Giant FOLK letters anchor NC Folk Festival in Greensboro

"You kind of see them at other festivals, or like Indianapolis, when you come into the airport," said Jodee Ruppel, executive director of the annual multicultural music folk festival, as she watched the installation at the Depot, 236 E. Washington St.

She imagines all the foot traffic near the Depot, as a crowd of more than 130,000 people is expected to descend on the city’s downtown Sept. 18-20. "We wanted something big, touchable, really visible art pieces, and so I was like, what if we could get those big letters where everyone could take a picture with them?" Ruppel said. "This is it!"

Festival organizers announced earlier this year that Americana folk singer and banjo player Molly Tuttle and the jazz and hip-hop group the Roots, which is also late night host Jimmy Fallon’s house band, are festival headliners. Get a schedule of the events at ncfolkfestival.com.

The free festival, with entertainers and music styles from around the world, also includes dance, storytelling, arts and crafts, and food. It is the largest music festival in the state, according to organizers.

New artists are invited each year. The festival is known for putting together a variety of music that crosses cultural and linguistic barriers, including Appalachian, beatbox, Bulgarian, Cajun, conjunto Tejano, country, Ethiopian, gospel, Mexican and Moroccan Gnawa — and that list is leaving out a lot.

The lineup includes Samir LanGus, a Grammy-nominated Moroccan musician, the female-led Brass Queens and the indie-rock band Susto. Browsers can click on links on the organizers’ website to listen to music by the performers. There’s also a schedule of when they’ll play.

The Roots were among the first groups invited to NPR Music’s Tiny Desk Concert Series. Tuttle’s latest album is "So Long Little Miss Sunshine." In her biography, Tuttle, who began performing at 15, is described as charting a course between honoring bluegrass and stretching its boundaries. The 35 performers appearing on five stages in the past have led to couples, children, their grandpas and others dancing in the blocked-off streets and parking lots.

In 2014, the National Council for the Traditional Arts initially chose Greensboro to host the National Folk Festival from 2015 to 2017. Its run was later extended, and organizers formed the nonprofit North Carolina Folk Festival, which relies on volunteers and sponsors. Cone Health is this year’s lead sponsor. The tents are already going up around downtown Greensboro.

Welding instructors were supervising the installation Monday because of what they said was a good problem to have: Almost all the students who worked on the project now have jobs. They had spent the summer designing and constructing the letters, making the project both a large-scale fabrication challenge and a hands-on learning experience, according to instructors. After the initial design, they thought about having the word "folk" more in line with how the word appears in the festival logo.

"So, it went from just regular four F-O-L-K letters to, let’s put the L on the K, and make a sound wave in the middle of the O," said instructor Zebidiah Downey. Students, who worked as a team, spent about 100 hours on the project, which included learning how to safely construct, move and assemble large, heavy structures. Some came into the program not knowing how to use a tape measure, Downey said.

The festival received a $15,000 grant from the Community Foundation of Greater Greensboro that has been used to hire student stage sound and lighting techs and others largely from area college programs. The GTCC welding students got college credit for the project.

"We call that soul pay," Downey said. That’s because GTCC’s welding programs, for example, have reverse job fairs. Potential employers will come to sit in on their work.

"Not what they are supposed to be able to do, but the reality," Downey said of that vantage point for an employer. "This is building their body of work."