A collaborative project between Mercer and Northeastern universities has revealed a surprising commonality among attendees of a revived music festival: life trauma. Now, the research team plans to use its data to help connect mental health agencies to music communities in need of services.
Dr. Nathan Myrick, assistant professor of church music at Mercer, and Dr. Andrew Mall, associate professor of music at Northeastern, are ethnomusicologists who study the cultural and social contexts of music. They teamed up in 2019 when they learned Furnace Fest was returning for a 20-year reunion.
Furnace Fest – a three-day event featuring a lineup of Christian and secular musicians in the hardcore metal/rock/punk genre – was held annually from 2000 to 2003 in Birmingham, Alabama. Although the festival was not presented as a religious event, it was associated with the Christian community.
With Myrick’s research focused on religious communities and Dr. Mall’s research focused on festivals in quasi-religious communities, the project was a perfect combination of their research interests and a unique opportunity to study the effects of nostalgia and marketing affinity group and get a sociological snapshot of a community, Dr. Myrick said.
The 2000s and 2010s saw a large-scale outing of the Christian faith and evangelical Christianity from Generation X and millennials, including many Furnace Fest attendees, Dr. Myrick said. Nonetheless, news of the festival’s revival sparked an enthusiastic response from previous attendees, who formed an active and close-knit online community. Dr. Myrick was curious to know what these former participants were doing now and why they were still interested in this festival.
“Demographically, 80% grew up in some sort of Christian community, and 75% no longer went to church or identified as Christian or religious, and yet they wanted to return to this historically populated holiday. Christian music groups,” he said.
Delayed for a year due to COVID-19, Furnace Fest returned in 2021 and far exceeded expectations with 10,000 attendees. Dr. Myrick and Dr. Mall interviewed audience members during the event, and one of their questions was why people initially became involved in the Furnace Fest community.
“The universal response was to respond with some sort of trauma story – some terrible thing that had happened to them or some sort of crisis of identity or faith,” Dr. Myrick said. “It’s really unusual to have an entire community open to you like that. It took us a few days to realize that this was what held this community together, this shared expectation of traumatic experiences.
Wanting to learn more, the professors returned to the festival the following three years with student research assistants from Mercer and Northeastern. In total, eight students contributed to the project. A clinical psychologist from Northeastern also joined the team for the 2024 festival.
Drs. Myrick and Mall adapted ethnographic methods typically used in political and social sciences to align with their project goals as ethnomusicologists. Their collaborative research model involving faculty and students from two institutions is unique in the field and has gained notoriety, Dr. Myrick said.
Dr. Myrick, Mercer 2024 graduate Jos Arbaugh, and Mercer sophomore Hannah Dixon presented their research on a panel at the annual meeting of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music in April 2024, and the research team was invited to write a paper on their methodology for the journal Ethnomusicology.
Before and after the festivals, surveys were emailed to attendees. As the events unfolded, the team interviewed audience members between sets or while they waited in line. For the 2024 event, they also conducted a mental health needs assessment in a Mercer-branded tent. Their work was supported by grants from Mercer, Northeastern and the Music and Entertainment Industry Educators Association.
Dixon, a music and media studies double major and lover of punk rock, discovered the research opportunity when she met Dr. Myrick during Heritage Scholars Weekend before becoming a student at Mercer. During the 2023 festival, which was her first live concert experience, she interviewed attendees and focused on the theme of kindness and support. For the 2024 event, she spoke with people inside the Mercer tent. She is currently working on a video essay about her experiences and the mental health aspect of research.
“It got really deep and heavy,” Dixon said of the interviews. “It was an incredible learning experience. »
Attending the festival allowed Dixon to know and better understand the Furnace Fest community. Dixon said she felt included and welcomed there, and saw how moshing, crowd-surfing and stage-diving are methods of connecting for this community.
“Folk punk has my heart,” said Arbaugh, who contributed to the project and graduated in May with a degree in psychology. “I’ve been into the punk scene since I started college. I got into the hardcore punk scene and going to Furnace Fest really expanded what I was listening to in that genre.
Arbaugh had only attended a few concerts before becoming involved in the research project and has now seen more than 100 bands in concert at Furnace Fest and other shows. Furnace Fest introduced them to a community of friends who loved the music genre and gave them the courage to attend concerts locally and in other states.
Before the 2022 festival, the research team kept a journal of the themes of posts on the Furnace Fest Facebook page and did preliminary research, Arbaugh said. Arbaugh interviewed audience members at the 2022 show and spent the 2023 event primarily observing for his research paper, focused on gender presentation on the festival stage. They presented their research at BEAR Day and to Drexel University students in the spring.
“I just loved being able to pursue my own interests as it relates to Furnace Fest,” Arbaugh said.
Furnace Fest’s key demographic is people from rural areas, the Rust Belt, the Midwest, and Appalachia, and these are some of the regions with the least access to mental health care and financial support for these services, Dr. Myrick said.
“With the mental health needs assessment, we were trying to find a way to connect people in these types of communities with the mental health professionals who can give them the care they need,” said the Dr. Myrick. “The punk/hardcore/emo/metal communities in the United States are populated by people dealing with some kind of trauma. These are people trying to cope with something that has been deemed detrimental to their emotional state.
The 2024 festival was supposed to be the last event, but it was announced in November that it would return in fall 2025. Furnace Fest has transformed into a place of safety and empathy for participants, and researchers hope their data can be used to help solve the problem. to the mental health needs of this community. They have been working with some mental health agencies, analyzing their data and will apply for grants to help make connections to provide mental health care where it is needed.
“It’s about making mental health care more accessible and raising awareness that mental health is a topic that needs to be talked about,” Dixon said. “I hope that if people can access more mental health care, they will understand how important it is to get help and seek out people. People need people.
This research could open the door to similar initiatives for other musical communities. Some initial ideas include increasing awareness and access to mobile advice trucks and telehealth sessions, Dr. Myrick said.
This festival has provided support for many people, but people shouldn’t have to look for a special stage to find that, Arbaugh said. Arbaugh believes this research project could help bring mental health support and resources outside of this “little bubble of a niche music genre.”
“I would like to see the stigma around mental health disappear,” Arbaugh said. “If people didn’t have to be ‘othered’ and pushed out of their original space to get help, I think it would be an ideal world.”
On a broader level, this research also shows the role that churches can play as a place of health, healing and support for their congregants. For many Furnace Fest attendees, it was the opposite and they viewed the church as the source of their trauma. If properly defined, religious and musical worship can become a space for people to express, acknowledge and cope with their trauma, Dr. Myrick said.
“How does the Church respond to these kinds of people, and what does this research have to offer churches across the country to better meet the needs of people struggling with mental health issues?” We all face some sort of trauma. If you’ve lived long enough, you’ve seen some things. Churches and communities tend to function better when this is emphasized,” he said.
Additionally, the research project shows how important emotional or affective processing is for people who have experienced trauma.
“Music is also a very important aspect of effective storytelling, which allows you to express your feelings in some sort of organized and meaningful story,” he said. “I think if churches can recognize and embrace that, we hope to have a much better, healthier, more healing music ministry in our congregations. »
