Soul Food Festival
East Baton Rouge Parish Library at Goodwood
Baton Rouge
May 24
If one agent of chaos could be blamed for Baton Rouge events not going to plan, it would be the rain. This year alone, the rain cut Blues Fest short and caused some of the biggest events in Baton Rouge to reschedule.
This weekend, the 9th annual Soul Food Festival popped up at the main library in Baton Rouge, but light showers precipitated smaller crowds than usual. The Soul Food Festival isone of the many events put on by Henry Turner Jr.s' Listening Room throughout the year. The event, much like Taste of the Deep South, combines food and music at the library and features local/local-ish artists, including Turner. This year, performers were set up inside in the large meeting room just off the library’s pavilion instead of onstage.
The festival felt a little sparse, some vendors didn’t show up, likely due to weather, so the usual food truck row that takes up the parking lot wasn’t as full as long time vendors expected.
“It’s been a slow day,” one vendor told me as I was making my rounds to see what everyone had. “It was slow yesterday.”
The split between indoor and outdoor vendors and stage made the festival feel a little fragmented. It didn’t rain Sunday afternoon, but the ground was still a little damp. Whether to persist despite the weather is one of the hardest calls you have to make as an event organizer. People don’t always brave the rain, but in Southern Louisiana, you’re not guaranteed better weather the next week.
Regardless of rain or crowd size, the star of the Soul Food Fest was Uncle Chess, a local artist with exactly one album on Spotify released in 2015. He went on in the afternoon after a worship choir performance and started freestyling about being at the library and inviting everyone to have a good time.
Uncle Chess’ set consisted of a mix of songs, some off of his album, all delivered with the same style of lively choreography. He’s limber, he danced and his stage presence emanated joy. He sang of love, the kind you experience only with age and being with a person a very long time, and the crowd got really into it. There was an electricity to the performance that doesn’t translate to studio recordings. His dancing is contagious, and it made me want to dance even though I’d never heard these songs before.
Uncle Chess performed like he was in a stadium with thousands instead of a library meeting room with dozens. I hope he gets a bigger stage soon.
