Raven Festival brings music and food to Kendall Yards in honor of Jim Boyd

By Quinn Welsch

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click to enlarge

Jim Boyd

Camp. Eat. Listen to tunes. What better way to spend the weekend?

Starting Friday, Sept. 28, the work of the late Jim Boyd will be celebrated in a four-day arts, music and food festival, Friday through Monday, dubbed Raven Music Festival. The event will be held in Kendall Yards and Sunset Park throughout the weekend. Attendees are invited to camp along the river. (See here for camping details.)

Proceeds will go to benefit the Bearing Sculpture Project. The Bearing is a bronze sculpture depicting a woman carrying a man holding a military-style rifle and sitting in a basket on her head by Spokane artist Ildikó Kalapács.

Music will be at the Olmsted Park and the Nest in Kendall Yards with more than two dozen bands in the weekend-long lineup, including acts from Trego, Buffalo Jones and Soveriegn Citizens and Non Prophets.

Visit ravenfest.org for more.

Boyd, a highly regarded recording artist and a member of the Lakes Band of the Colville Confederated Tribe, was a seven-time award winner of the Native American Music Awards and received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Native American Music Awards in 2014.

"I have been very fortunate that I was able to make a career out of it... I was able to make a living doing non-commercial, Native American contemporary music," Boyd told the Inlander in 2014 after earning the Lifetime Achievement Award.

Boyd, who passed away in 2016, is also known for performing in several groups, including XIT, Greywolf and Winterhawk, and sang four songs with lyrics by Spokane novelist Sherman Alexie on the soundtrack for the film Smoke Signals, and also appeared in Alexie's The Business of Fancydancing.

Check out some of our earlier coverage of Boyd's work here: