Porchfest 2024 gets underway this weekend. The annual Historic Athens music festival works to celebrate the history of Athens’ musical heritage against the backdrop of historic neighborhoods.
Tommy Valentine is the Executive Director of Historic Athens. He says the organization’s formal mission is to develop community wide understanding of the value of historic buildings, neighborhoods, and heritage. Events like Porchfest help to accomplish that.
“Each year, Historic Porchfest accepts signups from volunteer hosts, and performers who are then paired and individual one-hour concerts take place across a walkable area providing a family, free and friendly event,” according to Valentine. “This year we have 209 individual concerts.”
Those 209 bands cover a wide range of musical genres, including hip hop, bluegrass, indie rock, country, EDM, experimental music and more.
“Each hour there are between 30 and 40 concerts and they’re all within walking distance of each other, so a lot of the audience tends to go out to see a few prechosen favorites and then end up stumbling upon a new favorite.”
Porchfest 2024 is Sunday, October 20th from 12 to 8 pm.
For nearly 60 years, Historic Athens has worked to celebrate and conserve the community heritage of Athens.
