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Kudos to the City of Lowell, Greater Merrimack Valley Convention and Visitor Bureau, Lowell Festival Foundation, Lowell National Historical Park, and National Council for Traditional Arts for once again being the prime movers behind an inspiring and joyful Lowell Folk Festival.

The Sunday crowd was much smaller than yesterday’s, but it was steady and built through the afternoon. The lighter turnout actually made for better music listening for those who were there. Even in the late afternoon people could find open space at Boarding House Park to sit for a while. It didn’t feel like “appointment festival-going” wherein you had to stake out your patch of grass ahead of time. The atmosphere was more relaxed and allowed for more spontaenous sampling of the music, crafts, food, and more. At Lucy Larcom Park, the craftspeople, most of them musical instrument makers, were talking to six or eight people at a time instead of 20 or 30 at a peak crowd time.

My wife, son, and I rode the trolley from BHPark to the Mack Building Plaza on Dutton Street, which isn’t something we do often. The trolleys were stacked in twos, which doubled the loudness of the whistles as the trolleys rumbled over the tracks.  Every seat was full. I looked up at the brass plaque that read “Gomaco” and remembered all the work that went into the design and creation of the trolley system. Fred Faust, Sarah Peskin, Nancy Woods, Chuck Parrott, Ray LaPorte, Armand Mercier—and the many appointed commissioners—of the Lowell Historic Preservation Commission, US Dept. of the Interior, worked tirelessly to give Lowell an historic trolley system. Peter Aucella as LHPC executive director after Fred and Armand had his hand on the trolley project as well.  I’m pretty sure the undercarriages of the trolleys were located in Australia and shipped to Gomaco in the Midwest for fabrication—maybe Iowa? It’s still a small thrill to ride them through the downtown.

Food, you say? Over two days, I enjoyed several items. I ate a tasty kofta wrap made by the folks at the Middle Eastern booth on French Street. It’s barbequed ground lamb mixed with onion, parsley, and spices like cayenne, wrapped in Syrian bread with lettuce and tomato. (One of the volunteers, my friend Lila Lorrey, steered me toward the kofta.)  Heritage Ice Cream served up an excellent small cup of cherry vanilla loaded with maraschino cherries. One of the Lao booths provided a heaping plate of noodles on sprouts and a crispy egg roll. A cart vendor on John Street made me a specially ordered hold-most-of-the-sugar freshsqueezed lemonade with two lemon halves mixed into the chunks of ice. There were a lot of lemonade carts.  I didn’t see the limeade that somebody I know was raving about. A Laotian group with a six-foot grill at Dutton Street featured chicken-on-skewers that looked and smelled like it belonged on the Food Channel. I missed the Levasseur family from Lowell’s Cote’s Market with the French-Canadian beans at the foodways demonstration at Lucy Larcom Park.

Yo-yo artist and entertainer John Higby kept his audience laughing and cheering through his routine in front of Market Mills. I saw pictures of him with his wife doing amazing tricks and acrobatics yesterday, but he was on his own today. At one point he asked for a volunteer who could  handle a hula hoop. He called up a tiny girl who must have been eight years old at the most. She turned out to be as smooth as a semi-pro hula-hooper; everyone figured she was a plant in the crowd. Part of the act includes John riding a very large unicycle while whipping the yo-yo all over the place. He pulled off 98 percent of the tricks attempted. In my yo-yo days, I was lucky to get my clear fiberglass Duncan to “sleep” or go “around the world.”

The UMass Lowell Inn & Conference Center last night at 9 p.m.  looked like Logan Airport. The vans and shuttles made a double line along the whole driveway at the entrance. The transportation end of the Festival is one of those behind-the-scenes logistical tasks that hardly anyone is aware of. The drivers and escorts play key roles in keeping everything on time and moving the busy artists in and out of the city.

The ritual has been going on since the late ’80s now, but anyone with a feeling for the pulse of the city can feel the urban heart pumping at a faster rate starting mid-week of Lowell Folk Festival weekend. It’s always the last full weekend of July—full weekend—which is why it’s coming up in a couple of days and not ten days from now. A week from this Sunday is August 1.

Crews in matching shirts positioned the huge directional sign units at strategic intersections this afternoon, signalling the transition to Festival mode downtown. In the coffee shops people talked about the weather forecast, nervously anticipating a mixed bag of shine and rain. The Lowell Summer Music Series is on hiatus to make room at Boarding House Park for the Festival action. Dedicated Festival-goers started making their game plans for the weekend, circling favorite acts on the schedule.

The days before the National Folk Festival came to town for three years (1987-89), followed by the invention of the Lowell Folk Festival, were not without large festivals in the city. There was the biennial Greek Festival produced by Transfiguration Church, which drew a citywide audience, Greek and non-Greek.  On the Pawtucket Boulevard, the Regatta Festival Committee hosted Arthur Fiedler and the Boston Pops at the Sampas Pavilion. One year there was inclement weather, and the Pops played in a gigantic tent with a big zipper on the side. In the early years of the National Historical Park, Lucy Larcom Park along the Merrimack Canal was the site of a series of small ethnic festivals on weekends (one week it would be the Irish, another the French Canadians, and so forth). A different kind of festival was the Choral Festival (that may not have been the exact name), which featured choirs and choral groups from around the city singing at Lowell Memorial Auditorium. None of these events matched the scale that has been achieved with the Lowell Folk  Festival, which is the centerpiece of the city’s annual cultural calendar.

Over the past few years, I’ve been interested in the growth of the “fringe” Folk Festival both during the regular Festival hours and later into the night. There’s even a website now for something called the Lowell Folk Festival After Dark. There’s a massive menu of acts, many of which feature local talent, being showcased at downtown pubs, coffee bars, and restaurants. The “fringe” has become very organized. This would appear to be good news for the local businesses and local musical artists, but in the future could present an audience development and funding challenge for the main attraction, which is billed as the nation’s largest “free” folk festival.  Let’s be optimistic this week and look for the Festival “pie” to keep enlarging, so that all parties putting on the big street party can sustain themselves, whether private businesses or nonprofit organizations.

When you are out there, look for the next Allison Krauss, Michael Flatley, or Beausoleil—all of whom played Lowell on their way up and up. Who remembers Wayne Toups and ZydeCajun?

The Lowell Folk Festival gave the city a mega-event whose strength is organic to the community—it is rooted in the great American mix of peoples as seen in cities like Lowell. The Festival gave form and depth to the part of the Lowell story that flows from the humanity on the streets, a layered culture that has built up through the decades like geological layers in the earth. That’s not a perfect metaphor, however, because the layers don’t stay in place; they are permeable and they migrate upward and downward, resulting in an intermingled social soil typical of what is found across the nation.

Go to www.lowellfolkfestival.org for all the news and details. See you on the streets.