[3] Historical Spring Weekend acts include Bob Dylan (1964 and 1997), Ella Fitzgerald (1965), Ray Charles (1967), James Brown (1968), Bruce Springsteen (1974), U2 (1983), R.E.M.

In 1967, the festival featured Peter, Paul and Mary, Ray Charles, and Jefferson Airplane; Martin Luther King Jr., in Providence on other business, preached at the Sunday morning Protestant service held in Sayles Hall.

"[7] Ira Magaziner, an organizer of the event wrote of the festival "We had James Brown, Dionne Warwick, Procol Harum, the Yardbirds and Dizzy Gillespie; for the poetry crowd we had Allen Ginsberg and Lawrence Ferlinghett... To launch the event, we chartered a small airplane to fly over the college green and dump thousands of colored ping pong balls stamped with WELCOME SPRING WEEKEND.

"[8] 1969 headliners included Janis Joplin, who, according to The Brown Daily Herald, "Hunching, jumping, lunging at the microphone, stamping, clawing the air, the Blue-Eyed Soul Sister electrified an audience she huskily called ‘groovy.’”[9] Gordon Lightfoot, Smokey Robinson, Carlos Montoya and Herbie Mann also performed.

[1] Artists featured in the 1990s include A Tribe Called Quest (1992), Indigo Girls (1995), Bob Dylan (1997), Sonic Youth (1998), Busta Rhymes and Common (1999).

[10][11] Headliners in the 2010s included Snoop Dogg (2010), Childish Gambino (2012), Kendrick Lamar (2013), Chance the Rapper (2014), Mac DeMarco (2016), Young Thug (2017), and Mitski (2019).

The Brown Concert Agency did not publicly announce which artists were scheduled to perform at the 2020 festival, although an unsubstantiated rumor purported the lineup to include Doja Cat.