Sunday, July 11: I parked and walked to the entrance gate for Roanoke’s Down By the River music festival knowing little about the event or the performers. My beneficent editor had tasked me with covering the festival the night before. I was on assignment. My aim was to cover the festival not with the cold eye of the satirist, but with the rigid eye of the reporter.

When I arrived with my assistant, the concert was roughly half an hour in. We were greeted by the warble of guitars. Bebop Hoedown, the first of the event’s acts, was already mid-set when security casually examined my camera bag for butterfly knives and anti-Allman Brothers propaganda.

I can’t provide much of an impression of the seemingly fun hoedown hooligans and their hootenanny. Being that I was on assignment, I was all business and proactive skin care. After applying a palm of SPF 30 to my dome, it was all I could do to be turned away from the VIP seating area and locate a program before Bebop Hoedown wrapped up its set. Editor Tim W. Jackson has seen the band before, though, and assures me that the group is a top-notch local act.

My assistant, or rather my girlfriend who gave me permission to refer to her as my assistant, assisted me in locating a program and a beer tent. Beer was a necessary precursor to shrewd journalism. In order to report on a music festival, I had to become an attendee at a music festival. One plastic cup of Starr Hill Dark Starr Stout later and I had assumed the guise of a music festival attendee. I’m method.

Music festivals provide a venue for local vendors and organizations to showcase their products, causes, and grammatically incorrect advertisements. Over the course of my Down By the River investigation, I spoke briefly with a member of Margaret’s Dicey Divas, a group attempting to raise money for a friend with multiple sclerosis. I took their card, but my inept assistant lost it. Rather, my assistant made the mistake of trusting me to keep track of the card, and I lost it. Either way, she lost it.

Also worth mentioning were the fabulous ladies of Minute Maid. Their cause was dehydration. Perhaps capitalism played a role, but Minute Maid is absolutely opposed to dehydration. Minute Maid’s reps ambled the festival grounds peddling citrus-ish refreshments. They also wore lemon-shaped hats. I was tempted to photograph them. Because their cause was just, and their brows already weighty from their bitter lemonhats of shame, my lens cap stayed on.

The second act of Down By the River? New Riders of the Purple Sage. That one really got the crowd moving, a crowd that had doubled in size since my first application of sunblock. But I’m not a music reviewer, I’m a people-and-stuff reviewer. The best thing about live music isn’t the music, but the people and sights that it attracts. I could reenact Down By the River for you using terms like “dynamic drumbeats” or “heart-rendering vocals,” but I’d do better to report the image of a grinning stranger in an Allman Brothers tee.

That moustached man in the Allman Brothers tee was happy to be alive. It was in his face. Equally satisfied were the dancing couples too satisfied to notice that my insolent assistant was mocking them, or at least too satisfied to care. Happy too was the little boy I watched tossing his toy into the air. Again and again, the happy boy lobbed the toy up and caught it as it rolled back down the side of the tent. When the toy didn’t come down after a toss, the little boy froze and stared at the tent morosely. Then, I took a picture of the lost toy and made myself happy. Schadenfreude.

Of course the music was good. You already know it was. The fine people and companies who made Down By the River possible weren’t about to disappoint their patrons. Kirk Avenue Music, the Jefferson Center, and the rest of the festival’s sponsors have an agenda. That agenda is, as it was spoken at the festival, “to bring progressive music to Roanoke.” In my sunblock-stung eyes, the progressive music agenda is every bit as virtuous as the Margaret’s Dicey Divas agenda. Music is an expression of life, love, and skinny white guys with dreadlocks.

I don’t know the slide guitar from Earth-One Superman, but I know a good time, which was the theme of the festival that lasted well into the night that Sunday with lots of great musical acts performing. I was on assignment, but it’s hard to be professional when surrounded by dancing couples and children who’ve lost their toys. I know what fun looks like, and I saw it more than once Down By the River.

Charles Smith is a native of Martinsville and frequent festival patron. As you may have figured out, he goes primarily for the people-watching.