The Muddy Roots Article
Americana music and punk rock may seem like an unlikely pairing, but at Muddy Roots music festival in Cookeville, TN, the two feel like a match made in heaven. If your life lacks mosh pits with yee-yee energy, powered by PBR and Pall Malls, then I couldn’t recommend this powerful little festival more. The event occurs over the span of three (or four if you go to the pre party) days, typically the Friday, Saturday, and Sunday of Labor Day weekend. In Cookeville, this time of year usually brings the most ideal weather imaginable for camping, which makes the festival’s free camping option highly enticing. Unfortunately, this year the weekend was fairly hot, but given the sweltering, stormy summer that’s just wrapping up in Tennessee, the weather could’ve been a lot worse. There’s also free showers there, but most people there (including us) opt instead to mitigate their body odor by paying the $5 to get driven over to a nearby waterfall that has surprisingly clean-looking water for swimming in. It’s a lot more fun to go swim in the creek, anyway.
This year, the headliners were Suicidal Tendencies, Gwar, and Amigo the Devil, with some impressive mid-ticket names like Cro-Mags, DRI, Bridge City Sinners, The Dead Milkmen, Belushi Speed Ball, and friend of the show Joshua Quimby. Already, this has your evenings set up for endless reasons to stay out of your tent and mainline voodoo rangers on the main festival strip, but the daytime down ticket acts may just motivate you to beat the heat as well. An eclectic collection of Americana artists dotted the festival, mostly centering upon this incredible community of artists surrounding Flail Records. Additionally, the Murfreesboro Crossroads hardcore scene was very well represented, with bands like Officer Down, Dru the Drifter, Torsion, Bologna Pogna (who gets the award for drunkest set), Toxic Culture, Black Market Kidney Surgeon, and probably some others that I’m leaving out. All in all, Muddy was the culmination of everything I’ve been missing out on in my busy life when I choose to sleep instead of going out to a show most weekends.
But wait, there’s more. Though this festival was no shakedown, the vendor spread still provided us with plenty of shopping and gift giving opportunities. Muddy has a vendor alley area where you can pick up hand-made jewelry, kink-adjacent leather gear, thrifted finds, weed, those fun vintage re-tie-dyed graphic tees that are all the rage right now, houseplants, crystals, leftist literature, and vinyl records, and you could even get a fucking mullet right there with the barber tent. Food wise, the whole house of cards was being held up by one of those fairground food tents called Nana’s that was run by a bunch of older ladies, and god bless them for keeping all of us fed. Of course, there were other options too, including this really cool Columbian Southern fusion place, but for the most part you got exactly the type of festival food that an event like Muddy Roots puts you in the mood for.
Though I’m sure that rustic low-budget alternative music camping festivals exist in many forms across the country, Muddy Roots brings along this distinctly Tennessean flavor that makes the event endlessly engaging and charming. People seemed just as enthusiastic about the heaping helping of local acts as they were about the headliners, and at no point in the entire event could you mistake yourself as being anywhere other than Appalachia. The people who put this together really run this thing from the ground up with minimal outside funding, and the resulting production, complete with relatively seamless operations that make living at the festival grounds a breeze, commands tremendous respect. After looking at the price tag and lineup of Bonnaroo, I thought that camping festivals may never be for me, but Muddy Roots has proven to me that I just wasn’t looking hard enough.
