Three Reasons to Stand Still at GrassRoots: Giddens, Taj, and Del

You will do a lot of moving at GrassRoots this weekend — that's the entire point of a festival with a dedicated dance stage. But there are three moments across July 16–19 when the smart move is to plant your feet, shut up, and pay attention. The Trumansburg Fairgrounds have booked Rhiannon Giddens, Taj Mahal, and the Del McCoury Band into a single weekend, and each one is a different chapter of the same American story.

Rhiannon Giddens is the reason a lot of younger listeners fell down the roots-music rabbit hole in the first place — a musician who treats old-time banjo and fiddle not as museum pieces but as live wires, tracing Black string-band traditions straight into the present. At a festival built on the premise that folk music is a global, living, mongrel thing, she's practically the mission statement in human form.

Taj Mahal is the elder in the room, and the word "legend" gets thrown around so casually that it's worth stopping to mean it here. He's spent a lifetime dragging the blues out to meet the rest of the planet — Caribbean, West African, Hawaiian threads all knotted into the twelve-bar frame. Catching him at an outdoor stage in the Finger Lakes, decades deep into the work, is the kind of thing you'll mention offhandedly to someone in twenty years and watch them go pale with envy.

And Del McCoury — the man is bluegrass royalty, high-lonesome tenor and all, leading a band that plays the tradition with the precision of a Swiss watch and the joy of a back-porch jam. The Del McCoury Band takes requests, works a single microphone like it's 1955, and turns a festival crowd into a congregation. It is, reliably, one of the tightest 90 minutes in American music.

Here's the through-line, and it's the reason GrassRoots founders Donna the Buffalo have kept this thing running for 34 years: none of these artists are relics. They're conductors, moving current between the deep past and whatever's coming next. Giddens reclaims. Taj translates. Del preserves — but preservation, done at his level, is its own kind of rebellion against a culture that forgets everything by Tuesday.

The undercard this year is genuinely spectacular — DakhaBrakha, John Brown's Body, El Khat, a whole zydeco wing led by Keith Frank and Preston Frank — and you should see all of it. But block out three windows on your schedule and treat them as non-negotiable. When Taj Mahal is playing forty-five minutes from your house, you don't check your phone. You stand still.

Thirty-four years in, GrassRoots could coast on brand loyalty and the same fifteen jam bands. Instead it went out and booked a summit. That's why we keep showing up in the dust — and why, this weekend, three sets are worth staying rooted for.

Sources: GrassRoots announces 34th annual lineup (NYS Music); GrassRoots 2026 lineup (Ithaca.com); grassrootsfest.org