Live Review: Newport Folk Festival @ Ft Adams State Park, RI — 7/24 – 7/26/26

No annual American music festival is as effectively and consistently curated for the benefit of artist discovery as the Newport Folk Festival.
Organizers of this high-profile gathering in Rhode Island have successfully created a culture that encourages artists to get to know each other, to share their music with one another and it invites attendees to watch and learn about a long list of musicians they might otherwise never get the chance to observe in such a comfortable setting.
Like they do each summer, music lovers traveled from far and wide to historic Fort Adams State Park, where from July 24 to 26 they moved from stage to stage to take in a wildly impressive lineup of headliners whose sounds decidedly transcended what many would consider to be folk, but whose messages built on a decades-old foundation of social activism.











