Basin Summer Sounds draws thousands
Hamilton Loomis plays during Basin Summer Sounds Saturday.
EPHRATA — Thousands of people came to Ephrata to listen to music, play basketball and enjoy other activities on Friday and Saturday.
The seventh annual Basin Summer Sounds music festival was marked with a marriage proposal, dancing and two headliners — Cowboy Mouth and Jo Dee Messina.
Dean and Cindy Dyer were two of the people attending both days of the festival. The Othello couple had business in Spokane. They thought about listening to music in the city, but decided on their way home to stop in Ephrata.
“We’ve been here before and we’ve seen some really good music ... and I saw the ad in the paper,” Cindy said.
The Dyers enjoyed Friday night’s headliner, Cowboy Mouth, and were looking forward to Hamilton Loomis on Saturday. They said the Ephrata venue is great.
“We saw (Loomis) in Tri-Cities and we’re looking forward to seeing him again,” Cindy said. “Very high energy. It’s a good show. In the past we’ve come to see Vicci Martinez, she played a few times. We really like her.”
The Dyers were two of the estimated 4,500 people attending the Friday night concerts, festival committee Chair Janice Moore said, adding Cowboy Mouth’s performance was great.
“The man knows how to entertain,” she said. “Right off the bat, he came off the stage. He jumped the fence in front of the stage, came out into the crowd and pulled people up out of their chairs, (and said) ‘You’re not sitting - this is a stand-up concert.”
Two-thirds of the way through the group’s set Moore walked into the crowd and people he had pulled out of the chairs earlier were still standing, she said.
“One woman up there with her cane, she’s standing, watching and dancing. It was awesome,” she said.
Both Moore and Ephrata Chamber of Commerce Executive Director Tia Tracy were happy with the amount of people showing up for the festival.
“It always amazes me. I don’t know how we do it. It must just be our home town charm,” she said.
The band performing before Cowboy Mouth, Carbon Leaf, brought attendees to the festival as well, Moore said.
“There was this group that was just following them,” she said. “We actually had a proposal on the stage. Fans of Carbon Leaf had e-mailed us ahead of time and the guy had asked if there was a chance that he could propose and so we had a beautiful proposal on stage.”
Leslie Owenn was one of the crowd members Saturday. She danced with her daughter, Madee, during Slackdaddy’s performance. The Ephrata resident came down because it’s her hometown, she said.
“We came down to have fun with our family and friends,” she said. “It’s very good. This is our ... second year.”
Owenn said her daughter enjoyed the children’s activities on Basin Street, and they were also there to see Jo Dee Messina’s performance Saturday night.
This is the first year the festival has featured two headlining bands, and Moore said it worked well for the festival.
“This year our goal was to try and even out the nights and have people here for the whole weekend and not just for one night,” she said. “I would bet last year at our height on Friday night, we had maybe 2,000 people and at 6 p.m. (this year) we had 2,000 people.”
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