An annual North American event of performing arts and crafts sponsored by the National
Council for the Traditional Arts (NCTA) of Silver Spring, Maryland. Performance sites
change every three years.
The first National Folk Festival was held in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1934. The idea had
originated with Sarah Gertrude Knott, and she served as director of the festival. Major
M.J. Pickering was business manager. The term “folk festival” had been used before, but
those earlier events had presented single cultures. The festival Knott and Pickering
started presented Anglo, Indian, Black, Hispanic, Asian, European, and immigrant
culture, as well as regional culture.
Their festival was the first to solicit the help of folklorists, ethnomusicologists, and
other serious fieldworkers in presenting performance by authentic folk performers. With
this assistance, they originated many of the common techniques used by hundreds of later
festivals: crafts displays and demonstrations, comparative workshops, multiple staging,
worklore workshops and demonstrations, as well as public discussions by cultural
specialists.
The second National Folk Festival was held in Chattanooga, Tennessee, in 1935, and
was remarkably like the first one. It was especially rich in central South religious and
stringband music. Folklorist George Korson brought a contingent of anthracite coal
miners from eastern Pennsylvania.
But there were major differences in scale when the third National was held in Dallas in
June 1936. This festival was part of the exposition celebrating the Texas centennial, and
it was bigger—six stages instead of one or two, eight days rather than five. It presented
bluesmen, Cajun bands, string bands, shape-note singers, Indians, and many ethnic
groups.
The National Folk Festival has continued in a nearly unbroken annual chain to present
these interactions of folk artists, folklorists, and audiences. The fourth National was held
in Chicago in 1937. After that, the National moved to Washington, DC, where it was held
from 1938 to 1941. In 1942 it was held in both New York City and Washington, DC.
Festivals in other Eastern and Midwestern urban centers followed until 1971, when the
National settled into an elevenyear run at Wolf Trap Farm Park in Vienna, Virginia, near
Washington, DC. The National enjoyed this sylvan setting from 1971 through 1982,
when the board of directors decided to move on with a basic scheme of rotating on a three-year cycle, with the idea of leaving festivals in place that will continue on their own
as local events.
A change in structure came widi the 1987–1989 Nationals in Lowell, Massachusetts.
Earlier festivals had been sponsored by the NCTA and a single local sponsor. The Lowell
festivals emphasized that a local festival would continue from the outset and were
cosponsored by the Lowell National Historical Park, the City of Lowell, and the private
Regatta Festival Committee. The NCTA was in charge of the programming, but most
members were from Lowell. Held downtown on five stages and with parades through the
city, these events attracted audiences that ranged from 127,000 to 186,000, the largest in
the history of the organization, at a time when most other folk events were losing
audiences. The Nationals that have followed in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, and
Chattanooga, Tennessee, also have multiple sponsors that include private and
governmental bodies and have been large-scale events.
This oldest of multi-ethnic festivals has been staged in twenty cities. It is notable
among North American festivals for seeking out folk virtuosos who are authentic carriers
of folk or tribal traditions and preferring these originals to interpretations or revival of
folk performance.
Angus Kress Gillespie
References
National Council for the Traditional Arts. 1988. Program Book for the Fiftieth National Folk
Festival, Washington, DC: NCTA.
Wilson, Joe, and Lee Udall. 1982. Folk Festivals: A Hand book for Organization and Management.
Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press.