The Weakley County Examiner

Shannon Taylor

CEO/Publisher

When DJ Von took the stage during Martin’s inaugural Grassroots Soybean Festival, he brought with him a perspective few performers could offer. He had been part of the traditional Tennessee Soybean Festival before, including performing during the 2025 festival, and returned this year as the community tried something entirely different.

His assessment after the five-day festival was straightforward: it worked.

“I think it went very, very well,” Von said. “To be able to throw an independent festival, I think John Sellers and Martin’s Coffee and Bakery Company really did an amazing job to be able to put this together in a short amount of time.”

The inaugural Grassroots Soybean Festival was held Sept. 8-12, with much of the activity centered around Virginia Weldon Park. The independent event emerged following the cancellation of the traditional Tennessee Soybean Festival, leaving organizers with a relatively short window to build a new community festival from the ground up.

For Von, one of the biggest surprises was not simply that organizers pulled it together, but that the community responded.

“A lot of people came, a lot of vendors, a lot of different vibes, and I think it was pretty cool,” he said. “With it being his first ever thing, people still showed up and supported.”

Von did not view the Grassroots festival as an attempt to erase what the Tennessee Soybean Festival had meant to Martin. Instead, he saw it as a community response to the absence left behind this year.

“We would love to have Soybean back, but in the meantime and in between time, we couldn’t just have not have a festival,” Von said. “I’m glad that John and Martin’s Coffee Company put something together for the community.”

Von said several portions of the festival drew particularly strong crowds, with attendance remaining steady across the week’s different events.

“I think the church night was very huge,” Von said. “I think that Saturday was very huge as well. Friday was in between. It was pretty cool too. So each night or each day kind of brought a good nucleus of people.”

Weather presented one of the challenges organizers could not control. Rain interrupted portions of the outdoor entertainment throughout the week, including Von’s own performance Friday.

“You can never plan efficiently for weather. Weather’s gonna do what it’s gonna do,” he said. “Even my set got cut short 15 minutes on that Friday due to some rain.”

Despite the interruption, Von said organizers were able to adjust and the weather did not prevent people from supporting the festival.

One of the most noticeable differences in the Grassroots festival was its emphasis on performers, businesses and organizations with ties to Martin and the surrounding region. Von believes that was intentional and helped establish an identity for an event being created for the first time.

“We definitely did have some local and regional musicians that were part of the entertainment, and I believe that was possibly intentional,” he said. “To give people a real sense of community and a real sense of being grassroots. These are people that we see or know in everyday life, or we just know about them in a regional sense.”

Von has long resisted limiting himself to the label of a “local DJ,” but said being rooted in the community remains an important part of who he is.

“I’ve always tried to not label myself as a local DJ or anything like that, but being community based is what I really hang my hat on,” he said. “I feel like I am regional for sure, but I’m also local too.”

That same philosophy extended beyond the entertainment lineup.

Von said one of the things he appreciated most about the Grassroots festival was seeing locally owned businesses placed prominently within the event rather than operating around its edges.

“Oftentimes, the local businesses get the background roles, and this time local businesses were in the forefront,” Von said. “It was beautiful to see it be locally highlighted that this is something that we put together. This is something that is grassroots. This is something that really is close to home.”

The festival was backed by both public and private support. The Tennessee Department of Agriculture came aboard as a title sponsor with $25,000, while the City of Martin had previously approved $30,000 from tourism and hotel-motel tax funds to support the event, with expenditures subject to documentation.

Von said questions about how the state sponsorship was used and the details of the festival’s financial planning would be better answered by Sellers, who was directly involved in organizing the event.

The inaugural Soybean Parade also incorporated another piece of Martin history when the Weldon family was selected as grand marshal. With festival activities centered at Virginia Weldon Park, Von said recognizing the family was a fitting connection between the event and the place where much of it was held.

“I think it was just a good gesture to include the family of where the park would be, where the event would be held,” he said.

Whether Virginia Weldon Park becomes the permanent home of the Grassroots Soybean Festival or what the event could look like several years from now remains to be determined.

Von was reluctant to speculate about decisions that belong to the organizers, but after experiencing the first festival from the stage and among the community, he believes there is something worth building upon.

“I don’t know all those details, but I do know that what we had this year was very special,” Von said. “And who knows what the vision is over the next five years?”

For an event created during a year when Martin otherwise could have been left without its familiar September festival, Von said the first Grassroots Soybean Festival demonstrated something organizers could not guarantee beforehand: people were willing to show up for something new.

The name may have been different and the circumstances surrounding its creation unusual, but for Von, its strongest characteristic was exactly what organizers called it from the beginning: grassroots.