Richmond Folk Festival tribute will celebrate the R&B and neo soul legend with performances by a stage full of hometown friends, mentors and those carrying the torch forward

By Tina Eshleman

Photo Courtesy of Roquai via Wikimedia Commons

Michael Eugene Archer, better known as D’Angelo, was an international superstar — a Grammy-winning singer, songwriter, record producer and neo soul pioneer who was named one of Rolling Stone’s “Greatest Singers of All Time.” Though his albums were few and far between, they are widely considered masterpieces.

He was also a son of Richmond, Virginia, who was shaped by and later influenced the community where he grew up. After he passed away from pancreatic cancer on Oct. 14, 2025, he was laid to rest in a cemetery along the James River, a defining landmark of his native city.

With that same river as a backdrop, fellow Richmond musicians will pay tribute to D’Angelo during a 90-minute show at this year’s Richmond Folk Festival, marking the one-year anniversary of his death. Titled “Soul of the City: Richmond Celebrates D’Angelo,” the show will take place on Saturday, Oct. 10, at 5 p.m. on the Center for Cultural Vibrancy Stage in the Allianz Amphitheater at Riverfront.

“If you are from Richmond, if you’re from Virginia, you should look at his output and his career with pride, because it isn’t like his music came out of nowhere,” says Josh Kohn, associate director of Charlottesville-based nonprofit the Center for Cultural Vibrancy, which helps program Virginia artists for the festival. “It sounds like it came from a place, and that place is Richmond.”

The idea for a tribute came about when organizers realized that, while a private memorial service was held last fall — featuring performances by Stevie Wonder and D’Angelo’s former bands The Soultronics and The Vanguard — there had not been a big, public celebration of D’Angelo’s music in Richmond.

“The festival felt like the right spot to do something like this,” Kohn says, “a place where it was free to access for anybody and could accommodate large crowds, where we could be together to let this Richmond artistic genius’ music wash over us.”

Kia Bennett and Randall Cort, two contemporaries of D’Angelo who knew him since he was a teenager, are curating the tribute, and Bennett will act as the program’s emcee. A jazz, soul and R&B singer, Bennett is a featured artist on fellow Richmonder Mad Skillz’s “Words for Days, Vol. 1” spoken word poetry album that won a Grammy this year. Cort is a National Endowment for the Arts National Heritage Fellow and former drummer for the Richmond-based gospel group The Legendary Ingramettes.

As students at George Wythe High School for the Arts, Bennett and Cort were rivals of D’Angelo at a citywide talent show called the JFK Talent Showcase, where he represented Huguenot High School. The show was coordinated by Bill McGee, a trumpet player and longtime music educator who became a mentor for D’Angelo, Bennett, Cort and many other local musicians.

Bennett remembers D’Angelo as shy and unassuming. She graduated in 1994 and went off to Howard University, while he left school to pursue his music career. The next year, they both returned for a reunion talent show. He heard her rehearsing En Vogue’s “My Lovin’ (You’re Never Gonna Get It)” a cappella with her girls group 4Pleazure and said he liked their sound. He asked if they wanted to work with him.

“This was very early on in his career. He told us that he was coming out with his album ‘Brown Sugar,’” Bennett says. The group agreed, not realizing they would have a chance to work with a legend in the making.

Not long afterward, D’Angelo called Bennett when he was in Washington, D.C., for the Million Man March on Oct. 16, 1995, and told her, “Kia, it’s time. Do you really want to do this?”

She did. Bennett temporarily withdrew from college and, along with the rest of her group, traveled to Teaneck, New Jersey. For a couple of months, they lived with D’Angelo and his partner at the time, singer-songwriter and record producer Angie Stone, and learned backing vocals for his songs, then accompanied him on promotional appearances for his album.

“Angie taught all the background parts, and she was very meticulous,” Bennett says, adding that one takeaway from the experience was realizing harmony could share the spotlight as a dominant vocal part. “The first background vocals I learned were for ‘Me and Those Dreamin’ Eyes of Mine.’”

While she was there, Bennett had a chance to observe D’Angelo watching his first appearance on “Soul Train” on television: “From that time, I realized this guy is kind of big.”

In addition to the high school talent shows, Cort knew D’Angelo as part of a circle of musicians who played music in Richmond-area churches. D’Angelo, whose father was a Pentecostal preacher, had started playing piano by ear at age 3.

“D’Angelo brought the church to the R&B,” Cort says. For the Ingramettes, “I feel like it’s the same way. We take the church to the R&B because a lot of times, we don’t perform in churches.”

In an interview with talk show host Tavis Smiley in 2015, after the release of the album “Black Messiah,” D’Angelo spoke about the Ingramettes being a major influence on his early musical development, along with Prince, the Bee Gees and Walter Hawkins.

“There was a local group from Richmond, they were a quartet group named Maggie Ingram and the Ingramettes,” he told Smiley, “and they sang way up high in the high register. They were awesome.”

Photo Courtesy of Douglas Fron via Wikimedia Commons

Cort recalls running into D’Angelo on Main Street in Richmond after the release of “Brown Sugar.”

“He had a bunch of people with him and he came over to me and was like, ‘Hey,

Randall, how’re you doing? I didn’t think that he remembered,” Cort says. “At that point, I was playing with the Ingramettes and he always wanted to do something with the Ingramettes.”

Cort stayed in contact with D’Angelo’s cousin, Marlon Cox, a singer and guitarist who had played in church bands with D’Angelo, to arrange a collaboration on a record, but schedules never aligned before Cox died in 2023.

Bennett and Cort last saw D’Angelo at Cox’s funeral on Richmond’s South Side, where they all grew up. At the funeral, Bennett was struck by how the music she heard connected to D’Angelo’s sound.

“D’Angelo was the only one that reached out of the bubble to do it, but the whole family has that same Southern soul quartet, funk, R&B sound. It’s a mixture of everything,” she says. “He showed us that you can make it from Richmond, living your dreams.”

Joining Cort and Bennett at the Richmond Folk Festival tribute will be their mutual mentor Bill McGee, who is serving as the show’s creative director. Besides Bennett, singers include Shawn Chappelle from her former group 4Pleazure, along with JayWhit, B Musiq, Rodney Stith, Corey El and Sam Reed.

Musicians will include Cort on drums, McGee on trumpet, Frank Perkins on bass, Rudy Faulkner on vocals and percussion, James Gates on horns, Lance Dickerson on keys, Charles Newton on trombone and Chris Beasley, Carl Lester and Jared Pool on guitar.

All of the participants perform currently in Richmond, Bennett says. “They all have their own successful following.”

Cort says the Ingramettes will also make an appearance, and there will be other surprises. The set will be entirely made up of D’Angelo songs in chronological sequence, demonstrating his enduring influence on modern soul, R&B and jazz music in Richmond and beyond.

“I wanted people who I don’t have to tell what it was like,” Cort says. “I wanted people who felt it, touched it, saw him.” Adds Bennett, “We’re here to tell the story through music.”

Photo Courtesy of Jago via Wikimedia Commons

“Soul of the City: Richmond Celebrates D’Angelo” will take place at the Richmond Folk Festival on Saturday, Oct. 10, at 5 p.m. on the Center for Cultural Vibrancy Stage at the Allianz Amphitheater at Riverfront.