Attendees gather in front of a porch at Rhode Island Avenue Porch Fest 2016 (Credit: Wayne You Huang/Courtesy of Rhode Island Avenue Main Street Facebook page)

Four years ago, Takoma Park resident Mary Ann Ryan passed a peculiar scene while visiting a friend in Somerville, Mass. Walking in the town, Ryan saw a pianist-violinist duo performing together out on a house’s front porch. Her friend explained that she was seeing two performers among many who would play that day on front porches around town for Somerville’s annual PorchFest. The scene inspired Ryan to bring a similar tradition back to her hometown on the D.C.-Maryland border.

“It’s the only bolt-of-lightning moment I’ve ever had,” she said. “I thought, ‘I have to make this happen. Takoma Park would be perfect for this.'”

The following year, after obtaining the Takoma Park City Council’s approval and tracking down residents and business owners willing to lend out their porches for an afternoon, Ryan premiered Takoma Park’s first annual porch music festival in April of 2013. The festival’s array of artists has since expanded, she said. The 2016 Takoma Porch Fest this coming Saturday will feature nearly 50 bands, ranging from bluegrass and Americana (Silver City) to jazz pop (Flo Anito) and Irish music (The Greentop Ramblers), playing on front porches, in parks, and at businesses around the neighborhood.

Porch music festivals similar to Takoma Park’s have become increasingly popular around D.C. over the last several years. Events later started in Adams Morgan and near Rhode Island Avenue annually draw thousands of visitors to busy main streets in those neighborhoods. Scale and timing for the festivals vary, though organizers all seem to agree that their neighborhoods’ community pride and residents’ and business owners’ goodwill allow their events to thrive.

The nonprofit Adams Morgan Partnership Business Improvement District (BID) launched the neighborhood’s porch fest in October 2013. When executive director Kristen Barden and the group’s communications consultant, Nathan Ackerman, heard of the idea from Takoma Park, they began scouting out porches that might work for something comparable in Adams Morgan and later followed up with calls and letters.

Ackerman said the neighborhood’s rich creative culture and history likely influenced some homeowners to accept. “For those people who really kind of wanted to be part of continuing that legacy in the neighborhood, it was probably an easy decision for them,” he said.

Adams Morgan’s Porch Fest has become increasingly successful, the organizers said. The fall 2015 event brought some 4,000 to 5,000 people to the neighborhood to come watch artists such as street brass band Brass Connection, ska group The Captivators and electro-funk band Box Era, among nearly 40 others.

RIA Main Street, a nonprofit dedicated to redeveloping the Rhode Island Avenue business district, introduced its own porch fest in October 2014. With only about five porches and some overlap with other fall events during the first two years, the festival didn’t draw as many attendees as the organizers initially hoped for, said RIA Main Street executive director Kyle Todd. “We figured that maybe by the end of the summer and early fall, people were just festival’d out,” said Todd.

That changed this year when the group moved the festival to April and hired arts-focused event-planning company Recreative Spaces to organize it. Todd said their turnout tripled and estimated that 1,500 to 2,000 people came to the festival that stretched from Rhode Island Row near the Metro up to just east of South Dakota Avenue NE, at times filling the sidewalks to capacity. “Now that we know that we can attract that type of crowd in the spring, we’ll be prepared for that next year,” he said.

The organizers of all three festivals said they have not had to obtain permits for their events because they take place on private property and do not require road closures. Still, each one brings its own logistical and organizational challenges.

Zach Parkman, a three-time Takoma Park Porch Music Festival performer and an employee at Takoma Park’s House of Musical Traditions music store, agreed to take over for Ryan to organize this year’s festival. At first, the task seemed daunting, he said. “I’m very used to booking shows with maybe three bands, but 40 bands for four hours in a two-mile radius?” he said.

But he found his first primary obstacle was finding enough porches, rather than performers. After he reached out to last year’s hosts, though, almost all were willing to lend their porches or businesses again for a Saturday afternoon.

A more complicated challenge is “putting the right-sized band in the right-sized porch,” said Ryan. “Some porches are really little, and you don’t want to put a seven-person band there.” (With time off from organizing, Ryan will be performing this year in the singing ukelele-guitar duo, The Mary Ann and Dan Show.)

Todd, of RIA Main Street, made a similar distinction after watching various groups play along Rhode Island Avenue. The organizers found they should reserve larger commercial porches for higher-energy bands “with a more robust, vigorous following,” and residential porches for quieter performances to better manage the crowds, he said.

While Takoma Park’s porch fest sets a general volume limit—“please leave your drum sets and electric guitars at home,” the event’s website reads—Barden said Adams Morgan’s organizers ask bands to work with their hosts to determine the appropriate volume for their shows.

“It’s sort of self-policed in that regard,” though they have had surprisingly few sound complaints from hosts’ neighbors, Ackerman said.

Barden and Ackerman said they have tried to boost their festival’s visibility in the past by featuring some of the city’s “incredible talent,” such as brass bands and Afro-Brazilian drummers (Batalá Washington), on busy corners like the one on Columbia Road and 18th Street. Such efforts could potentially attract sponsors, which would allow them to better compensate the nearly 40 artists performing each fall, Ackerman said.

With limited funding for these events, sponsors have indeed made key contributions. Car-sharing company ZipCar donated two passenger vans this year for the afternoon to RIA Main Street to shuttle festival-goers to porches. Aside from the first year in Takoma Park, when Ryan used several hundred dollars in donations and some of her own money to print flyers, Whole Foods has donated money and supplied food for past festivals, and House of Musical Traditions will he helping to promote the event this year.

Money aside, D.C. area porch fest organizers all say their communities excel at coming together to collaborate on these grassroots events. Parkman said the rise of these events is part of a general “DIY resurgence” in the area.

“This is just a community outgrowth of that [attitude of], ‘Hey, we want to do something and we’re not going to wait for someone else to do it, we’re gonna do it ourselves,’” said Ackerman of Adams Morgan.

And by collaborating on successful porch fests, these neighborhoods can offer outsiders an opportunity to share some of their collective pride. “It’s a great way to invite people in from outside the community and feel like, for the afternoon, they’re part of that community,” Todd said.

The Fourth Annual Takoma Porch Festival takes place this Saturday, May 21, from 2-6p.m. Check out the websites for more information on future porch fests in the fall in Adams Morgan and in the spring near Rhode Island Avenue.