The Tumbleweed Music Festival is a mostly free, open-air, community acoustic music festival sponsored by the Three Rivers Folklife Society, a small, 501(c)(3) community arts organization here in the Tri-Cities, which is traditionally held on Labor Day weekend each year.  The 2024 festival will be our 28th annual!  We feature many kinds of acoustic music (primarily folk, blues, bluegrass, etc.) but are welcoming to all types of music and dance performances.

The festival begins Friday of Labor Day weekend with a free “New Horizons” concert, presenting younger (and euphemistically “higher energy”) performers than many of our attendees are used to seeing.  We’ve found some fantastic people that way who have since become Tumbleweed family members, returning to perform often.

Saturday and Sunday of that weekend, from 11am to 6pm, we have a new performance or workshop on each of our 4 outdoor and 2 indoor stages, and 2 workshop rooms every 45 minutes; afternoons, one of the stages becomes an open-mic stage that keeps its own schedule.  All performances and workshops are free except for the Saturday Tumbleweed benefit concert and the Sunday evening Contra Dance – those are ticketed events.

One other feature of Tumbleweed is the annual “Jane Titland Memorial Songwriting Contest,” in which songwriters submit songs matching that year’s festival theme; for 2024, our theme is “By Water, Under Trees.”

Performers (except for the three headline acts chosen for the Saturday evening Tumbleweed benefit concert) are not paid beyond a travel stipend that is based on distance traveled to be here (and which maxes out at $150).  If this works for you, we’d love to have you apply! See the “Applications” tab in the Main Menu.