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FAMILY TRADITION: Hank Williams Jr. will play the Bud Light Stage 9:45 p.m. Sunday.
DOWN BY THE RIVER CEELO, FIREWORKS, DOGS DOING INTERESTING THINGS HIGHLIGHT THIS YEAR’S RIVERFEST. BY JIM HARRIS, LINDSEY MILLAR, DAVID RAMSEY, WILL STEPHENSON AND MORGAN SYKES
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MAY 22, 2014
ARKANSAS TIMES
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t this year’s Riverfest, the colossal live music showcase and all-around cultural spectacle mounted every Memorial Day weekend in downtown Little Rock, there will be fire-eaters, East African acrobats and Hank Williams Jr. There will be face-painting and a rock wall, a fleet of food trucks and a dog circus. CeeLo Green will be performing, as will Salt-NPepa and Chicago and Buckcherry. There will obviously be fireworks. It is the festival’s 37th consecutive year, and DeAnna Korte’s 10th as its executive director. “It really comes down now to Mother Nature,” Korte told the Times in an interview on the eve of the event’s set-up. “She really wields the hand. We can plan and do our part to make sure everything’s good, but then Mother Nature will decide how the weekend goes. You can’t control it, you just have to say a prayer and hope the weather holds out.” The trucks bearing tents arrived last Thurs-
day, May 15, followed by the Little Rock Parks and Recreation Department, who prepared the festival area and shipped in more equipment. The grounds were wired for electricity, and the vendors started moving in on Monday. But as Korte explains, this is just the culmination of a process that began a year ago. “Myself, I’m already thinking about next year,” she says. “I think that’s what makes the event a success every year, the planning never stops.” It is thanks to a combination of “Southern hospitality” and a “good reputation in the festival industry,” Korte says, that Riverfest is able to book artists of CeeLo’s and Chicago’s caliber, a particularly difficult proposition given the desirability of Memorial Day weekend for big events. But aside from the lineup of celebrity performers, a list that also includes groups like The Fray, Three Days Grace, The Wallflowers and Lee Brice, Riverfest also marks one of the biggest local music platforms of the year, a rare