Cherry Blossom Festival

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A festival blooms in Brookhaven

BY ANN MARIE QUILL

It started small, but it kept growing.

Conceived in 2015 by the late mayor and former District 1 Councilwoman Rebecca Chase Williams, Brookhaven’s first Cherry Blossom Festival originally offered road races, arts and crafts. The Pet Parade and a show headlined by rock ‘n’ roll legends The Coasters and The Drifters.

“There’s truly something for everyone,” Williams said at the time.

It attracted a few thousand fans. But in the years since, the acts have gotten bigger, and the crowd has grown to more than 40,000. That puts Brookhaven’s hometown music-and-arts fest among the metro area’s big players.

“I can’t turn on the radio without hearing a song by someone who’s played at the Cherry Blossom Festival,” Brookhaven Mayor John Ernst said.

Internationally known acts such as Smash Mouth, the Spin Doctors, the Wallflowers and the Romantics have appeared at the festival. In 2021, after two years of festival cancellations due to the COVID pandemic, the Brookhaven Cherry Blossom Festival Summer Block Party filled the Brookhaven MARTA Station parking lot with concertgoers clamoring to see acts such as Better Than Ezra, Rick Springfield and Collective Soul.

This past spring, with Joan Jett & The Blackhearts as headliner, the 2022 Brookhaven Cherry Blossom Festival drew an estimated 40,000 concertgoers and was the second biggest music festival in Georgia, behind only Shaky Knees. “And that’s just because they had one more day than we did,” Ernst said jokingly

In 2018, the city began contracting with Splash Festivals to run the artist market, a move that expanded the arts portion of the festival from a handful of vendors in a grassy area of Blackburn Park to more than 100 artists’ tents lining Rebecca Williams Way, which winds through the park. A second partnership put the Brookhaven Cherry Blossom Festival music lineup on the concert map in the Atlanta area. “Our partnership that began with Live Nation in 2018 was the linchpin,” Ernst said.

Ernst said when he thinks about how concerts can bring people together, he goes back to a New Year’s Eve party in 1999. “I was at a private party where Duran Duran played,” he said. “I remember thinking: ‘it’s not outrageously expensive to hire some of these acts. Doesn’t everyone deserve to see them without going broke?’”

Ernst said he saw the Cherry Blossom Festival’s potential in 2017 when the headliner was The Sweet Tea Project, a side band led by Ed Roland of Collective Soul. Ernst contacted concert promoter Peter Conlon, president of Live Nation Atlanta, who agreed that Live Nation would book acts for the festival pro bono along with Andrew Hingley, a Live Nation talent booker and co-owner of Eddie’s Attic.

Hingley, a Brookhaven resident, said the Cherry Blossom partnership is a symbiotic relationship. While Live Nation may not charge the city a booking fee, he said, the arrangement helps the company as it arranges artist’s tours. “There are certain periods of the year when artists may be looking for somewhere to play, but everything’s booked,” he said. “It’s great to have the Cherry Blossom Festival to offer them; it

helps build a relationship with those artists.”

The festival, Hingley said, now is firmly on the concert map. “We now get calls from acts wanting to be in it. It’s been such an evolution, and the last few years have just been home runs.”

Ernst agrees. “I think Rebecca would be proud. She was a believer in doing things the right way, and I think we’ve hit the mark with the Cherry Blossom Festival,” Ernst said. “Besides, at the Summer Block Party, Ed Roland referred to his band as the ‘house band.’ What other young festival in a young city can say that?”