2025 Tumbleweed Music Festival

Visión general

The Tumbleweed Music Festival is a free, open-air, community acoustic music festival which is traditionally held on Labor Day weekend each year. Tumbleweed is sponsored by the Three Rivers Folklife Society, a small, 501(c)(3) community arts organization here in the Tri-Cities. The 2025 festival will be our 29th annual! We feature many kinds of acoustic music (primarily folk, blues, bluegrass, etc.) but are welcoming to all types of music and dance performances.

The festival begins Friday of Labor Day weekend with a free “Alternative Folk” concert, presenting (euphemistically) “higher energy” performers with different types of acoustic music than many of our attendees are used to seeing. Over the years, we’ve found some fantastic performers through this concert who have since become Tumbleweed family members, returning to the festival often to perform.

Saturday and Sunday of that weekend, from 11am to 6pm, we have a new performance or workshop on each of our 4 outdoor and 2 indoor stages, and 2 workshop rooms every 45 minutes; one stage becomes an open-mic stage at 2:00pm; it then keeps its own schedule. All performances and workshops are free except for the Saturday benefit concert and the Sunday evening Contra Dance – those are ticketed events.

One other feature of Tumbleweed is the annual “Jane Titland Memorial Songwriting Contest,” in which songwriters submit songs matching that year’s festival theme; selection of a theme for 2025 is is “Play Time.”

Performers (except for the three headline acts chosen for the Saturday evening Tumbleweed benefit concert, and the band and caller for the Sunday evening Contra Dance) are not paid beyond a travel stipend that is based on distance traveled to be here (and which maxes out at $150).