Soul Beach Music Festival celebrates 19 years in Aruba

ARUBA (WTVD) -- As summer unofficially kicked off on Memorial Day weekend, thousands of people from the United States and across the world flocked to Aruba for Soul Beach Music Festival 2019.

The 6-day event featured world-renowned musical artists, comedians and performers to ring in the "start of summer."

The island country saw the majority of attendees arrive on the festival's opening day, May 22, and day after. This year's festival started with a welcome party at a bar in Oranjestad.

"Soul Beach brings the most tourists to Aruba each year at one time," said one staffer said.

Festivities continued throughout the week, with evening acts from comedians Aida Rodriguez and Deon Cole from ABC's Black-ish.

In addition to Cole and Rodriguez, festival attendees from as far away as London witnessed electric performances from Grammy-Award winning artists such as John Legend, H.E.R. and Ella Mai.

Grammy-nominated artist Charlie Wilson, affectionately known as Uncle Charlie, showed no signs of his age with a nearly hour-long setlist.

Aside from the comedy show and concerts, guests partied at the festival's day parties at Moomba Beach. Come sundown, attendees thoroughly enjoyed the transitions between songs with DJs Jazzy Jeff, DJ Envy, DJ OutKast, Kid Capri and others.

Festival organizers have yet to publicly announce plans for their milestone 20th anniversary.

If you start saving and planning for the next one as you read this, you shouldn't miss the invitation for its 20th anniversary.