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Bleachers perch near the street beside an adjoining arch. A little way off sits a historical marker, just far enough away to make one wonder if the landmarks are all connected. Behind all this, a large field stretches on the Southern Illinois University Edwardsville campus, just off the entrance from New Poag Road. It’s crisscrossed with trails and gravel and paved runways.
Currently, this field is home to the East Side RC Club, and the arch belongs to SIUE cross country. However, it used to be part of the site of a music festival that drew more than 1 million attendees from 1969 to 1980. The Mississippi River Festival had its first concert at SIUE on June 20, 1969. Some of the acts in the multiweek festival would go on to play Woodstock just a few months later.
The Intelligencer reported on the festival that March, when it was announced as a partnership between SIUE and the St. Louis Symphony Society. SIUE’s Delyte Morris spearheaded the event.
“The St. Louis Symphony Orchestra will play concerts on Friday, Saturday and Sunday evenings under a huge white tent to be set up in a natural amphitheater used by the university as a site for commencement exercises,” the March 18, 1969, article said. “In addition to the weekend concerts, a series of top folk and pop artists has been scheduled for weekday appearances.”
The venue was designed to provide more than 10,000 people with an unobstructed view of the stage, and they weren’t overshooting. According to SIUE records, the first festival ran from June 20 through July 27, 1969, and more than 1,000 people attended each of the first six shows, including orchestra performances — not bad for an inaugural festival at a nascent university.
Later that first year, however, Iron Butterfly performed for a crowd of 12,735. Joan Baez performed for 11,042. Bob Dylan even made a surprise appearance to perform with his old group The Band.
“Folk singer Bob Dylan made his first live appearance in about two years last night,” the Intelligencer wrote on July 15, 1969. “The audience was small — about 4,000 people — but their demands for more music, extending the concert beyond the normal closing time, finally ended when festival officials doused the lights.”
The Mississippi River Festival would go on to host iconic acts like the Grateful Dead, Chicago, Ike & Tina Turner, B.B. King, the Beach Boys, Ella Fitzgerald, Bette Midler, James Taylor, Bob Hope and Dolly Parton.
Many acts returned across the years, and the St. Louis Symphony participated through 1977. ZZ Top closed out the festival for good on Aug. 23, 1980.
In 2024, Alton and REX Productions partnered to bring back the festival, a version of which has taken place over several days in the summers of 2024 and 2025. The historical marker, though, is an unassuming plaque just off an entrance to SIUE, honoring the legacy of the 1970s and the heyday of a culture that exists just in memories.
Guess What Glen-Ed? is a new Intelligencer series focused on the interesting, fun, mysterious, or just plain weird things that make Edwardsville and Glen Carbon unique. Got a tip? Reach out to features reporter Riley Hansen at [email protected].
