Wegscheider said, provides a place “where children are making something inspiring an adult next to them.” It’s a place where people, regardless of age or artistic background, are encouraged to tap into their creativity, with many artists opting to take their masterpieces home with them.

In the Green River Festival merchandise booth, Manager Allyson Smith said that while this was her first year working there, it was unlike any music festival she’s worked in the past.

“It’s been a really great experience,” Smith said. “We have really awesome volunteers, really great staff. … All of the patrons have been really excited to be here.”

‘Not just about the music’

Excitement was felt by Christopher “Monte” Belmonte and Kaliis Smith, with a twinge of nervousness. This was the duo’s fourth time hosting a live version of their radio show, “The Fabulous 413,” at the Green River Festival, but for the first time, they were performing on the Main Stage.

For Belmonte, it was his 25th time at the Green River Festival. He remarked how much the event has changed in that time, but the faces, for the most part, have remained the same.

“It’s like a family reunion,” Belmonte said. “It’s not only the backstage crew that are the same people. … There are people that come every single year to this.”

“Someone brings us sausage literally every year,” Smith added.

Away from the stages, vendors, food trucks and organizations were present.

For one vendor, Shelburne Falls resident Adam Zawalich, owner of Zawalich Woodwork + Design, said he started coming to the festival three years ago, but he had always wanted to come since living in the Pioneer Valley.

In his third year as a vendor, Zawalich described the crowds as a “melting pot of people,” noting how he ends up meeting more of his neighbors at the festival than in Shelburne Falls itself.

In observing people who come through the festival, including the Makers’ Market where he displayed his handmade wooden guitars, he said, “it’s not just about the music.”

Of these organizations was The Parlor Room Collective, headed by Executive Director Chris Freeman. The Parlor Room Collective is a nonprofit dedicated to art, artists, education and community in western Massachusetts, according to its website. 

Before his current role, Freeman played with his band Parsonsfield at Green River Fest, which he called his band’s first festival experience.

“It’s so well-run. The team is working so hard to get everything up and going,” Freeman said. “They’ve really figured out how to use this space the right way and it feels really similar to past years. … What is the strength of the valley is that things like the Iron Horse, Green River, can go through different owners and different eras, but ultimately, it is part of our culture here to have these [events].”

‘Music is history’

This festival is the second-biggest event hosted at the Franklin County Fairgrounds each year, topped only by the Franklin County Fair, according to Mike Nelson, president of the Franklin County Agricultural Society that runs the fairgrounds.

It’s not just the crowds that keep growing; this year marked the largest cohort of artists to ever grace the Roundhouse Stage, the Back Porch Stage, the Dean’s Beans Stage and the Sundial Audio Main Stage.

The festival started as a concert at Greenfield Community College, which was held to celebrate the fifth anniversary of WRSI. From that first concert in 1986, the festival would blend into a music and hot air balloon festival put on by the Franklin County Chamber of Commerce, becoming the Green River Festival officially in 1998.

Encapsulating this decades-long evolution is a Green River Festival museum exhibit operated by the Memorial Hall Museum. This exhibition started in 2024 and has been moved from the Youth Hall to the Roundhouse in the upstairs section.

Overseeing the museum at its opening on Saturday were Lindsay Kruzlic and Jillian Gochinski, and Kruzlic said people come through who’ve been at the festival for these 40 years, or people who are at the festival for the first time. Some people coming through the exhibit were drawn to the concert posters, as well as the photos, with some visitors seeing if they could find themselves in the images.

“We have people telling us all different types of stories about being able to come here and to feel safe, them being here to feel included,” Kruzlic said. “They always find something new that they love.”

Hanging up at the exhibit was a memory board, where people placed sticky notes with their festival memories. Notes spoke of love, like the story of a couple enjoying the hot air balloons 32 years ago when the festival featured hot air balloon launches. Another note said, “This is where I asked this really tall, cute guy to be my boyfriend.” An addendum read, “The really tall guy said ‘Yes!'” Others gave shoutouts to musicians in the lineup, and others paid homage to where they were traveling from to get to the festival.

Also at the exhibition were the different parts of the festival, including photos from over the years, and quotes from performers and organizers about the festival’s history.

Although this exhibit wasn’t showcasing what is traditionally thought of as local history, Kruzlic said it showcased for people the history of this ever-growing summer event, unique to Franklin County.

“We are able to get the people that already like history and already are local to the area to learn a different kind of history, not necessarily like Civil War history, Revolutionary War history, but music is history,” she said. “It’s been around for 40 years, and it’s such an institution.”