Crowds from South Carolina and the Southeast joined in Five Points to mark the 42nd annual St. Pat’s in Five Points festival on Saturday, the biggest one-day St. Patrick's Day celebration in the Southeast.
This year’s festival featured its largest lineup, with over 40 local and regional bands performing. Headline acts included Lawrence, The War and Treaty, Futurebirds, Sister Hazel and Conner Smith.
With five different stages, the festival's lineup incorporated a variety of genres, such as reggae, country, pop, soul, indie and rock.
Bands that had previously never performed in Columbia came to leave an impact on listeners. HAPPY LANDING, a folk rock band from Oxford, Mississippi, said in coming to Columbia, they wanted to celebrate St. Patrick's Day by gaining new fans.
“We definitely want to build our audience in Columbia,” Matty Hendley, the lead vocalist and one of the guitarists, said. “(The festival) is a really great opportunity to do it for the Columbia crowd, and so we can come back on tour here.”
Jessica Evans, a fourth-year sport and entertainment management student, said the best part of the festival was watching Futurebirds, an indie rock band from Athens, Georgia.
“We always love when Futurebirds comes to Columbia,” Evans said. “A lot of (my) friends are big fans of them, and I just think it’s always a good time.”
Some fans said they were excited about the bands they came to the festival for. The Stews, a rock band from Auburn, Alabama, generated a tightly packed crowd and loud atmosphere that USC School of Medicine student Jackson Salley described as “electric.”
“For a post-modern rock band, they’re bringing it back to where (music) needs to be, which is just head banging, guitar riffs, just soulful stuff,” Salley said.
For USC students, the annual festival provides an opportunity to party with their community and make more friends, Matthew McIntyre, a fourth-year real estate student said.
“I think everyone can come out here and feel comfortable,” McIntyre said. “It’s a great event for everyone to come out and meet new people.”
The event kickstarted with the Get to the Green road race at 7:30 a.m., which included a 10K, 5K and a 1-mile family run. The festival opened to the crowd at 10 a.m., when onlookers could watch the St. Pat’s Parade along Devine Street, filled with fancy cars, floats and people marching down the street celebrating the Irish.
Dozens of local and regional vendors came to set up shop around Five Points. Karen Atkinson, owner of High Point, North Carolina-based dessert shop The Kid In Me Tastee Treats, came to the festival in hopes of growing her business. She said she wanted her first time selling at the festival to be an opportunity to engage with the community.
“(I want to) be able to just meet a lot of different people, people that, of course, I've never seen before,” Atkinson said. “Get a chance to get our business out there so people are aware of who we are, where we are and what we do."
While the high temperatures made it feel like summer instead of spring, Five Points was filled with students, families and fans from all over who came to celebrate and have a good time.