‘It’s a seed I’m planting’: How Catherine Morris willed BAMS Fest into life

With the help of a sympathetic English teacher, Morris wrote a letter to win a $2,500 sponsorship from Roche Bros. Supermarkets to renovate the station. So they had a space — a rinky-dink, “closet-sized” studio — and volunteers — dozens of students lined up to spin the new turntables the school purchased. “Everyone wanted to be a DJ,” she recalls. But there was a problem: She didn’t know how to run a radio show.

So Morris reached out to now-defunct Boston radio station WBOT-FM Hot 97.7, and asked to shadow their employees. She was a member of the Boys & Girls Clubs of Boston, and spun a story about writing a newsletter about the station for the club. The ruse got the 15-year-old in the door, but then Morris did the work: For an entire year she turned up at Hot 97.7 headquarters in Roxbury — sometimes after school, other times on the weekend — with a three-ring binder in hand to take notes.

As she watched, she learned valuable skills: how to schedule interviews with musicians, to ask for promotional material, and to speak clearly for the radio. Soon she developed a programming schedule for her school’s radio station that ran from 7 a.m. to 1 a.m. the next morning.

She also continued to develop her keen eye for the next stars. In 2001, she booked an interview with Maroon 5, a then little known band that would go on to win three Grammys and sell millions of albums.

Now 38, Morris is still putting those lessons from high school to work, both in her day job as director of arts and culture for The Boston Foundation, one of the largest community foundations in the nation, and in her passion project as the founder and artistic director of Boston Arts & Music Soul Festival, better known as BAMS Fest.

Morris founded the BAMS Fest organization in 2015. It aims to be more than a festival: It is also a nonprofit with a mission to break down racial and social barriers to arts, music, and culture across Greater Boston. And while putting on an event that since 2018 has drawn tens of thousands of attendees — and performers such as Eric Roberson and D Smoke — is far more complex than running a high school radio station, BAMS Fest is animated by the same daring, entrepreneurial spirit — and mission of belonging Morris unlocked all those years ago.

Now in its fifth year, the festival is not only persisting, it is expanding. For the first time, it will span multiple days this year, from June 22 to 24. Day One will be a conference for artists, with workshops on mapping early career pathways to success, balancing motherhood and music-making (Morris is a mother of a young child herself), brand-building, and more. The performances over the next two days are free to attend in Franklin Park and will feature musical acts including rap pioneer Grandmaster Flash, as well as local performers, dance lessons, area food and craft vendors, and visual arts showcases.

Morris says her motivation for creating the festival came from a sense that there were fewer and fewer spaces where Black Bostonians could find community and joy without feeling self-conscious, surveilled, or priced out. “The calling was to create more space where arts and culture — our arts and culture — can be experienced across the city, and that it’s not going to be in a traditional space,” she says.

The festival is trying to fill the gap as a free event curated by local people of color and performed by mostly local artists of color in front of a diverse, multigenerational audience. “Why not Boston? Why can’t Boston have that caliber of a festival? We have the talent. I run into that talent every day,” says Lanelle Sneed, an event and program manager for BAMS Fest. “Building culture is what makes people stay.”

Greater Boston has produced Black stars in the past, including Donna Summer and New Edition, and the area consistently attracts some of the most promising musical talent from around the world to its institutions. But with the cost of living sky high, artists often struggle just to survive in the city, let alone raise awareness and hype for their work.

“There are a lot of musicians scuffling to make that $100 for four or five, six hours of work. Incidentally, for musicians that [pay] has not changed, and I started singing 25 years ago,” says Valerie Stephens, who has played at BAMS Fest and been a full-time performer in Boston for 38 years. She’s unsure she can continue to afford living here.

Thousands of artists apply to be a part of BAMS Fest’s lineup each year. Where other music festivals choose performers who yield maximum profitability and name recognition, BAMS Fest values community building first and foremost.

“I’m not looking for cover bands,” Morris tells artists. “I’m looking for your music, your voice.”

In high school, Morris didn’t stop with the radio station. She sensed deep racial division at Lincoln-Sudbury, so, with the backing of the school’s principal, she created what looks in retrospect like a proto-BAMS Fest. It was a quarterly showcase of Black Metco students’ experiences through the arts, called Universal Rhythm.

James Buford, a former classmate who’s now a fashion designer, says Morris is a “natural born planner.” The showcase had a logo, fliers, banners, and a budget — all of which were created by students. Morris would often bring paint and art supplies from home for posters. “She’s always been the type to invest her own dollar, her own energy, her own time, into ensuring that something came to life,” Buford says. She also set the expectation that everyone in the show would rehearse their acts, both at school and at home, and she wasn’t afraid to critique all aspects of her classmates’ performances in the pursuit of quality. “What are you guys going to wear?” Buford remembers her asking. “Is that going to work with the light?”

Universal Rhythm became so popular that students from all backgrounds clamored to see the show. In 2002, so many students squeezed into the 100-seat black box theater that those who sat in the aisles had to be escorted out because they posed a fire hazard.

“What the Metco kids brought to Lincoln-Sudbury was a certain type of rhythm that the school’s culture was lacking,” Buford says. “It never really had a place until Catherine put something together.”

And Morris pulled off all kinds of other events: a basketball game played by radio DJs and other local celebrities, a hip-hop dance class, poetry slams. But Morris says Universal Rhythm was the ultimate confirmation to her that she “was working toward something.”

She found out what that was when she attended Temple University in Philadelphia. In the mid-2000s, the city boasted talent like Jill Scott, Musiq Soulchild, and The Roots. Morris got involved in the arts scene through internships at the Rhythm & Blues Foundation, and later with the Philadelphia mayor’s office, where she got firsthand experience in planning the Welcome America Festival, a weeklong Independence Day celebration with a million visitors. “I remember saying to myself, This is actually what I want to do — festivals!” Morris recalls.

Coming home to Boston, she thought, We don’t have anything like Philly, and Philly is our sister city. We’re looking ugly out here, so I want to start one.

In 2016, Morris found herself pitching BAMS Fest, which she’d recently founded, to three angel investors. She was pursuing a master’s degree in management from Simmons College (now Simmons University). As part of her course load, she took a business plan writing course that culminated in a pitch competition. “It’s a long road through vision, marketing, financials, and operations — she just chopped her way through it week after week,” recalls professor Teresa Nelson. “She was sure about what she was building in BAMS Fest.” On the day of the pitch competition, the investors named Morris the winner. “They had never expected to fund a nonprofit,” Nelson continues, “but she was the best.”

To get her nonprofit off the ground, Morris invested $22,000 of her personal savings — for rentals, paying artists, marketing materials, and more. “The fastest $22,000 that was ever spent,” she says.

Morris assembled a small team of volunteers who believed in her vision. The number fluctuated — sometimes just four, sometimes as many as 13 — because they mostly weren’t paid, except when Morris could find something in the razor-thin budget. They would stay up late together in their rented Dorchester office, planning and eating “so much Domino’s it was horrible,” Morris says.

“We are a family,” says Tim Hall, a saxophonist and assistant professor of professional music at Berklee, who would go on to help plan the first three BAMS Fests. “Even though we might not have been paid a ton, the benefit was the people in our community feeling validated by what we were doing.”

In BAMS Fest’s early days, Morris hustled, grassroots-marketing style, to get her vision in front of community members, especially elders who remembered Black Boston’s live music scene at its most vibrant. She had countless lunches and dinners, showed up at churches, and walked dogs with folks just to get their ears. “No one knew me from a can of worms,” she says, “but they believed in what I was building.”

Morris’ staff might have been volunteers, but they also had to believe. Hall recalls Morris calling on her staffers at meetings and making them recite the BAMS Fest mission statement by heart.

For the first three years, between 2015 and 2018, the team curated small events all over Greater Boston: panel discussions, live shows, art exhibitions, poetry readings. They were growing their organization’s audience, but also proving its legitimacy to decision makers in city government. Morris wanted to bring her festival to Franklin Park, and they had the power to decide whether she could.

Morris says the first time she scheduled a meeting with the city’s Special Events Committee and the Parks and Recreation Department, her idea was rejected as too ambitious. “I’ll be back,” she told them. And she did come back the next year, by which time she had revised her plan and her organization’s reputation had grown.

This time, she got the green light. She was coming to Franklin Park.

The date of the first festival — a one-day event on June 23, 2018 — was fast approaching when two major problems appeared. First, the weather forecast was terrible, rainy and unseasonably cold. And second, it began to look as if the headliner wouldn’t be able to make it. The mother of Kindred the Family Soul frontwoman Aja Graydon-Dantzler had died.

“She was very distraught,” says Morris, who scrambled for a backup plan. “I must have called everyone I knew in the music business, like ‘Can you make some calls? Do you know anyone who can come to Boston on short notice?’”

But at the last minute, Kindred the Family Soul came through. Morris attributes that to the outpouring of love from Bostonians on social media when Graydon-Dantzler announced her mother’s death, as well as the relationship she and the husband-and-wife musicians had developed.

Despite the rain, about 2,200 people showed up. After Kindred the Family Soul’s performance, audience members hugged Graydon-Dantzler and gave her flowers, while Morris’ mother, Betsy, and the rest of her family gathered around to pray over her. BAMS Fest team members made Graydon-Dantzler a gift basket to show their support.

One of the audience members that day was Morris’ longtime friend Mike Watts. “It was an amazing day,” he recalls. “I told her this is what she needs to do.”

To Morris, the day was deeply emotional. At one point, she looked out at the crowd “in their ponchos, in their rain jackets, under umbrellas, with their BAMS Fest hoodies” and felt like they were giving her a message: We’re here because you said this was going to happen and you made it happen.

But Morris was just getting started. In 2019, festival attendance increased to 6,500 people. When COVID derailed the in-person festival the next year, Morris and Co. took a break to reimagine it and set new goals. They were back in 2021 with a virtual lineup of performances that garnered 80,000 views from as far away as the UK and Ghana. Then there was the big return to Franklin Park last year, when more than 10,000 people showed up.

Morris’ goal for 2023 is 15,000 to 18,000 attendees. She is already aware of people flying in from Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., Texas, and Sacramento to experience BAMS Fest, which is building on its utility by adding a conference. Morris says she included this component in an attempt to create “a knowledge-passing mechanism” between Boston artists to instill a sense of community and solidarity that will encourage them to stick around.

Also on stage at the inaugural BAMS Fest was Valerie Stephens, who calls the festival “a gift to the city.” She says she doesn’t get invited to perform at many music festivals, so getting on that stage in front of all those spectators made her realize “people care. They’re hearing me even though I might not be mainstream. I’m appreciated for my vision and my approach to art.”

The festival had marked results on Stephens’ professional prospects, too. She says after her performance she’s been getting more attention from a wider audience that is “more multigenerational, artistic, and politically involved.”

This month, another staple of the Black Boston arts scene celebrates an anniversary: Roxbury International Film Festival is turning 25.

Lisa Simmons, artistic and executive director of Roxbury International Film Festival, is well aware of how difficult and essential the work she and Morris do is for the community. “It’s important that there are festivals that are curated by people of color for people of color,” she says. “Everyone’s invited to the party, but I do think it’s nice to be able to have that space, so that people feel agency to be there.”

A big part of this, Morris says, is compensating artists fairly. “It’s always been important that you’ve got to meet people where they are,” Morris says. Oftentimes around tax season, artists even call her asking for advice on how to file. To date, BAMS Fest has supported more than 650 artists and creatives.

According to Simmons, Morris’ attention to artist compensation is important to dispelling perceptions that “Black organizations have some sort of reputation of not paying.”

“There’s a lot of nuances, especially when you’re dealing with your people, when you’re dealing with a community that has been overlooked, that has been marginalized, where there’s been a lack of standards setting around what a festival is,” Morris says. “A festival is a city within a city: it has resources, it has safe space, it has outlets, it builds community. It leaves an impression and hires people, provides jobs, safety, and basic needs.”

All of this expansion has been made possible by the strong sponsorships Morris has built over the years. The festival’s benefactors include The Boston Foundation, Mass Cultural Council, Mass Humanities, The New Commonwealth Fund, and the Mayor’s Office of Arts and Culture.

Morris says BAMS Fest keeps tabs on about 600 artists, but not all of them are ready to perform at an event on the scale of the festival itself. “BAMS Festival is a graduation. You have to work for it,” she says. “Any artist who has ever applied, most of the time is artists that we know, that we’ve been watching for a year.” Some local up-and-comers getting a shot at this year’s festival include Nate Nics, kei, and Notebook P.

For those who don’t make the cut, Morris says her team starts asking, “What opportunities can we create, or that we have, that will build their confidence, that will help them build their business, that will help them cast a wider net?” Those opportunities range from panels to smaller shows to workshops. Over time, Morris says the goal is to build personal relationships with the artists she scouts, checking in on them and celebrating their accomplishments, which means “anytime now that I pick up the phone,” they’ll answer.

Growth has been happening internally for the festival as well. This past year was the first time Morris paid herself a salary for her BAMS Fest work. A number of paid roles have also been added to the festival’s staff, including a new managing director, Paul Willis. Being able to properly compensate people, Morris says, brought her to tears. “I cried because I never thought I’d see this day.”

One of the folks now on staff in a part-time role is program manager Lanelle Sneed, who started as a fan of BAMS Fest, then became a volunteer before being hired during the pandemic. She had gotten laid off from her job as an engineer and credits her work with BAMS Fest for helping her “find a different passion.”

Kara Elliott-Ortega, the mayor’s chief of arts and culture, believes it is “hugely important to showcase BIPOC artists in a public space like Franklin Park.” She adds that “spaces aren’t truly public until we feel welcome there, like we can be ourselves, and truly relax and enjoy each other and our culture. BAMS is actively creating that sense of belonging.”

And Morris’ plans for Franklin Park keep getting bigger and bigger. She envisions a future where BAMS Fest is “a 300-acre festival that’s centered around Blackness, and creativity, and imagination, and it’s happening in one of the deemed ‘racist’ cities of the country, and somehow we’ve been able to carve that out.”

The park is dear to Morris’ heart because it is where the Boston cultural icon Elma Lewis held her Playhouse in the Park performance series in the 1960s and ‘70s, featuring artists including Duke Ellington, Billy Taylor, and Odetta. Lewis cultivated it as a site of Black joy, even leading a campaign to clean up the neglected park. Morris hopes to leave the same kind of mark on Boston.

Her goal is for arts and culture to no longer be seen as “a novelty,” but rather “a necessity.” For Morris, that change looks like simplifying the permitting processes required to put on large-scale events, creating direct, public revenue streams for the arts, building more housing for artists, and developing more defined pathways for young people hoping to work in the creative economy.

“There’s these very subliminal glass ceilings about what Boston’s capable of becoming,” she says. She wants to help break those, but knows she can’t do it all. “It’s a seed I’m planting, but how that seed grows is all the nutrients and love the community gives to it,” she says. “It can either have substantial life or it can fall to the wayside.”

After a quarter century in the game, Simmons of the Roxbury Film Festival knows a thing or two about longevity. “If you’re doing the work to get noticed or recognized, it’s not going to last,” she says. “You want a legacy that lives on because of the importance of it.”

When I met Morris at her office in Fields Corner on a recent Saturday, I found her 5-year-old son, Fredrick, hiding under a table, making himself as small as possible. He doesn’t want to come out, but Morris coaxes him into shaking my hand. He has the same kind, searching eyes as his mother.

Though Fredrick met me hesitantly, soon he was comfortable, showing off how fast he can run and flashing a wide smile that’s missing a few teeth.

“The moment I found out I was pregnant, I made a decision I was going to raise him in the arts,” Morris says, “so he can constantly know that his imagination is infinite. He can do whatever he wants.”

When she gave birth to Fredrick, she stepped away from BAMS Fest for the first and only time — for a week and a half. She views them as metaphorical siblings: BAMS Fest is Morris’ first child and, like Fredrick, she knows one day it will outgrow her.

“It’s just a matter of who is going to be out here and supporting the infrastructure so this outlives me. So that this young man can benefit from it, and all his friends,” she says, as Frederick naps on her chest.

But that’s in the future. For now, he still needs his mother.

Dates: June 22-24

Location: Franklin Park

Cost: The festival for the most part is free. But there’s a cost for some events, including the BAMS CONX conference, and there are some paid options for seating.

Details: For the schedule, ticket options, and directions, visit bamsfest.org

To volunteer: Visit bamsfest.org/volunteer by June 19

Julian E.J. Sorapuru is a Development Fellow at the Globe and can be reached at julian.sorapuru@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @JulianSorapuru