She had a very traditional approach to the idea. “The children in the valleys, in the foothills, and in the mountains should be given the opportunity of hearing the ballads of their forebears,” she would write in her fanciful autobiography, The Sun Shines Bright (1940). She believed “only those mountain minstrels to whom the ballads had been handed down by word of mouth should participate. Only those untrained fiddlers and musicians who had learned their art from their forebears should take part.” Annabel Morris Buchanan had a similar idea when she initiated the White Top Folk Festival in Southwest Virginia, also in 1931. A “folk festival should encourage only the highest type of native material, traditionally learned and traditionally presented,” she explained in 1937, just two years before her festival ended. She did not exclude more recent compositions, if “the structure or literary merit of the text may entitle it to consideration beyond that of the folklorist alone, … or perhaps the tune is derived from some older folk air.” That is, the festival was “held for the purpose of discovering, preserving, and carrying on the best native [white] music, balladry, dances, traditions, and other arts and customs that belong to our race.”
Eleanor Roosevelt, wife of the president, visited in 1933. The next year the festival attracted 200 performers and 10,000 fans, and featured a conference with professional folklorists discussing the current state of folk song collecting. Douglas Kennedy and Maud Karpeles, directors of the English Folk Song and Dance Society, sent their congratulations, and in 1935 sword and morris dances were added to the program. The last festival was held in 1939. Folklorist Jane Becker has criticized many of the festival promoters for their narrow views: “They proceeded to sanitize culture, weeding out the vulgar and the crude and presenting only those forms that upheld their middle-class standards of propriety and taste. Annabel Morris Buchanan argued that festivals should encourage only the ‘highest type of native material.’ Modern chain-gang songs, hillbilly tunes, and humorous songs, she rejected, not because of their contemporary nature, but because of their crudeness and vulgarity.”
Sarah Gertrude Knott, from Kentucky, attended Bascom Lamar Lunsford’s 1934 festival, and was inspired to immediately start the National Folk Festival in St. Louis. But her concept of folk culture was somewhat different from the white-centered, rural nostalgia of Jean Thomas, Annabel Morris Buchanan, and Lunsford. Groups from 14 states participated in the first National Folk Festival, representing “the traditional heritages rooted here in early days and those that have grown up I [sic] our country,” she later explained. But this meant including “the Indians, British, Spanish-Americans, French, German, and Negroes, along with the newer indigenous creations of the cowboy, lumberjack, sailor, and other such typical groups.” The second festival, held in Chattanooga, Tennessee, in 1935, featured mountain fiddlers and ballad singers, aswell as Pennsylvania anthracite miners, and a thousand-voice black chorus singing spirituals. The yearly National Folk Festival would continue its unique, eclectic approach to the country’s complex folk traditions throughout the century.
Folk Music in the United States During the Depression
