![]() The environment is inviting, and the vibe is as infectious as the music. Vendors will be on hand to showcase everything from handcrafted jewelry and hippie chic tie-dye to baked goods and arts and crafts. Inside, it’s cool and wonderful and musically very acoustic, and outside, we have that fabulous park right there.” Walker said the change in venue to the Karpeles Manuscript Library Museum offers festivalgoers the best of both worlds. “We encouraged people to bring their own picnics, musical instruments, hula hoops and such. “Then I started doing it because I wanted it to be more like Shakedown Street, which was the parking lot scene at the Grateful Dead shows, and not have money exchanging (sic) hands,” Walker says. After the museum closed, Walker began moving the festival around to nearby restaurants that offered refreshments for attendees and the opportunity for restaurant owners to turn a nice profit on a Sunday afternoon. Admission was $1 and 1,400 people showed up. The inaugural festival was held in the rear yard of the former Jacksonville Art Museum. “I thought if we call it the China Cat Sunflower, every Deadhead will know exactly what that means.” The idea of a Jerry Garcia Memorial began to take shape. “When it was over, it was like, ‘What do we do now?’ I was driving around one night and thinking about how we could honor this amazing thing,” she says. The idea of a family-friendly festival seemed to be a perfect way to keep the spirit alive. In the three years that followed, Walker saw 28 Grateful Dead shows-until the music stopped with Garcia’s death. Everyone was standing up and singing every word to every song through the whole show.” “It was really an amazing thing, even compared to any other music I’d seen because the tribe is so together. “When I saw my first show in 1992, I got it really quick,” Walker says. As a huge fan of live music, Walker said she was “blown away” by the traveling culture that became as much about a Dead show as the music itself. Bands including Papa Million (the Ouija Brothers (BayStreet (and the Glass Camels (will perform the music of the Grateful Dead, the Beatles, Widespread Panic and others.īrenda Star Walker founded the China Cat Sunflower Festival not only to celebrate Garcia’s life and music but also to continue the familial bond of the Grateful Dead shows. Widespread Panic is now considered to be one of the highest-earning touring bands and will celebrate Houser’s life on August 10 at the Georgia Theatre.Ī blessing and chant will signal the start of the festival, with a drum parade leading revelers into the adjacent park grounds to form a drum circle. Houser and the rest of his bandmates were hugely influenced by the Grateful Dead when they started playing covers 25 years ago. This year, the festival will also honor the late Rick O’Shea, an avid kite maker, and Michael Houser, the former lead guitarist of Widespread Panic, who lost his battle with pancreatic cancer on August 10, 2002. The festival has evolved over time but is always held on the second Sunday of August, between Garcia’s birthday and the day he died. Named after the Grateful Dead song, the China Cat Sunflower Festival was born in 1996 as a living tribute to Garcia, who had died the previous year of a heart attack at age 53. 1st Street, Jacksonville, 356-2992 (The event is free and open to the public. ![]() The 17th annual China Cat Sunflower Festival will be held from 4 pm to 9 pm, or more specifically, 4:20 pm to dusk, on Sunday, August 12, at the Karpeles Manuscript Library Museum, 1021 W. The China Cat Sunflower Festival is a gathering reminiscent of the epic, transcendental concert tours that generated a traveling family known as Deadheads. For the last 17 summers, fans of the Grateful Dead have come together on the hottest day of the year to celebrate the life and legacy of the late Jerry Garcia.
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