Newport Folk Festival Returns, In A Year Defined By Uncertainty

When Cheyenne Shaffer walked onto the grounds of the 2021 Newport Folk Festival, she was dressed for the occasion. "I mean, it's so cheesy — but it's like a homecoming!" she gushed, wearing a Newport Folk trucker hat and a bandana emblazoned with the festival's logo, a flying seagull clutching a guitar case by the handle. A regular patron since 2012, Shaffer broke out her beloved official merch for the long-anticipated return to Fort Adams State Park on Friday, along with a DIY garment: a sleeveless denim shirt with four words embroidered across her back in royal blue, reading IN JAY WE TRUST.

Shaffer was referencing the "sacred trust," as longtime producer Jay Sweet often calls it, that helps sustain the festival, spiritually and otherwise. Artists trust Sweet to curate a singular event that lives up to its substantial legacy. The Folk Family, a particularly devoted community of performers and superfans who make the annual pilgrimage to Fort Adams State Park, trusts him to not only live up to that legacy but to extend it, booking an increasingly diverse array of talent hoping to redefine what folk can be. Sweet, in turn, trusts the performers to deliver exceptional performances they wouldn't bring to other festivals, or to curate a star-studded collaborative set, as Brandi Carlile did in 2019 and Allison Russell did this past Sunday. This summer, following 16 months where the stages at Fort Adams were empty due to the coronavirus pandemic, that trust is being put to an extreme test. As the highly contagious delta variant of the coronavirus surges across the country, is it safe for fans to attend any music festival right