Jeb Puryear is the architect of one of Upstate New York’s most enduring contributions to American roots music. As co-founder of both Donna the Buffalo and the Finger Lakes GrassRoots Festival of Music and Dance, the Trumansburg, New York, guitarist has spent more than three decades building a musical ecosystem in the Finger Lakes region that blends community, activism, and genre-defying Americana into something entirely its own.
Donna the Buffalo
Puryear co-founded Donna the Buffalo in 1989 with fiddler and accordionist Tara Nevins in Trumansburg, a small village south of Ithaca. The band’s name was an accident — a friend suggested “Dawn of the Buffalo,” which was misheard — but the music was deliberate from the start. Puryear’s electric guitar and Nevins’s fiddle anchored a sound that pulled from zydeco, calypso, old-time Appalachian music, and rock, creating a groove-oriented Americana that was built for dancing. Over 35 years, Donna the Buffalo has toured relentlessly, building a devoted fanbase known as “The Herd” — a self-organized community of followers who travel to shows, support charitable causes, and embody the band’s ethos of loyalty, generosity, and musical curiosity.
GrassRoots Festival
Just two years after forming Donna the Buffalo, Puryear launched the Finger Lakes GrassRoots Festival of Music and Dance in Trumansburg in 1991, borrowing $5,000 to get it started. What began as a small benefit — originally supporting AIDS awareness — grew into one of the region’s signature cultural events, drawing over 15,000 attendees annually by the 2010s. Donna the Buffalo serves as the host band, and the festival’s multi-genre programming reflects Puryear’s vision of music as a community act rather than a commercial product. The concept proved so successful that it expanded to Shakori Hills GrassRoots in North Carolina.
A Finger Lakes Institution
Puryear’s legacy is inseparable from Trumansburg and the Finger Lakes. He didn’t just build a band and a festival — he built an infrastructure for roots music in a region that didn’t have one.