Shindig on the Green

Saturday nights in downtown Asheville, the city returns to what it was before it packaged itself for anyone. Pack Square Park fills with people who brought lawn chairs, blankets, fiddles, banjos, and the understanding that you don't just watch — you play. This is Shindig on the Green, running free every week from early July through late August since 1967, and the deal has always been the same: show up along about sundown, find a spot on the grass, and see what happens when a few thousand people decide the old music still works.

The stage show is fine — bluegrass bands, clog dancers, ballad singers working through two numbers each on the Bascom Lamar Lunsford stage — but the real event is everywhere else. Under the trees, on the sidewalk, in loose circles around the park, musicians who've never met pull out their instruments and start playing together. Anyone can join. You don't audition for a jam session in Asheville; you just know the song or you learn it fast. Bring your dulcimer. Bring your flatfooting shoes. The street dances don't care if you're good.

Between two and three thousand people show up on a given Saturday, some of them locals, many of them visitors who flew in specifically for this and will tell you it's the most honest thing they've seen in a long time. They're not wrong. The performers are volunteers — kids working on their square-dance steps, great-grandmothers singing ballads their own grandmothers taught them, multi-generation families who've been doing this since the beginning. Hundreds of thousands of people have passed through here over sixty seasons, and the event still doesn't charge admission, still doesn't curate the lawn, still trusts that the tradition will keep itself alive if you just give it space and a summer evening in the mountains.

Pack Square is the old City County Plaza, rebuilt but still the center of downtown, still the place where the music goes when the workday ends. The Folk Heritage Committee runs this and its older sister event, the Mountain Dance and Folk Festival, to preserve what's worth keeping from Southern Appalachia's musical past. Concessions available, parking free after six, dogs stay home. You want to hear what this place sounded like before the term "heritage tourism" existed, you go on a Saturday night in July and you sit on the grass until ten.