Despite a forecast of inclement weather this weekend, Arts & The Park organizers vow the scheduled concerts and events will happen "come heck or high water."
"We're real pleased with the line-up, we've got some outstanding musicians and the other arts and other performers coming in, but one thing we are focusing on today is the weather, and it looks like there's a good chance that there might be a little rain and wind on Saturday," said Charlie Moore, founder of the Arkansas Highlands Folk Project, which has helped develop the musical side of the festival.
"We're gonna have it come heck or high water, but we may, for the benefit of those coming to see it, we want you to be comfortable and we want the artists and the musicians to have a good venue to provide the type of performance that we want," Moore said.
If the weather proves to be too stormy for outdoor performances, festival attendees can visit https://hotspringsarts.org/ to learn where alternate venues will be located.
If the weather allows, there will be musical performances at Hill Wheatley Plaza and at Kenneth Adair Memorial Park. Moore organized the lineup for the Hill Wheatley shows, while fellow musician Charlie Mink is handling the lineup for the Adair shows.
"Well they've asked me to kind of look out for the music part of the Adair Park ... downtown, you know it's that little pocket park across from the visitors center; it's got a nice little waterfall there and so on, a beautiful area," Mink said.
There will be performances at the park on Saturday and Sunday.
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The first performer will be Ken Tillery at noon Saturday "and I understand that his wife is going to join him," Mink said.
Laura Lee Willard will perform at 1 p.m. followed by Stuart Cully and Mink at 2 p.m., who "are going to do a little duet, we've done several times around town, basically Americana music. It will be a little bit of folk involved, just various things that we associate with music here in the United States," Mink said.
There will five performances on Sunday.
At 11 a.m., Tom and Jenny Sartain will perform, followed by the Lakeside High Jazz Combo at noon, Treble In the Village at 1 p.m., Ms. Martin's Music Menagerie at 2 p.m. and the Greenbrier Trio will close the show at 3 p.m.
At Hill Wheatley Plaza, Keith Symanowitz will perform and teach "Old Time dance" at 2 p.m., Moore said. Symanowitz "is actually a really great ambassador for Old Time music, for preservation and he's a professional dancer, award-winning dancer."
Symanowitz will perform together with Memaw and the Squirrel Chasers who will then follow up with another 45 minutes of concert "and you can practice your dance steps with her," Moore said.
The Arkansas Highlands String Band, of which Moore is a member, will perform at 6 p.m. Saturday "as a warm-up for the feature band, which is Sad Daddy," Moore said.
Sunday performers include Ricko Donovan at 11 a.m., Rough and Ready Stringband at noon., Quapaw Tribe Dancers at 1 p.m., The Trojan Orchestra and Strings Program at 2 p.m., and Jacob Flores will close the event at 2:30 p.m.
"They asked me to kind of round up some folks, and what I've tried to do here is to as, hopefully, you can tell, get an eclectic mix here," Mink said.
" ... We're not going to do any hard rock or any heavy metal or anything like that because they wanted to stay basically with a kind of a heritage theme rather than a modern music," and with that in mind, he said, they intend to "make an attempt here to have as wide a selection of music as we can come up with. Things that should appeal to almost anybody, hopefully, and I think we got some pretty good folks here."
"Looking forward to it myself, to tell you the truth. There's some great stuff here. Anybody that likes music would certainly find something here, probably a lot of things that (would) be fun to listen to. We're really excited about it," he said.
Mink, who will also perform during the festival, said prior to moving to the Hot Springs area a few years ago, he lived in Mountain View for 17 years, where he "was a contract performer with the Ozark Folk Center and MC at Jimmy Driftwood Music Barn for a number of years."
Mink plays the dulcimer, he said, "primarily an instrument called an Olden Gray dulcimer, which has a completely different sound than most dulcimers. I play the mountain dulcimer also, trying the duplicate the sound of the old Celtic harps, so I try to work that in to the old Irish and Scottish music."