When I was growing up in Martinsville, Virginia, I never thought of it as a particularly music-friendly city. Sure, there were open mic nights at local churches and I caught the Charlie Daniels Band at our local Nascar track (ed. note: Martinsville Speedway) on the 4th of July, but if you wanted to catch a touring act you needed to be ready for a 2-5 hour round trip.
However, since I’ve left, the area’s musical profile has grown considerably thanks to Rooster Walk, a roots music festival that will be celebrating its 14th year this May. I recently had the opportunity to talk with the festival’s founder, Johnny Buck, and learn about how the festival, its offshoots, and the charitable work they’ve done has impacted the community.
Landis Wine: So this year y’all are doing Rooster Walk 14. Emmylou Harris is one of the headliners. Big stuff. Let’s take it back to the studs. Talk to me about how things started.
Johnny Buck: So Rooster Walk started in memory of two of our best childhood friends who passed away within a year of each other when we were in our mid twenties. And that was Edwin Penn, whose nickname was “the rooster” in high school and Walker Shank. And so when Walker passed away, he was the second of the two to pass. We felt like we wanted to do something to remember our friends, and we were trying to figure out what would be appropriate. And we had gone to a lot of concerts together as a friend group, and we’d played in the band at the high school and stuff. And so a music festival felt like a great fit because we had also had some talks in our early twenties about how Martinville is a small town, and so it wasn’t realistic for certain things to ever be there, like amusement parks, et cetera.
Every time we went to a music festival together, we usually knew we were getting close when we felt like we were out in the country and we might be lost. And so we had talked about how there’s no reason Martinsville couldn’t have a festival. It’s got lots of beautiful countryside and in the foothills of the Blue Ridge got a lot of natural amphitheaters. So we decided to do Rooster Walk, which was taking Edwin’s nickname the Rooster and Walker’s given name and proceeds from the first festival we’re going to go to an endowment scholarship fund at Martinville High School, which is where we all attended and graduated in the class of 2000. And the first one, honestly, the community really got behind it, and we surprisingly did really well financially, even though we had, none of us had worked at a music festival or even volunteered formally at one.
So we didn’t really know what we were doing as compared to now where we’ve been putting on events for a long time. But after the first one, we had this money we’d raised and we’d raised about $30,000 and we had a decision of, well, do we put all 30,000 in the endowment fund and call it a day, or do we hold some of that back to do festival number two? And we went and forth on it, and it was the first time of many that we ultimately came to the question of what would Walker and Edwin want us to do? And when we framed it that way, it was pretty obvious, well, they would want us to throw another party. So that’s what we did, and it just kind of kept growing slow and steady every year.
Entering the fourth year, we formally filed with the IRS to be recognized as a 501 C3 non profit, and that really opened up a lot of doors on local sponsorships and donations because it became a tax deductible charitable gift for individuals or companies. And we’ve just been really supported by the community, not just like Bassett Furniture, who’s been the title sponsor for over a decade, but also lots and lots of mom and pop like dentist offices and locally owned brick and mortars that are supporting it.
Not so much because they’re going to sell more braces to people by being at Rooster Walk. It’s that they appreciate the event, what it brings to the community, and that it brings not only out of town visitors, but it brings a lot of the folks who grew up in Martinsville and Henry County back to the community. So kids who are adults now and live somewhere else, work somewhere else. They come back a lot of times that weekend. They get to see their family who’s still in Martinsville. They get to see their friends they grew up with. And so a lot of folks support us just because they love the event and everything that it brings to the community.
LW:I wanted to touch on, and you mentioned it briefly, some of the ways that y’all have given back through the scholarships, music instrument program and that sort of thing, what the idea was with that, and then also what it’s sort of done for the community.
JB: Sure. So the initial idea, as far as giving back, was from year one: to create an endowment scholarship fund that was specifically for Martinsville High School. And so every major event we do, we try to donate a portion of proceeds into that endowment fund.
The idea of the endowment fund has always been that we are trying to build up the balance to where the endowment – the interest gained on a per year basis of the sitting in the account – can afford to pay off the scholarship that’s given each year. So that if Rooster Walk ceased to exist, the scholarship would live on in perpetuity.
It is a merit-based scholarship, and it goes to one outstanding senior at Martinsville High School each year. It’s a thousand bucks a year for four years, but we have almost achieved the full endowment level to where if we never did another event, the scholarship would just keep spending off $4,000 a year because we’re paying out since most kids, the scholarship is good for four years of undergraduate study.
So at any given year, we’re typically awarding four different scholarships until a kid graduates, but then that kid’s replaced by this year’s winner. To date, we’ve put $158,570 into the endowment fund. I do not have exactly what we paid out, but it would be, I can look that up if you need me to, but it would be somewhere in the, let’s see, it’s probably somewhere in the $30,000 – $40,000 range.
LW: That’s incredible.
JB: Yeah. And then, let’s see, in 2015, we actually had another high school friend that we’d grown up with pass away: Todd Eure. And Todd had been a trombone player in the concert band, symphonic band, jazz band, marching band. And we wanted to do something to acknowledge and remember Todd, but obviously we weren’t trying to change the name of the festival at that point. We were about six years in. So we came up with the Rooster Walk Music Instrument Program, which is the second charitable initiative of the company.
The idea there is that public band programs are often woefully underfunded in Martindale Henry County, not just the city school system, but Henry County School System as well. They have a rich musical tradition in the schools and the band programs. But there are kids who have interest every year in starting band in fifth grade or sixth grade, but they don’t have the financial means to buy or even rent an instrument.
So this program does two things. We award money, like basically micro grants and instrument refurbishment and donation. On instrument refurbishment and donation, someone from the general public can approach us and say, “Hey, I’ve got this saxophone that’s been sitting in my closet for 20 years since I graduated high school. Would you guys want it?” And they’ll donate it to us and we write them a tax donation letter for that. And then we take it to Denton’s Music Repair shop and get him to look it over and basically give us an assessment. “Yeah, this is a good instrument, just needs to get tuned up a little bit.” Or “this one’s so far gone, it’s probably not saveable, that type of thing.”
Once we have that assessment, we send it out to all the middle school and high school band directors in the city and the county, and we say, “Hey, we got this saxophone donated. Does anybody want it?” And if one of the band directors says that they want it, then Rooster Walk pays Dentons to fix it up and then we donate it to the school. And the idea there is primarily on the entry level band program, like middle school band, to where they have kind of an inventory of loaner instruments that many of which have come from this program. So if a kid is interested in trying saxophone, trying band for the first time, but they cannot afford to get one through their household, then they can use one of these instruments for the first two years of band at no cost. And the hope there is after two years in, if they’re really into it and they’re practicing, that either someone from their family or their church or their community will find a way to source them an instrument that they own, and then that loaner that they’ve been using can go back to the next kid who’s first year band and doesn’t have the ability to buy one or rent one themselves.
The other thing that program does is microgrants to the band directors. So basically there’s a high school in the county that only gets about a thousand dollars of funding a year for band. So almost all the money they raise is through a band booster program. But what that means is even things as simple as repairing an instrument the school owns or buying new sheet music for the Christmas concert sheet music for a band with 32 instruments playing is actually several hundred dollars. So with this micro grant program, the band directors apply to us, explain the need, the cost of the need, exactly what they’d get, and more or less anything under a thousand bucks, we just approve it because nobody’s abusing the program.
LW: That checks out.
JB: And so we also allocate some kind of rolling funding to each band program. There are six of them that we fund, three middle schools, three high schools. And so every three or four years, we’ll say, Hey, we’ve got whatever it is, 4,000 bucks. We can guarantee you over the next three or four years, occasionally the band directors come to us with what we really need is help on this big purchase, let’s say marching band uniforms. Can we just apply all the money to this one purchase instead of doling it out over four years? So we’ve done that as well. It’s really just designed to be flexible and be an easy access small revenue source for the band directors.
LW: That’s amazing. I’ll pivot a little bit to talking about the festival in general terms. You’re on number 14 this year. It’s a long time to be running anything. What are some of the challenges you’ve overcome and how has it evolved?
JB: Sure. So I guess on how it’s changed and evolved, number one, the most obvious is just the size of the attendance, the size of the crowd. The first Rooster Walk drew fewer than 500 people, and it was almost entirely either folks who lived in Martinsville, Henry County or they had a direct connection. So we were in our mid twenties when we put on Rooster Walk one. So we had friends who’d grown up in the community, now they lived in Richmond, now they lived in Charlotte, so they came back, but it was everybody who either, most of the people attending either were still living in Martinsville, Henry County, or they had a direct family connection. So that was fewer than 500 folks.
Rooster Walk 13 had about 6,000 people, which is obviously a totally different animal. And we would’ve had absolutely no ability to put on an event year one that drew even 2000 people because we didn’t know what we didn’t know. But kind of one of the beauties in the way it all unfolded is that since it grew slow and steady in the early years, the crowd was small enough and compliant enough with our wishes where we could fix issues on the fly. And we also had a policy that let’s try to never have the same mistake two years in a row.
So like year one, for example, we had talked to the company that rents Porta Johns and we said, “Hey, we think we’re going to have about X number of people. How many Porta Johns do you think we need?” Because we didn’t know. And they said, “well, I think you probably need about 20, whatever it was, but it was a two day event.” And what they didn’t tell us was you should schedule them to come and get cleaned and pumped out each day. They just said, “you need 20.” And we said, “okay, we’ll rent 20.” So by the end of Saturday night, a lot of them were very, very full and very unpleasant to walk into. And so we said year two, there will probably be some other issue that the patrons notice and tell us about, but let’s just make sure that issue in festival number two is not cleanliness.
Other major changes, obviously Rooster Walk started the first six years at Blue Mountain Festival Grounds, which was a venue just across the Henry County, Franklin County line. So it was in Franklin County, although it had a Martinsville mailing address, and we were getting close to outgrowing the space patron wise, but we had already outgrown the parking. So by Rooster Walk 6, we were renting land to park from three different landowners, and we also could see that we were going to have to cap attendance pretty soon because there wasn’t yet another field that was close and would work for parking.
We moved to Pop’s Farm in Axton, Virginia, which is where we are today. That’s been one of the other outside of just attendance. That’s been the other huge change in the history of the festival. Blue Mountain was and still is an amazing venue and a really special, magical vibe. We had a creek run in between the two stages, but Pops Farm is 151 acres and the way it’s laid out and the way we’ve developed the venue over the years with roads and trails and running power and water different places, it’s one of the biggest selling points we have today as a festival.
We hear over and over from first time attendees, it’s because they happen to really love the headliner that year. We hear over and over from folks like that, the reason they come back the next year when maybe we don’t have the same band that they love was that the venue is so beautiful and lays so well for holding an event like that easy to get around. Nothing is too far apart, but also nothing is so close that you’re on top of each other. So people just really love coming to music events at Pops Farm.
LW: That’s amazing. I feel like you’ve probably have a lot going on that’s not just being able to stand and just enjoy it the entire time, but any big standouts or stuff where you were just like, holy shit, I can’t believe we got them, or sort good transcendent performances that you’ve been able to experience over the years.
JB: So there have been a lot over the years, and you are right, and even most of the people working the festival, they get to see very little music compared to a patron. But the first one of those moments would be Rooster Walks 3. When we had Infamous String Dusters headline, they were not nearly as famous back then as they are now, but that was for me, a moment where it was like, wow, this is a legitimate music festival lineup. This is a nationally touring band that otherwise would not be playing in Martinsville on Saturday night. And then year five, same type of thing. When we had Leftover Salmon as the headliner, they were far more famous in that space and time than the infamous String Dusters had been. And we saw a significant increase in attendance from music fans who had no connection to Martinsville.
They were coming because of the band lineup and because of Leftover Salmon in more recent years, I’d say that the clear choice for me is when we had Billy Strings four years in a row, and we had Marcus King three years in a row, and they overlapped and we put on two sets, one each year that were called King and Strings, where it was Billy and Marcus on stage together with members of each band. And those have become kind of a little bit of a legendary folklore type thing in the Roots music scene. And the only two King and Strings performances in the history of the world both came at Rooster Walk. They’ve never done one of those ever again. We created and printed 50 King and Strings posters that we sold at the merch tent, and I saw one of them on eBay a few weeks ago for $8,000!
LW: Not bad if you can get it. Yeah. Damn.
JB: I don’t know if it sold, but that was the asking price. But that’s just to illustrate that it’s like a thing. People who were not there, have never been to Rooster Walk, they live in California or Minnesota or wherever, it’s a thing they know about and talk about as one of those legendary two artists connecting for a moment in time.
LW: Definitely, man, that’s incredible. I also wanted to ask about your current involvement with the Rives Theatre or any other cultural stuff that’s popping around in Martinsville these days?
JB: Yeah, absolutely. So we’ve got our hands in a number of different music-related events that we put on throughout the calendar year in Martinsville, Henry County, because our mission is to promote music, arts, and education in our home of Martinsville Henry County. So we don’t do events outside of that geographic footprint.
Rooster Walk used to manage and book the Rives Theater, but that caught fire and burned down in the fall of 2019. And then Covid hit. Since we came out of Covid, what we do now is called Rives On The Road. So those are indoor concerts that occur during the cold months of the year, roughly mid-fall to early spring. For the longest time, they were literally kind of pop-up shows. We would contract with a different venue in the community for each different show. And this year, for the first time, we settled on one home for the series, which is the Forest Park Country Club Ballroom. So we’re going to do about six or seven indoor shows in 2024 through Rives On The Road.
In addition, obviously, there’s a Rooster Walk in May. We do the Walker Shank Memorial golf tournament every spring, which raises money for the scholarship fund. That is the one event that is not music-related, but it raises money for the endowment. Then we do a couple of one-night concerts each year, say two to four at Pop’s Farm. Those are typically summer shows, so a band with an opening act, you can camp that one night if you want, but it’s not a festival. It’s a one-night outdoors show.
Last year we started for the first time a fall music festival at Pops Farm. It’s called the Infamous Weekend, and that’s actually in partnership with the Infamous String Dusters. So we’ll be doing that again this year. That’s September 20 and 21, so it’s a two-day event, whereas Rooster Walk is a four-day festival, but it is a music festival, so there’s more than one stage. There are food vendors, craft vendors, people camping in tents and RVs, renting the little cabins at Pops to sleep in the full deal. Just much smaller than Rooster Walk. Infamous Weekend had probably about 1500 people attend in its first year, 2023. And I’m really excited about that event. I think it’s going to continue to grow in both attendance and offerings with that one.
We really lean a lot on the outdoor amenities that Martinsville Henry County has to offer since music music on Friday starts at 3:30, and so if folks are getting in there Friday morning, they have half a day before there’s a band. So we partner with a local guided fly fishing outfit. We partner with a river float company, so you pay for that service, but you can catch a shuttle to the Smith River, fly fishing for three hours, get brought back on Friday or Saturday morning and then see music. We also do a guided bike ride to Mountain Valley Brewing, which is a craft brewer about five miles from the venue, and then disc golf course at the festival venue, guided hikes, and just really trying to combine a lot of the outdoor recreation stuff with music at Infamous Weekend.
And then the last thing we do of note, which was also a first-year event last year, is the RW Shucks Seafood Block Party in Uptown Martinsville. That is a downtown Martinsville event. We work with the city to block off all the streets in front of the old historic courthouse, and we set up a stage in front of the courthouse facing the courthouse and the courthouse lawn, and then it’s all seafood vendors, so oysters, lobster, shrimp, yada, yada plus music and beer. And that’s like one day, it’s obviously not a camping event, but we put it on last year for the first time. It sold out in advance at 500 tickets, and it’s a fall event. It’s in mid-November, so it can be kind of cold.
LW: It’s sort of a sweet spot for that and, yeah, that’s amazing. A couple things I’ll touch on and then I’ll let you go. I think one of the things that covers a lot of this is, and I was thinking about how I was working in a place last year that was doing a lot of, starting to do a lot more consulting down there and talking about Southern Virginia, Northern Virginia is shrinking a little bit. Southern Virginia is getting a little bit more action. I know that Martinsville has been making a lot of strides with all the work you’ve done down there. Are you seeing that in real time? What does that look like? It feels like there’s more action happening down there now, just in general.
JB: Yeah, there’s definitely a lot more action happening, and it’s really exciting and also very heartwarming. When I was growing up in Martinsville and came through high school, graduated in 2000, some of the NAFTA corporations movement overseas type stuff, some of that was starting to happen in the very end of the nineties, but me and my cohort of classmates, we got out and got to college or got started on our first job before it had really devastated the community.
You would have to fact check this, but Martinsville, when we were there, was a town of about 17,000 people, and it had this huge textile-based economy, sweatshirts and furniture were the two primary, but there were five or six, seven companies doing all that type of work. And a lot of the employees for those companies lived in Martinsville, but a lot of ’em also lived in Henry County. So I had a guy tell me a few years ago that from something like 1996 to 2004, Martinsville, a town of 17,000 people, lost over 40,000 jobs. And that’s because some of the people who were employed lived in the county.
But it was really tough, as you can imagine for about 10 years after that in the wake of that exodus of employment, because the community had to really kind of reinvent itself. It had been a textile furniture-based economy for over a century, and all that was gone other than Bassett Furniture and Hooker Furniture did stick around, but they’ve just done a tremendous job of economic development and tourism working together to try to reinvent and build it back piece by piece.
Gone are the days of bringing in one employer who’s going to employ 20,000 people because things are so much more automated that it doesn’t make business sense businesswise for a company to model themselves where they need 20,000 people. They need people to run the machines that do what used to get done by people.
But it was really cool to see, especially I noticed it most before Covid, I felt like the community was really starting to have a lot of good things to offer, and it was kind of like, will it catch on? And will folks notice? And then during Covid, when you’ll remember throughout the country, there was kind of a mini exodus of folks leaving urban areas. Everybody was freaked out about Covid and didn’t know what it was or what it wasn’t.
I had real estate friends who were working in Martinsville who said pre-Covid, there were literally hundreds of good houses on the market, and you got a year and a half into Covid, and it was like tens of houses on the market. It’s wild.
And so that’s awesome. Mountain Valley Brewing and Axton is opening up a brewpub in downtown Martinsville on the Courthouse Square. There’s a boutique hotel that’s coming in downtown Martinsville that is at the site of a former manufacturing plant, and the Virginia Museum of Natural History. The Dick and Willie Trail community’s done a great job on greenways and connecting geographically from west to east to be able to bike and ride on the Dick and Willie and then the Smith River.
There have been so many folks, Dan River Basin Association, Trout Unlimited, and the local tourism department that have really worked hard to market and promote that natural asset of the Smith River, Smith River Festival that happens every summer is free and just brings in folks from all parts of Virginia and North Carolina because it is pretty unique to have a river in this part of the country where you can actually catch rainbow trout, native brook trout. Normally the water is too warm for those fish to survive, but coming off the Philpot Dam, the water is like 38 degrees year-round.
LW: Is there anything that you haven’t really hit on yet? Something you’re keeping an eye out for in the future?
JB: So much. I’d say that we want to continue to grow and expand Rooster Walk, not only the audience that attends, but the offerings that are at the event for the time being. At some point I may turn around Saturday night while the headliner band is planted on the main stage and survey the amphitheater and go, this is probably about as full as it should be, but we’re not there yet. And so sometimes folks ask me, what’s your sellout? And I say, honestly, I don’t really know because the venue is 150 acres and it comfortably holds the crowd that’s coming now. We’ve been growing 10 or 15% a year in attendance every year, and there’s still room on that Saturday night headliner amphitheater. There’s still room for a lot more people. So we just want to continue to grow it, but we want to make sure that we never sell so many tickets that it’s an uncomfortable experience for the patron.
And then on the flip side of things, in the fall, the Infamous Weekend is like the new little baby, currently a two day festival, probably a couple thousand people this year. But that’s one that we’re going to kind of let it organically take the shape or grow into whatever it wants to be. It could hypothetically, stay a two day event with only two stages going forevermore because it was really fun last year and it was such a small footprint and so easy for not only us, but for the patrons. But at the same time, if it really starts growing year to year in attendance then and the patrons tell us that they would like a third stage or a third day, then we’ll do that too. So we’re just going to kind of treat that as its own animal, not trying to necessarily make it into the fall Rooster Walk.
Right, and just see what form and shape it takes. But it’s definitely growing and it’s exciting to have an event in the fall when the weather is changing in Virginia. It’s really beautiful.
LW: Absolutely. Well, sweet. Yeah, thanks for your time today going over all this stuff. I appreciate it. Good seeing you as well.
JB: Good to see you too, man.
You can find more information on the Rooster Walk Fest HERE
Story by Landis Wine
Main Photo by Bob Adamek
