From Maplewoodstock Music and Arts Festival:
After a year’s hiatus due to the COVID pandemic, the annual Maplewoodstock Music and Arts Festival is back and will be held on Saturday, October 2, and Sunday, October 3, 2021, from noon until 9 pm each day. This free, two-day, live music and arts event will be held at Memorial Park, Maplewood, NJ, (160 Dunnell Rd, Maplewood, NJ, 07040 — directly opposite Maplewood’s NJ Transit train station).
Saturday’s Headliner is New Orleans funk rock-n-pop act Galactic. Sunday’s Headliner is Friends of the Brothers, paying tribute to the music of the Allman Brothers Band. Sunday’s Featured Act is Funk Yeah! featuring professional talent from Maplewood, South Orange, and New York City.
“We are so pleased to be able to present that the best possible free music and arts festival that we can,” says volunteer Maplewoodstock Festival Chairperson Tom Kerns. “We are looking forward to bringing the community back together after a year or more of social distancing. We may adjust some aspects of the festival to account for COVID and public health guidelines. Any adjustments will be communicated on our maplewoodstock.com website, facebook.com/maplewoodstock page, and our other Twitter and Instagram accounts.”
Over the two days, the festival will host 20 bands who represent a stylistically-wide variety of rock, pop, soul, R&B, funk, folk, reggae and world beat. Seven of these bands are from Maplewood/South Orange; the other 13 bands hail from nearby music-friendly communities such as West Orange, Bloomfield, Montclair, Jersey City, and Brooklyn.
As in the past several years, the Maplewoodstock Festival will offer a food court – with a cornucopia of options from burgers to tacos, from lobster rolls to pad Thai, from fresh squeezed lemonade to jerk chicken — a beer garden (with Jersey brew) for kid-dodging parents, and a KidZone with games, crafts, and more for our youngest attendees and their minders.
The town of Maplewood will also offer a senior-friendly tent for those long-time citizens who want to come out, enjoy the energy, sit in the shade, and enjoy a meal from our food vendors that can be delivered from volunteers run by the Age Friendly Committee for Maplewood and South Orange. (For more information, see www.
For those hearing impaired, the Maplewoodstock Festival will also offer volunteer-organized sign language interpretation for most hours each day. If you are seeking sign language interpretation, you should aim to situate yourself at “House Right” – about 20 feet from the right-front corner of the stage. Festival organizers will mark the area with “Deaf Area” signs and ask attendees to be gracious and neighborly in sharing/ceding space for those wanting to view the sign language interpreters.
Volunteer Maplewoodstock Festival Chairperson Tom Kerns also reminded attendees that, “the Maplewood Department of Health and the Centers for Disease Control recommend that all unvaccinated individuals of all ages wear a mask at crowded outdoor events. And, please keep watching our website for updates.”
As it has been from the beginning, the Maplewoodstock Festival is a volunteer-run organization, raising the funds to present this free, two-day event from the t-shirt purchases, sponsorships, advertisers, and arts, food, and beer garden vendor space fees. The festival organizers ask our attendees to first support those efforts, vendors, and partners – please eat, drink, and purchase at those local businesses. And, the festival also gratefully accepts donations via its maplewoodstock.com website via PayPal.
A full line-up of band bios, festival schedule, directions, and real-time updates can be found on the maplewoodstock.com website and our Facebook and Twitter accounts also listed on the website.
