On Sept. 21, music will be everywhere across the Skinker-DeBaliviere neighborhood. Fifty bands will be playing a wide variety of musical genres from porches throughout the area.
“If you don’t like it, you can walk away. There’s going to be another band just one block away,” says Jim Fuchs, co-chair of PorchFest.
“It’s kind of like a wall of sound. We try very hard not to have competing acts, but we want you to be able to walk on any block of Skinker-DeBaliviere and hear music.”
For 45-minute sets, bands both little-known and established will be performing all afternoon for free to whoever wanders past or sits down to take in all or part of a show.
A bluegrass band, Scroggins & Farrar, will be playing at a house on Pershing Avenue at the same time DJ Ty will be spinning rap records four blocks away on McPherson Avenue. Rolltop Sweetgum will be pumping out folk/rock tunes on Waterman Boulevard, while Hudson and the Hoodoo Cats will begin their two-hour blues set on Westminster Place.
Most of PorchFest is mostly music — a lot of music — being performed on porches. But there will also be a main stage at Greg Freeman Park on Kingsbury Avenue. There, the women’s chorus CHARIS will perform, followed by After Dark A Capella, The Peace Lords, Sinead Angele and the country-rock-soul headliner, Old Capital Square Dance Club.
The neighborhood was hit hard by the tornado of May 16, especially parts of DeGiverville Avenue. In recognition of the damage done, the Saint Boogie Brass Band will start playing in that part of the neighborhood around 4 p.m. They will make their way in a New Orleans Second Line style to the main stage just before Old Capital Square Dance Club comes on to play.
“It’s kind of like a Pied Piper effect. People come out of their houses and start coming to the main stage,” Fuchs says.
The concept of PorchFest began in Ithaca, New York, when students at Cornell University noticed that the school’s neighborhood was full of big, beautiful houses. They also realized they did not know much about their neighbors who lived in them.
So the students started asking neighbors if they would lend them their porch for a day. Student bands would play on the porch, and it would be a good way for the students and the neighbors to get to know each other, Fuchs says.
Now there are loosely organized PorchFests across America. The St. Louis group that produces it here is a charitable organization, but not all the PorchFests are.
The idea came to St. Louis through Will Hunerson, a student at Washington University. Hunerson was a music fan from New York and knew about the Porchfest at Cornell. He and other students approached the Skinker-DeBaviliere Community Council about the idea.
It was interested.
“We gave it a try,” says Fuchs. “We had just shy of 20 bands that first year. They said, ‘Wow, 20, there is some interest out there.’”
The 50 bands this year is a record for the event, which is now in its seventh year (it began in 2017, but skipped 2020 because of COVID).
At first, the organizers walked around the neighborhood picking out porches that might make good stages, and then asking the homeowners if they would mind lending their porch for an afternoon.
Now they get homeowners and bands calling them, saying they want to be part of the event.
“Over the years, we’ve had some porches that have hosted the same bands year after year. When you host someone on your porch, they sort of become part of your family,” Fuchs says.
This year, some of the porch locations were unexpected, because part of the neighborhood was hit so hard by the tornado, Fuchs said.
“We came to them and said this is probably not the year to put bands on your porch. And they said, ‘No, this is exactly the year.’”
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Daniel Neman | Post-Dispatch
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