BUTTE — You couldn’t ask for a better day to host an outdoor festival than Friday: “We have perfect weather but no festival, so...” said Montana Folk Festival organizer George Everett.
Friday should have been the start of the Montana Folk Festival, a three-day free music festival that draws tens of thousands of people to Uptown Butte each summer.
The event was canceled in April due to the coronavirus. Montana has had some recent spikes in cases of Covid-19, so organizers say the cancellation was a good idea.
“All the people that were affected in every county, they would be in Butte. So there’s no way you can have a mass gathering like that until something changes,” said Everett.
Everett says the festival will be back next year.
“We’re just going to keep going with the expectation and that hope that 2021 will be a different year and we’ll be able to pull it off as we have in previous years,” he said.
Normally this time of year there would be a huge tent, there would be music blaring and hundreds of people dancing, but there’s been nothing normal about 2020 — and organizers of the Montana Folk Festival say they hope this time next year, things will get back to normal.
“People are going to be hungry for live music and social gatherings and, if possible at all, in 2021 we’ll have the biggest one of all in Butte, Montana,” said Everett.