Dancing Goats Folkfest to Bring Art, Music to Honea Path April 11
Greg Wilson/Anderson Observer
It’s hard to miss The Fiddle & Bow Music Hall when turning onto Main Street in Honea Path. It’s obviously a venue for artists. Inside, the walls are crowded with Southern folk art, a small stage touched by wood and shadow, the faint echo guitar still hanging in the rafters. The man who built it, artist and musician Justin Thomas Atkins, moves easily through the room lined with his paintings and hand-lettered show posters the way some people cover their walls with family photographs. He grew up on the grammar of old country music—he is, as he likes to say, “actually named after Justin Tubb, Ernest Tubb’s son”—and the hall is his attempt to give that inheritance a permanent address.
Atkins calls the place the Fiddle & Bow Music Hall and Southern Folk Art Gallery, a title that sounds half-waltz and half-manifesto. On a given night its low stage might hold a honky-tonk legend such as Wayne “The Train” Hancock from Texas, or Linda Gail Lewis, Jerry Lee’s piano-pounding sister, breaking into stories about life on the road with “the Killer” (and threatening to destroy a piano herself as part of her show). Between shows, the hall becomes a gallery, drawing visitors who’ve come to browse thickly painted visions of roosters, saints, sinners, and kudzu-strangled dreams, all hung wall to ceiling in this former mill-town street. If you want the purest version of what Atkins is doing here, think of it as less a business and more a working theory: that music and folk art, held close enough together, can still name a place and keep it from disappearing.
April 11 is the day he plans to test that theory in the open air. On that Saturday, Main Street in Honea Path will be overrun by what Atkins has resurrected and reimagined as “The Dancing Goats Folkfest,” a new spring festival that is also, in a way, a ghost brought home. The name comes from an earlier art show in Ellijay, Georgia, begun by a friend of his named Mona, where Atkins once showed his work. That festival withered under the quiet pressures that undo most volunteer-run institutions—too few hands, too much else to do. Standing together at Howard Finster’s Paradise Garden, Mona told him, almost offhandedly, that he ought to start Dancing Goats up again.
“Well, sure, I might as well,” he remembers saying with a grin. “Let’s do it.”
What he brought back to South Carolina is less a duplication than a local translation. For Dancing Goats Folkfest in Honea Path, Atkins has invited folk artists from across the Southeast—Florida, Tennessee, small towns closer to home in Honea Path, Belton, and Anderson—to set up along Main Street in a juried show that runs from morning into late afternoon. Some are established names in the self-taught art world; others will be hanging their work in public for the first time. The idea is not curation as gatekeeping but as welcome: the seasoned visionary sharing sidewalk space with the nervous newcomer, all of them answering to the same unapologetic category, “folk.”
The music program has its own kind of taxonomy; one built from proximity and memory rather than genre purity. There is Cody Gentry, an Upstate songwriter whose work has filled the very room where Atkins paints. There is Hubby Jenkins, once of the Grammy-winning Carolina Chocolate Drops, bringing the banjo-and-fiddle repertoire that insists the Black South has always been central to American string-band music. David Childers arrives with his band the Serpents, fresh from induction into the North Carolina Music Hall of Fame, singing the kind of rough-hewn, literate songs that have made him a cult figure for decades. Jason Ringenberg—best remembered for the cowpunk fury of Jason and the Scorchers—will appear in two incarnations: as his Emmy-winning children’s alter ego, Farmer Jason, leading kids through songs and stories, and later as himself, fronting a grown-up set from the main stage. Somewhere in the mix, the ethereal wail of Deshawn Hickman’s steel guitar—familiar to some from his appearance on “America’s Got Talent”—will thread church to juke joint without pausing to ask permission.
The day is arranged like a palimpsest. Inside Fiddle & Bow, an all-day music jam will unspool in the hall, as if the building itself refuses to stay quiet even while Main Street is taken over by its larger, more extroverted cousin. Outside, the main stage will cycle through gospel, rock, Americana, country, whatever else fits under the very local notion of “anything that represents our culture in our area.”
Children will have their own zone—rides, music, Farmer Jason’s set, the easy chaos of a small-town festival designed with them in mind. There will be a vintage market for the rusted and restored, and food that makes an argument for place in its own way: Indigenous Underground’s chef Erica, once an ambassador chef for the state, will be serving variations on Atkin’s own Atkin Mill & Company grits—gator and grits, shrimp and grits, brisket and grits—alongside other local restaurants staking their claim on the sidewalk.
Then there are the goats. The titular animals are not metaphorical; they are, as Atkins explains it, contestants. Dancing Goats Folkfest will feature what he tells you, with a straight face, is a goat beauty pageant. The rules are simple: dress your goat, bring it downtown, and join the parade down Main Street to the main stage, where a panel of still-to-be-determined judges—Mayor Doc Smith has already been floated as an ideal candidate—will confer the title and a $250 cash prize. It is absurd, of course, and completely serious: the kind of communal joke that works only in a place small enough that everyone can imagine who is likely to show up leading a be-ribboned Nubian or a glitter-spattered pygmy. When Atkins says the goats “will probably be dancing,” it is hard to tell whether he means from nerves or because, with that much music in the air, they won’t have much choice.
Underneath the whimsical name and the pageant, Atkins talks about Dancing Goats as a way to “celebrate the cultural significance of this area through art and music.” Honea Path is one of those Southern towns suspended between versions of itself—the old mill economy receding, the future not yet fixed—and festivals have become a kind of secular liturgy in places like this. You close a street, you hang a banner, you invite artists from away and neighbors from up the road, and for a day the town rehearses a possible story about what it is now. In Atkins’s telling, that story is capacious enough to hold bluegrass jams, gospel sets, a TikTok-primed music hall, a juried folk show, a vintage clothing booth, an Emmy-winning children’s performer, a steel guitarist from national television, and a line of goats on parade.
The town itself has leaned in. Honea Path and Envision Honea Path have helped with logistics, marketing, and billboards scattered across the Upstate and into Georgia, an investment in the idea that this first-year experiment might become the town’s annual signature.
The schedule is engineered to make the day feel continuous: art vendors setting up by nine, music beginning at ten, the show running until five, a brief exhale for artists to pack their work and then return, as civilians, for the final concert at seven. It is, in its way, a modest proposal—that on April 11, 2026, in a mill town off the main interstate routes, you might find a fully realized folk festival, equal parts seriousness and play, staking out a claim for what Southern culture can look like when it is allowed to be specific rather than generic.
If you search it out in the blur of social feeds, the festival has a small but insistent digital presence: a Facebook page where the lineup is posted and updated, scattered announcements pushing followers to “like us and all that good stuff.”
But Dancing Goats, as Atkins imagines it, is less an online brand than a physical convergence, something that happens only by people showing up at a particular place at a particular time. For one Saturday in April, the experiment is simple: close Main Street, open the music hall doors, hang the art, plug in the amps, roll out the grills, and see what happens when a town asks its artists, musicians, cooks—and goats—to stand together in public and answer the oldest question in American folk culture: What does it mean to be from here, now?
