By: Carter Van Pelt
One of the highlights of the 2023 global music festival scene is the return of the Sierra Nevada World Music Festival, June 16th-18th in Boonville in Northern California’s Mendocino County. The festival was last staged in 2018 but was indefinitely suspended due the extended illness of founder and organizer Warren Smith, who passed away in January 2021.
While originally conceived as a reggae-centric world music festival during the 1990s, Sierra Nevada was always a reggae festival first, despite the appearances of global caliber artists like Baba Maal, Salif Keita, King Sunny Ade, Zakir Hussein, Femi and Sean Kuti, and dozens of others.
The heart and soul of the festival was a celebration of ska, rocksteady, and reggae’s founding artists, sometimes forgotten but cherished among reggae collectors, super-fans, and by founder Warren Smith himself. These included Alton Ellis, The Skatalites, Rico Rodriguez, Ken Boothe, Roy Shirley, the Pioneers, Keith & Tex, and Junior Byles, among others.
Reggae artists who performed at the festival over the years include icons like Jimmy Cliff, Bunny Wailer, Toots & The Maytals, Wailing Souls, Black Uhuru, Lee Scratch Perry, Prince Buster, Gregory Isaacs, Sugar Minott, Israel Vibration, the Marleys, Burning Spear (who returns this year), and Beres Hammond (who also returns this year). More recently, the festival has seen next generation reggae artists like Protoje, who returns this year, and Chronixx, as well as the most recent Grammy winner, Kabaka Pyramid. Top reggae DJs and soundsystem operators including Jah Shaka, Stone Love, and David Rodigan have also been featured participants.
VP Records is proud to be a sponsor of the event for 2023. The lineup includes several artists with whom VP Records has significant history and catalog, including Beres Hammond, Tarrus Riley, Luciano, Kumar (formerly of Raging Fyah), Derrick Morgan, and Johnny Clarke.
Warren Smith’s widow Gretchen is at the helm of this year’s festival, a tribute to her husband’s legacy in reggae, which dates to the 1970s. Warren Smith, who first organized the event in 1994, was an early reggae promoter and producer on the West Coast, having brought Dennis Brown, Big Youth, and Soul Syndicate to California for the first time during the 1970s. Spending extensive time in Jamaica in the 1970s, he produced the Island Music Festival in the Parish of Trelawny in 1978.
As a manager and record producer, Smith worked closely with Soul Syndicate, issuing records Harvest Uptown, Famine Downtown and Love Is And Always on his Epiphany Records label. This period was documented in Jeremiah Stein’s excellent film about Soul Syndicate, Word, Sound, and Power (1979).
Smith was also the first producer to record on the 16-track tape machine at Jamaica’s famed Channel One studio when it was installed in 1979. Earl Zero’s Visions Of Love LP was the fruit of this labor. Greensleeves Records’ early catalog also includes two songs from Warren’s Channel One sessions (co-produced by Chinna Smith), Earl Zero’s “City Of The Wicked” and “Righteous Works” (GRED23).
For more information about the festival, visit www.snwmf.com and follow @snwmf on social media.