National Park Service

National Park Service

Since entering into a cooperative agreement with the National Park Service (NPS) in 1970, the NCTA has offered a wide range of programmatic and technical assistance to over 700 NPS-administered sites in 37 states and U.S. territories.

Our work has included planning new parks, conducting ethnographic studies, organizing crafts and museum exhibits, developing traditional music presentations, training park personnel in cultural presentation techniques, and assisting local non-profit groups with organizing cultural events in National Parks.

Recent program highlights

On November 6, 2025, we partnered with the Medgar and Myrlie Evers Home National Monument to host Soil to Song: A Block Party at Ms. Myrlie’s Garden. This sunny afternoon featured Delta blues from the one-of-a-kind Super Chikan, a cabbage planting demonstration from community gardener Norma Michael, and spoken word and poetry from the students and faculty of Jackson State University (JSU).

In June 2024, a long-awaited program came to fruition involving the Gullah Geechee Ring Shouters and the Winnsboro Easter Rock Ensemble. Members of these two groups came together to present their shared ring shout traditions at various locations in and around New Orleans. It was a memorable week of performances and cultural exchange as these two groups shared Black spiritual practices that date to our nation's antebellum era, and before.

In 2025, our colleagues with the New Orleans Jazz National Historical Park and the Gullah Geechee Cultural Heritage Corridor received the Excellence in Interpretation Award from NPS, and a documentary produced during the pilot project was accepted into the 2025 New Orleans Film Festival.

In March 2024, we returned to the location where we started our five-decade-plus work with the National Park Service, the Wolf Trap National Park for the Performing Arts. Here we celebrated the 20th anniversary of the creation of the Crooked Road, southwest Virginia's heritage music trail. We revisited on of our national tours, Music from the Crooked Road, bringing together several of today's outstanding artists from Southwest Virginia, for a concert at the beautiful Barns at Wolf Trap.