John Brown's Body Lands on the GrassRoots 30th Anniversary Bill

John Brown’s Body is on the lineup for the 30th annual Finger Lakes GrassRoots Festival of Music & Dance, announced April 10, 2022. The festival runs July 21 through 24 in Trumansburg, N.Y.

The Ithaca reggae band declared an indefinite hiatus from touring in early 2018. The GrassRoots announcement puts its name back on a bill in the hills above its home town.

What the band said when it stepped away

Founding drummer Tommy Benedetti described the pause to The Pier in March 2018. “If you look at JBB like a volcano, we’re starting 2018 in a dormant phase,” he said. “There could be an eruption at any time, but right now there’s no time frame.”

The hiatus followed the 2016 album Fireflies and a run of send-off shows that closed out 2017, finishing on New Year’s Eve at the House of Blues in Boston alongside Stick Figure and 10 Ft. Ganja Plant.

Members spread into side projects during the break. Benedetti listed Jay Spaker with Double Tiger, JP Petronzio with Road Man, Dan Africano with Elephant Wrecking Ball, and himself with Dub Apocalypse and Organically Good Trio.

An Ithaca band that helped shape American reggae

John Brown’s Body formed in Ithaca in the mid 1990s, at a point when a national U.S. reggae circuit barely existed, and became one of a small handful of American reggae bands touring the country. Its label, Easy Star Records, sums up the sound with a WRUV line: “future roots, reggae, and dub.”

The catalog charted repeatedly. Amplify reached No. 1 on the Billboard Reggae Chart in 2008, the JBB In Dub EP topped the iTunes reggae chart in 2012, and 2013’s Kings And Queens went to No. 1 on both. Fireflies, the band’s eleventh studio release, debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard reggae chart. The Easy Star relationship dates to the 2005 album Pressure Points.

Trumansburg is familiar ground. BandsThatJam posted a soundboard recording of a John Brown’s Body set from the festival taken in 2006, when the group was an eight-piece drawn from Ithaca and Boston and was touring behind Pressure Points.

The rest of the 30th anniversary lineup

Festival founders Donna The Buffalo head the announced bill, joined by The Infamous Stringdusters, Galactic featuring Anjelika “Jelly” Joseph, Cory Henry, Marty Stuart & His Fabulous Superlatives, DakhaBrakha, Dobet Gnahoré, Peter Rowan’s Free Mexican Airforce featuring Los Texmaniacs, and Keith Frank & Soileau Zydeco. More than 70 other musical guests round out the four days.

Beyond the stages, the weekend carries arts and crafts and face painting for families, several beer and wine gardens, and restorative healing workshops and yoga. GrassRoots Culture Camp, the festival’s separate program of instrumental technique and dance workshops, runs July 17 through 20.

Sources: Jambands.com, The Pier, Easy Star Records.

Photo: Pete716, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons.