What is the word “Southern” to you?
Is it a banjo-backed folk band, or a hip-hop artist drawling laid-back rhymes over a beat as smooth as Southern honey?
Is it a grizzled bluesman, or an alt-rock band with a sound as thick as the humid Carolina air?
These are the questions ConvergeNC organizers and UNC students Gabe Chess and Libby Rodenbough will pose to attendees at Saturday’s festival, which celebrates Southern culture through music.
“The approach is that by clearly labeling it as Southern, and by clearly marketing it as Southern, everyone comes thinking they’re going to a Southern music festival,” Chess said.
“Then you’re thinking, ‘Huh, I’m at a Southern music festival but I’m hearing this and I’m seeing this and I’m feeling this and maybe that’s not what I expected. Is it still Southern?’”
The festival will feature a diverse and seemingly scrambled multitude of local acts, ranging from rapper Kaze to Virgins Family Band to a blues revue and more, which the organizers hope will inspire people to explore their own definitions of Southern culture.
“It’s not a safe step we’re taking here with the acts,” Rodenbough said.
“They don’t all make perfect sense with one another, but we hope that there will be one thing that will unite them, and hopefully that’ll be the spirit of the place.”
This idea of a “spirit of place” is the center theme behind the festival’s celebration of Southern culture. Along with the other philosophical aspects of the event, which include integrity and a student-run foundation, it has been in place since ConvergeNC’s beginnings.
“It’s a very grassroots thing, and in fact, for me, a priority going into the future is absolutely keeping it student-run and keeping it sort of feeling like a populist endeavor,” Rodenbough said.
In May, Chess and festival co-directors Connor Kane and Clyde Atkins came up with the idea of ConvergeNC and then presented it to Bill Ferris, a UNC American studies professor and senior associate director of the Center for the Study of the American South. Ferris then reached out to a wide variety of faculty, students and relevant people to help get the festival to happen.
Chess said Ferris’ involvement really got the ball rolling with the event, and it also placed Rodenbough into the mix as an organizer — a helpful addition because Kane and Atkins would be studying abroad.
“I believe deeply that the reason the University exists is to serve the student body — without the students, we have no purpose,” Ferris said.
“This is one idea I’m absolutely thrilled to be a part of, and I cannot think of two more visionary or talented students to lead it.”
While Ferris’ help, as well as the advice of an advisory board, assisted in bringing ConvergeNC to life, the festival was conceptualized, organized and run by students, chiefly Chess and Rodenbough.
Chess credits the liberal arts curriculum of UNC as inspiring the creation of the festival, by exposing him to a vast and diverse amount of culture in his classes.
The diversity of the curriculum assisted on the business side of organizing the festival as well, Chess said.
“We’ve had to wear so many hats as a part of this, and someone who goes to a school and is looking for a specific trade in a certain area might not have the diversity of experience that would allow him or her to wear all those hats,” Rodenbough said.
In recent appearances on the radio and at events, Gov. Pat McCrory has said liberal arts “help exercise the brain” while not teaching “us skills that will also help us get jobs.” McCrory also said he does not want to subsidize curriculums in public colleges that will not get students’ “butts in jobs.”
However, Chess and Rodenbough believe ConvergeNC provides a formidable counterexample to the governor’s ideas.
“To succeed and to grow in the modern and future economy, you have to be adaptable,” Chess said. “That’s not a trained skill. That’s a way of thinking. It’s an ethic and it’s inseparable from the liberal arts.”
So far, the festival has garnered the attention of local press, unified the community and inspired a new sense connectivity among local cultural institutes, Rodenbough said.
“I think it is a physical stamp of what a liberal arts education can enable people to do,” Chess said.
ConvergeNC is the first of what the organizers hope will be an annual occurrence. But in order to continue the festival, Chess emphasized the importance of passing the leadership roles onto future students and keeping to the festival’s “spirit of place.”
“I think one of the main ways that we hope this festival will be unique is that it’s a priority of ours that ConvergeNC feels like it couldn’t happen anywhere else — that it feels really, really rooted not only in the South, not only in North Carolina, but here in Chapel Hill on UNC’s campus,” Chess said.
Contact the desk editor at diversions@dailytarheel.com.
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