Knott, Sarah Gertrude (1895–1984). Encyclopedia Of American Folklore

Founder and program director of the National Folk Festival. Trained in drama, and with
no academic grounding in folklore, Knott pursued her lifetime goal to introduce the folk
performing arts to the widest American audience. After several years of almost singlehanded and often frustrating effort, she staged the first National Folk Festival in 1934 in
St. Louis, Missouri. This was followed by annual festivals cosponsored by local groups in
more than a dozen other American cities until, in 1971, the national event settled down at
the Wolf Trap Farm near Washington, DC. Knott personally produced and staged each
festival until her retirement in 1971; thereafter, until her death, she served as consultant to
state and community folk-arts programs for the national Folk Festival Association and
similar organizations. Over the years, her festivals have become the standard for many
similar events throughout the country.
Knott had a vision of national gatherings of peer- rather than producer-selected
performers keeping true to their own traditions in an age of standardization and mass
audience appeals. Her goal was a better understanding and appreciation of America’s
diverse ethnic, geographic, and occupational groups through the preservation and
perpetuation of their inherited cultural legacies.
Her efforts were much criticized by academic folklorists. They particularly objected to
her insistence that only through the medium of regional and national festivals (big shows
with large audiences) could the country’s traditional legacies survive, and to her failure to
see the inconsistency between her “standards of authenticity” and the artificiality of “big
show” performances in large auditoriums.
Knott’s last years were spent in the preparation of a definitive history and rationale for
folk festivals, a work that was never completed to her satisfaction.
Robert M.Rennick
References
Knott, Sarah Gertrude. 1963. Prepared and Supplementary Statements. Hearings before the Special
Subcommittee on the Arts of the Committee on Labor and Public Welfare. U.S. Senate, 88th
Cong., 1st sess. Washington, DC: GPO, pp. 257–261.
Ramsay, John M. 1992. Sarah Gertrude Knott. In The Kentucky Encyclopedia. Lexington:
University Press of Kenlutky, p. 522.

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