History
The NCTA is the nation’s oldest folk and traditional arts presenting organization. Through nine decades of festivals, tours, symposia, exhibits, and media productions, the NCTA has showcased the very best of the myriad grassroots folk, tribal, and ethnic cultures that comprise our nation.
Initially known as the National Folk Festival Association, the organization was founded in 1933 by Paducah, Kentucky, native Sarah Gertrude Knott (1895-1984), a woman of remarkable magnetism, vision, and determination. While Knott had no formal training in the folk arts, she had a clear and revolutionary idea of what she wanted to do—stage a national folk festival, bringing traditional musicians, singers, dancers, and artisans from across the country to showcase the richness and complexity of American culture. She collaborated with folklorists, ethnomusicologists, and other specialists to carry out her vision, essentially inventing the folk festival as we know it today, and defining this form of presentation for many decades to come.
Sarah Gertrude Knott
The first National Folk Festival was held in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1934. The festival has since traveled to nearly 30 communities throughout the United States, large and small, bringing the traditional arts to millions of citizens, and presenting thousands of the best American grassroots artists: from W.C. Handy, Lawrence Walker, and Hobart Smith in the 1930s, to Alison Krauss, Michael Flatley, Doc Watson, and Shemekia Copeland in more recent times. Along the way the festival has generated and spun off numerous regional and local events that continue to flourish today, including the Lowell Folk Festival (1987), Richmond Folk Festival (2005), Montana Folk Festival (2008), North Carolina Folk Festival (2015), and Maryland Folk Festival (2018). All began by hosting the National Folk Festival for three years, produced by the NCTA and local partners, before launching as their own community-led festival. They are among the largest events of their kind in the country, drawing hundreds of thousands of people each year. The NCTA also had a hand in advising on and creating the New England Folk Festival (1944), the Florida Folk Festival (1953), and the Northwest Folklife Festival (1972).
The year 1970 marked the beginning of a transition and the revitalization of the organization. After 37 years at the helm, Knott retired. The association entered into a cooperative agreement with the National Park Service, and the National Folk Festival found a home for the next dozen years (1971-1982) at Wolf Trap National Park for the Performing Arts. With a new program director, Andy Wallace, and a new board, the National Folk Festival was restructured and soon began to attract national attention through public radio and television broadcasts and national press. The organization expanded its activities through its partnerships with the Park Service and the U.S. State Department, organizing overseas tours through the United States Information Agency’s Arts America program. In 1976, incoming executive director Joseph T. Wilson and the board of directors changed the organization’s name to the National Council for the Traditional Arts to reflect its expanded programming and mission.
After 12 years at Wolf Trap, in 1983, the National Folk Festival returned to the road with a new model that it uses to this day: the NCTA partners with a new community for three years to present a free, public festival, laying the groundwork for the host community to take ownership and continue to produce the festival on its own once the National moves on to a new site. National Folk Festivals over the past 40 years have drawn the largest crowds in the event’s history, while spawning vibrant local festivals that have played a major role in revitalizing their host communities.
In keeping with its mission to bring the traditional arts to an expanding audience, the NCTA’s work has included a host of other projects and programs alongside its festivals. The NCTA's touring program began in 1974 when it organized the first of seven international goodwill tours featuring American folk and traditional artists that have traveled to six continents. Since 1978, NCTA has produced 50 national tours that have traveled to 49 states, and performed in hundreds of venues ranging from major concert halls to community centers and high school auditoriums. Many of these tours have been the subject of radio and television broadcasts, extending their reach beyond live audiences. These conceptual tours were a key factor in opening the doors of the nation’s major performing arts venues to traditional artists. Since 1983, the NCTA has organized and produced the annual week of activities celebrating the recipients of the National Endowment for the Arts National Heritage Fellowship. For over half a century, the organization has worked with the National Park Service in all parts of the country to develop cultural programs and projects; among these was the creation of the Blue Ridge Music Center. The NCTA devoted 25 years to bringing this project to fruition, and curated the Center’s acclaimed Roots of American Music museum, which opened to the public in 2011. The NCTA has produced scores of recordings of fine musicians representing a wide-ranging spectrum of America’s cultural traditions, as well as a host of public radio and television programs.
Since 1971, virtually all of the NCTA’s festivals and tours have been recorded, forming an incomparable and constantly expanding audio archive of traditional arts performances. The NCTA’s in-house audio lab has preserved and digitized over 8,000 hours of these sound recordings. These are now housed in the archive of the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress.
As the NCTA enters its tenth decade, it continues to explore ways to share the cultural riches of our amazingly complex nation with the American people, and to celebrate and honor those who are the keepers of this priceless heritage.