During the first weekend of September, folk music fans from around Chicagoland and beyond dusted off their flannels, dug up merchandise from their local breweries, and donned their Carhartt overalls to head to the first ever Evanston Folk Festival in Dawes Park on the lake shore.

The Evanston Folk Festival consisted of two days of performances on three stages across Evanston’s gorgeous Dawes Park as well as aftershows at the local venue and festival organizer SPACE. The IPAs were flowing, and the mood was jovial. The festival was headlined by Sierra Ferrell on Saturday and Patty Griffin on Sunday, two contemporary indie folk artists combining traditional instruments and styles with modern sensibilities. As Ferrell explained from the stage, “We all know what it’s like to feel lonesome… and if you’re an old time or bluegrass band you can put it into a really happy sounding song.”

For many attendees, Ferrell and Griffin may have been the only two artists they had heard of: audiences at most of the other performances were almost comically laid back. Many attendees knitted in the background. Near the lagoon stage, set against Dawes Park’s picturesque pond, children fed the down-coated ducks. Performers came down off the stage to dance among the audience, yelling for anyone with a “G-Harp” to join them on the next song. During the mainstage performance of singer-songwriter Sarah Jarosz from Wimberley, Texas, families sat and ate picnics on the grass and read books. A few enterprising attendees even hung hammocks between convenient trees and dozed happily to the murmur of banjo on the wind.

In terms of fashion, the attendees were less relaxed: every outfit sought to outdo the next on who could seem the most folkloric, or, at least, folkloric in the Evanston sense of the word. At least eight different breweries were represented from around the Chicagoland area, as were Divvy bikes, the CTA, and “White Guys for Kamala.” Several attendees sported homemade knitwear (perhaps finished just that day?) and “visibly mended” clothing. The attire spoke to the twee aesthetic espoused by the festival, a kind of Instagram hipsterness evoked by the hay bales surrounding the Dawes stage, the specialty bike parking area, and the “1850s style” tintype photobooth. Unlike the UChicago Folk Festival and perhaps the standard image of old-time music, the Evanston Folk Festival was dominated less by old salts than by millennials, a testament to the changing face of folk music. These attendees were the sort of people that romanticize dive bars and buy expensive coffee equipment and whose kids wandered around the Dawes stage reverently carrying a lighted blunt through the crowd like a bundle of sage. Much of the festival, and even many of the performances, were geared towards this kind of aestheticized experience.

However, underneath the Instagrammable faux-authenticity, the Evanston Folk Festival’s organizers strove to celebrate the community around them, paying homage not only to the town of Evanston but the long history of Chicago folk music that made the hip indie-folk-rock hybrids possible.

The festival was run by the local folk music venue SPACE, which most summers hosts an event called “Out of Space” at a local golf course. As the golf course went under renovation, the venue began casting about for a different summer event and settled on the idea of an Evanston Folk Festival. However, unlike the previous event, the organizers kept the connection with the venue surprisingly low-key; although SPACE did host the more high-profile artists who performed in the aftershow, including Gillian Welch, Steve Earle, and Rufus Wainwright, none of the posters or official branding explicitly connected the festival to the venue, instead marketing the event as a community event for all of Evanston. The organizers seemed to promote folk music not as the purview of a single venue in Evanston, but of the whole town.

And, indeed, the festival does celebrate the town of Evanston as much as it celebrates folk music. Alongside music and food, one section of the Dawes Park was set aside for a small maker’s market run by Evanston Made, a group promoting local Evanston artists. Most if not all of the food vendors came from the area. Among other small pop-up stands, the Evanston Historical Society provided information on the nearby Dawes House, former home of Charles Dawes, vice president under Calvin Coolidge and namesake of the park. Festival organizers brought in local bookstore Bookends and Beginnings to provide a selection of books to accompany the folk-themed talks in the nearby WBEZ conversation tent. In one of these talks, writer Mark Guarino spoke at length about Evanston’s own Americana music connection in the person of Jethro Burns, a well-known country musician who retired to Evanston and began teaching lessons to local children, including mandolinist Don Stiernberg, who Guarino brought on the conversation stage.

Guarino’s book talk was indicative of the festival’s focus on paying homage to a long history of folk music, especially in the Chicagoland area. Aside from Guarino’s talk on the history of folk and country music in Chicago (including our very own UChicago Folk Festival), other lectures focused on the legacy of Joni Mitchell, Mavis Staples, Black country music, and Evanston’s historic Amazingrace Coffeehouse. In a certain sense, these lectures seemed like the festival organizers doing their homework, hearkening back to a previous era of folk festivals, even as the current iteration saw more electric guitar than fiddle.

So, too, did some of the acts reference an older era of folk music. Corky Siegel is an award winning, internationally famous blues harmonica player who trained with the greats of the Chicago blues scene. Despite drawing a smaller and older crowd than some of the younger artists, Siegel was also honored with a speaking slot in the conversation tent. Appreciating Chicago’s long history of blues music was a common theme in the tent and on the stage: multi-instrumentalist, Grammy award winner, historian, and “American Songster” Dom Flemons brought audiences back to simpler times and instilled an appreciation for traditional music among a new generation. Doing the same was blues musician Jontavious Willis, a younger performer no less devoted to appreciating the classics of the form. As the sun set above the trees of the Dawes stage, Willis combined music with storytelling, using his harmonica to punctuate folk tales and gossip in his lilting hypnotic voice, the way his ancestors may have once shared songs around a campfire.

Longtime Chicago folk music fans in the audience, like Cheryl Joyal, one of the organizers of the recent Fox Valley Folk Festival in Geneva, IL, could also point out several less well known artists on the line up as Chicagoland classics. On top of Siegel, Flemons, and Willis, Joyal also identified bluegrass inspired singer-songwriter Robbie Fulks, quirky trio Sons of the Never Wrong, and, of course, Wilco frontman Jeff Tweedy presenting in the conversation tent. Even as the headliners drew standing crowds and beanie garbed yuppies, the Evanston festival honored local folk history and its long legacy.