RISON - The origins of this week’s Rison in the Fall festival can be traced back to an idea by the late Bill Ripling, the former mayor of Rison.
Roy Phillips, who served as the lead promoter of the Rison in the Fall Festival for about 30 years, said Ripling wanted to do something special to celebrate the City of Rison’s 100th birthday after it was formally incorporated in August 1890. He appointed a committee to create an event and a two-day celebration was held that year.
However, Phillips said people liked the celebration so much that they wanted to do it again, and the next thing he knew, it became an annual event.
Phillips, along with the current festival organizer Douglas Boultinghouse, talk about the history and the future of the Rison in the Fall Festival in this week’s episode of the Free Range Conversations podcast.
The podcast can be accessed through Apple Podcasts, Spotify and other podcast platforms. It can also be heard on ClevelandCountyHerald.com
At the very beginning, Phillips said the event was simply referred to as the 100th anniversary celebration. When organizers decided to make it an annual event, he said they held a contest to come up with the name for it and Rison in the Fall was the winner.
Phillips said Rison in the Fall was basically a homecoming event held each year. There was always some local entertainment that was part of the festivities, and eventually a pageant was added along with a street dance and barbeque cook-off.
Initially, Phillips said the barbeque competition consisted mostly of local cookers, and it was nothing to see dozens of people with everything from backyard grills to trailer barbeque pits be set up along the 200 block of Main Street to battle it out in a friendly competition.
However, interest in the festival began to wane. First the street dance was eliminated, and eventually the pageant, which was one of the festival’s biggest draws.
Even the barbeque cook-off, which had become the backbone of the festival, dwindled to only a handful of competitors.
When the city took over the Pioneer Village in 2013, there was an effort to rejuvenate the festival by moving it to the Village. Phillips was able to secure some sponsorship money to offer some sizable cash prizes for the barbeque winners, but after seeing some initial increase in participation, that fell off as well.
After hearing feedback from the public, Phillips decided to return the festival back downtown in 2018 and the move was well received.
In preparation for the 30th anniversary of the Rison in the Fall Festival that next year in 2019, Phillips enlisted the help of Douglas Boultinghouse, who had some connections to the Nashville music scene. Boultinghouse also brought in the Rison Shine non-profit community development group, which provided the festival with some additional volunteers as well as some fresh ideas of how to develop the festival.
Boultinghouse reached out to Tayla Lynn and Tre Twitty, the grandchildren of country music stars Loretta Lynn and Conway Twitty, to headline the 30th anniversary festival in 2019 and it was a huge success as hundreds packed Main Street to take in the free show.
Since then, Boultinghouse has secured more sponsorships to bring in even bigger name performers and has also established a small army of food trucks that has added to the venue.
An estimated 2,000 attended last year’s Rison in the Fall Festival and even more are anticipated this year as a concerted effort to market the festival outside the immediate area was made using radio ads and social media.