The 51st Annual Newport Folk Festival lineup was announced and will include Steve Martin, Swell Season, Jim James, Levon Helm, Brandi Carlile, Sharon Jones, and many, many more. The event will take place at Newport, R.I. on July 30, July 31 and August 1, 2010. Tickets go on sale at newportfolkfest.net on Friday, March 26.

Actor Steve Martin will take the stage and he will be playing the banjo with the band Steep Canyon Rangers. Levon Helm, from the Band, will be performing his Midnight Ramble. Richie Havens, who wowed the crowd at Woodstock 41 years ago, will demonstrate that he still has 'it'. Another talent appearing is Tao Rodriguez-Seeger, the grandson of Pete Seeger.http://music-mix.ew.com/2010/03/24/newport-folk-festival-2010-lineup/

The Newport Folk Festival is an annual music festival that highlights a variety of folk, blues and rock musicians from around the world. Started in 1959, the Newport Folk Festival is held each year in Newport, Rhode Island.

One of the most famous performances in the history of the Newport Folk Festival occurred in 1965 when Bob Dylan performed with electric instruments for the first time in his career. While Dylan was heavily criticized within the Folk community for supposedly abandoning his Folk roots, the performance is often cited by historians as one of the seminal moments in both the genres of Folk and Rock.

In the early years of the Newport Folk Festival, the talent came from anyone and anywhere. In the fifties and sixties, folk music was not recognized as a mainstream art form. It was left to the political extremists, the beatniks and the college undergraduates. So, rather than the big headliners the Festival draws now, the music featured "musicians fetched from forests, front porches, five-dollars-a-night tin-roofed Mississippi barrel-houses, lefties found wandering the vast cement canyons of NYC, blue grassers rescued from country music oblivion and tour buses packed to the roof with ethnic singers and dancers".http://farinafiles1.tripod.com/id22.htm

The festival's heyday occurred in the mid-1960s when such musical luminaries as Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Johnny Cash and Howlin' Wolf gave some of their best known performances. After a decrease in interest during the 1970's (no festival was held between 1971 and 1984), it was revived in 1985 and has continued uninterrupted through the present.