FESTIVAL HISTORY

Excerpts from…

Mountain Dance and Folk Festival: A Living Tradition  -  By Loyal Jones

Author of Minstrel of the Appalachians:  The Story of Bascom Lamar Lunsford.  University of Kentucky Press, reprint 2002.

 Western North Carolina native Bascom Lamar Lunsford developed, from an early age, a passion for the ballads, folk songs, and dances of the Southern Appalachian Mountains.  As a young boy, he began playing the banjo and fiddle, learning many songs, tunes and dances from his neighbors. By the time Lunsford settled in Buncombe County, then an attorney and gentleman farmer, he had also established himself as a well known singer, musician and collector, the General Phonograph Corporation already having released two disks with four of his songs.

 In 1928, the Asheville Chamber of Commerce planned to stage the Rhododendron Festival to call attention to the beauty and climate of what the promoters had taken to calling the 'Land of the Sky.'  Chamber officials approached Lunsford to arrange a folk song and dance program as a part of the Festival, which also included handicraft displays, romantic pageants, and beautiful baby contests. 

 Lunsford recruited five square dance clubs to compete for prizes and invited ballad singers, fiddlers, banjo pickers and string bands to entertain on Pack Square.  Five thousand people descended upon downtown Asheville and were backed up against office buildings, draped across Zeb Vance's statue and hanging out of the windows of local businesses.  The Asheville Citizen described the music as a "...throwback from the modern jazz world..." and went on to say that it should be "...a permanent thing, something that might be continued from year to year as a festival of Western North Carolina -- on the order of the great festivals of older nations which have been handed down from generation to generation."

 Like any event, though, the Mountain Dance and Folk Festival has had its ups and downs.  With the coming of television, social activation, the Civil Rights movement, Rock and Roll, and other attractions, the audience dwindled in the early 1960s. However, the folk revival of the late 1960s rekindled interest in the Mountain Dance and Folk Festival, the oldest festival of its kind in the country.  People from all over the United States had moved to Western North Carolina as part of the back-to-the-land movement, and many of these young people were drawn to the folk arts as an example of the simple and honest lives they were seeking.  Also, many tourists loved to return to Asheville during the Festival to get an annual taste of Appalachian folk arts.  Thus the 1960s stood for a time of rebirth for the Mountain Dance and Folk Festival, which continues to cater to sold out shows through its 75th year.