City bids farewell to summer at festival

The city of Rocky Mount said goodbye to the summer in go-go style.

At its fourth annual End of Summer Celebration held Saturday at Martin Luther King Jr. Park, city leaders brought back The Junkyard Band for the live music.

The evening also featured fun for all ages with food trucks, bouncy houses and a bubble pool foam pit that were popular attractions for area youth.

Signed by Def Jam Records in the 1980s, the Junkyard Band has performed at New York’s Apollo Theater, the John F. Kennedy Center for Performing Arts and has opened for Tupac Shakur, Lauryn Hill and Chuck Brown.

The evening of music, food and children’s activities was heralded as a “go-go festival” in celebration of the vibrant go-go music scene, a subgenre of funk music that became popular in the 1960s and ’70s.