One of the highlights of the 2023 global music festival scene is the return of the Sierra Nevada World Music Festival, June 16th-18th in Boonville in Northern California’s Mendocino County. The festival was last staged in 2018 but was indefinitely suspended due to the extended illness of founder and organizer Warren Smith, who passed away in January 2021.

David Rodigan, Linton Kwesi Johnson, Warren Smith, Johnny Osbourne

While originally conceived as a world music festival during the 1990s, Sierra Nevada was always a reggae festival first, despite the appearances of global caliber artists like Baba Maal, Salif Keita, King Sunny Ade, Zakir Hussein, Femi and Sean Kuti, and dozens of others.

The heart and soul of the festival was a Jamaica-centric celebration of ska, rocksteady, and reggae’s founding artists, sometimes forgotten but cherished among reggae collectors, super-fans, and by founder Warren Smith himself. These included Alton Ellis, The Skatalites, Rico Rodriguez, Ken Boothe, Roy Shirley, the Pioneers, Keith & Tex, and Junior Byles, among others.

Reggae artists who performed at the festival over the years include icons like Jimmy Cliff, Bunny Wailer, Toots & The Maytals, Wailing Souls, Black Uhuru, Lee Scratch Perry, Prince Buster, Gregory Isaacs, Sugar Minott, Israel Vibration, the Marleys, Burning Spear (who returns this year), and Beres Hammond (who also returns this year). More recently, the festival has seen next-generation reggae artists like Protoje, who returns this year, and Chronixx, as well as the most recent Grammy winner, Kabaka Pyramid. Top reggae DJs and soundsystem operators including Jah Shaka, Stone Love, and David Rodigan have also been featured participants.

Earl Zero and Tony Chin at SNWMF 2008

Warren Smith’s widow Gretchen is at the helm of this year’s festival, a tribute to her husband’s legacy in reggae, which dates to the 1970s. Warren Smith, who first organized the event in 1994, was an early reggae promoter and producer on the West Coast, having brought Dennis Brown, Big Youth, and Soul Syndicate to California for the first time during the 1970s. Spending extensive time in Jamaica in the 1970s, he produced the Island Music Festival in the Parish of Trelawny in 1978.

As a manager and record producer, Smith worked closely with Soul Syndicate, issuing records Harvest Uptown, Famine Downtown and Love Is And Always on his Epiphany Records label. This period was documented in Jeremiah Stein’s excellent film about Soul Syndicate, Word, Sound, and Power (1979). Smith was also the first producer to record on the 16-track tape machine at Jamaica’s famed Channel One studio when it was installed in 1979. Earl Zero’s Visions Of Love LP was the fruit of this labor.

For more information about the festival, visit their website here and follow @snwmf on social media.

— Carter Van Pelt