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When a respected Rhode Island woman named Ada Holding Miller suggested in 1952 that White Springs, Florida would be a good place to hold a folk festival, the town's population numbered just about 700. White Springs' turn-of-the-century notoriety as a destination for tourists seeking a medicinal soak in the local sulphur springs was well past its heyday. For 50 miles in any direction, White Springs was largely surrounded by vast tracts of land used for farming and timbering. Remarkably, by the time of the 50th anniversary of the Florida Folk Festival in 2002, it appeared that Mrs. Miller's suggestion was a good one. How did she know? More precisely, how did she know what a folk festival was? And then, how did she know that White Springs would be a good place to hold one?
By the late 1800s factories were being built and farmers were
forsaking the hard labor of raising crops for the deceptively easy life
of shift work and regular pay.
Cultural workers reasoned that if these traditions were to be maintained, the nation's population in its entirety must appreciate their value. In 1928 the first folk festival was held in western North Carolina, soon followed by festivals in Kentucky in 1930; Virginia in 1931; and a National Folk Festival in 1934 in St. Louis, Missouri. Their intent was to bridge the gap between America's old culture and its progress-driven new culture.
Knott came to White Springs to organize a Florida festival in 1953, enlisting the aid of folklorists, song collectors, traditional artists, and revivalists. The first Florida Folk Festival was held May 8-10 and played to an audience of about 800. The sponsors were the Stephen Foster Memorial Commission and the Florida Federation of Music Clubs. Knott's philosophy of American culture as consisting of the traditions of many native and immigrant cultures was applied at the first Florida Folk Festival. The participants included Minorcan, Seminole, Miccosukee, Greek, Jewish, Spanish, African, and Czechoslovokian traditions alongside those of the Florida Cracker. Her multicultural approach left an indelible mark on the folk festival movement that survives today.
In 1972 attendance at the Florida Folk Festival peaked at more than
100,000 as popularity surged in the music festival circuit nationally.
State agencies took notice and in the late 1970s White Springs became
the home of the Florida Folklife Program. The Program very shortly was
accorded bureau status within state government. The prestige and
authority of the Bureau of Florida Folklife Programs was unmatched by
any other folklife program in the country. With a respected staff of
professional folklorists and administrative su In 1995, moving in tandem with the national New Right movement to reduce the size of government, the Florida Department of State absorbed a 25 percent reduction in funding. The Bureau of Florida Folklife Programs lost its bureau status and its staff was severely cut. The dismantled Bureau’s staff and operations were moved to Tallahassee. Production of the festival became the responsibility of the Museum of Florida History, with the assistance of the Bureau of Historic Preservation and a reconfigured Folklife Program. Perceiving the move as a loss of local control over the festival, White Springs took the news hard.
In its 50th year, the Florida Folk Festival remains entwined with the
history of the nation, and continues to present the traditions--root and
revival--of an American region. The Federation of Music Clubs is no
longer involved in the folk festival movement but continues to sponsor a
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Miller's visit to White Springs came just one year after the town had
opened a new memorial park dedicated to American composer Stephen
Foster. By coincidence Foster wrote a song that mentioned the Suwannee
River, a 240-mile-long waterway that cut through the town as it flowed
toward the Gulf. The song, "Old Folks At Home" was one of more
than 200 compositions that made Foster known as the nation's first
professional songwriter. His tunes were still being sung 100 years after
their initial popularity and had gradually passed into the common
repertoire of American music. As early as the 1930s music educators and
collectors were lobbying for a Foster memorial to be built along the
banks of the Suwannee somewhere in Florida.
Foster's music also was recognized by the National Federation of
Music Clubs and its various state chapters. In 1935 the Florida
Federation exerted its political influence to help persuade the
legislature to declare "Old Folks At Home" the official state
song. A prominent White Springs citizen, Mrs. Lillian Saunders, was a
former president of the Florida chapter of the Federation. When the
Saunders family donated 100 acres of land to develop a Stephen Foster
Memorial in White Springs in 1938, the town's fortunes became fastened
not only on the Suwannee River, but also on the promotion of American
music.
In 1952 the National Federation held its annual meeting in White
Springs, with Ada Miller presiding. The gathering allowed the membership
an opportunity to admire the new Stephen Foster Memorial Park and
prompted Miller's idea for a folk festival. Miller might just as
reasonably have suggested that the new park would be a great place to
stage an outdoor drama, or that its stately museum might be a fine hall
for opera. Certainly the public-mindedness of Mrs. Saunders and the
members of the Memorial Commission committed them to securing the future
success of the Stephen Foster Memorial. Equally important, White
Springs' origins as a resort town prepared it for the hospitality and
boosterism of the tourism industry and made it a willing partner in the
enterprise.
Federation members were involved in folk festival productions
elsewhere in the nation. The choices they made in music and culture to
be presented on stage represent a significant share of the character and
development of folk festivals. But the Federation's activities were only
a part of much larger events in the history of the nation, and the
reactions of musicians, historians, anthropologists and others who
chronicled the rapid social and economic changes that overtook the
country at the turn of the 20th century.
Kinfolk were becoming less likely to rely
upon one another for work and socializing as families relocated to be
closer to mill jobs or other public work. Commercially recorded music
was gradually replacing down home gatherings to make music. By the early
1900s, these changes were seen as endangering the American "way of
life." Cultural workers, including artists, writers, actors and
academics, began trying to document the last remnants of imperiled
American traditions with photographs, song collections, and recorded
life histories.
The U.S. government joined the effort when it developed cultural
documentation projects as part of the emergency work relief offered
during the Depression. In Florida two of the nation's foremost
folklorists, Alan Lomax and Zora Neale Hurston, recorded the songs and
lore of African Americans. The Federal Writer's Project sent writers out
to detail the life and traditions of ordinary Americans with the goal of
"providing national unity through folk life histories." In
Florida, the stories and lore of cow hands, turpentine workers, saw
millers, fishermen, and cigarmakers were prominent among those who were
documented.
A member of the Virginia Federation of Music Clubs named Annabel
Morris Buchanan was the founder of the Virginia folk festival. As a
piano teacher, composer and performer, Buchanan had created her own
interpretations of folk culture with costumed recitals of Indian dances,
Negro spirituals, and Appalachian ballads. Like many other founders of
folk festivals across the country, Buchanan's idea of folk music blurred
the lines between working class experience and middle and upper class
appreciation. Folk festival promoters mixed performances by mountain
women in feed sack dresses with their own costumed recital
interpretations. From their inception, folk festivals brought together
authentic folk tradition and the revivalists from other social classes
who perceived themselves as helping to preserve old ways.
At Mrs. Miller's suggestion, the Stephen Foster Memorial Commission
contacted Sarah Gertrude Knott, the founder of the National Folk
Festival. Knott was the daughter of a moderately prosperous farming
family in Kentucky. Her drama studies in college had led her to seek
instruction from playrights in North Carolina who were writing folk
culture themes into theater productions. During the Depression Knott was
hired under the Works Progress Administration to document folk culture
in St. Louis. The songs and stories she heard soon were cast into stage
performances, ultimately resulting in the 1934 National Folk Festival.
Knott was an inveterate networker who traveled extensively to promote
the folk festival movement to potential patrons and businesses. By the
1950s she was no doubt acquainted with the folk festival work of
Buchanan, and with the support of Federation members. At least one
written historical source records that Knott had initiated discussions
with the Florida Federation in the 1930s for the creation of a state
folk festival.
After two years, Knott turned the direction of the festival over to
Thelma C. Boltin, a long-time Florida resident who had been a performer
at the first two festivals in White Springs. Thereafter Boltin became
"Cousin" Thelma: storyteller, fieldworker, emcee and legend at
the Florida Folk Festival. Like Knott, she consulted with Alton C.
Morris, a Florida folk song collector, and J. Russell Reaver, a
collector of Florida folktales, and others whose work could anchor the
state's folk traditions in the festival's offerings. Most of the
administrative and site operations for the festival were conducted by
local residents who were either volunteers or employees of the Foster
Memorial. In 1957 the festival's organizers added regional crafts as a
component of the festival and in 1958 they added regional and ethnic
foods.
pport, the Bureau was able
to expand its programming beyond the Festival to include radio programs,
video production, fieldwork, educational programs in schools and an
archive. Inevitably the stewardship of professional folklorists brought
into question the Festival's earliest beginnings and its definitions of
what constituted Florida folklife. The question was not resolved in a
vacuum of academic and professional folklorists’ opinions.
Participants and supporters of the festival formed an informal coalition
that exerted its own newfound political influence to protect the root
and revival character of the Festival. The group subsequently
incorporated as a not-for-profit organization named Friends of Florida
Folk (FOFF). Throughout the 1980s folklorists nationally fine-tuned
their knowledge of folk festivals based in part on the successes and
failures at the Florida Folk Festival.
In 2002 state and national events once again impacted the festival.
The state legislature ordered financial cutbacks after calculating a
large shortfall due to budgeting and taxation policies, coupled with a
decline in state income generated by the tourism industry following
terrorist attacks on the nation on September 11. Budget cutbacks
implemented by the Department of State resulted in the elimination of
the festival from its budget and staffing. By that time the Stephen
Foster Memorial in White Springs had been turned over to the Florida
Park Service and was renamed the Stephen Foster Folk Culture Center
State Park. Local citizens, FOFF and a few unexpected supporters rallied
to raise money for the festival's continuation. The Florida Department
of Environmental Protection’s Division of Recreation and Parks decided
to assume financial and staffing responsibility for the Florida Folk
Festival.
ege-age women in Foster's honor in White
Springs. Former members of the Stephen Foster Memorial Commission remain
involved in both the annual operations of the Stephen Foster State Park
and the Folk Festival. FOFF members serve as political constituents,
performers, stage hands, volunteers and returning audience. The Florida
Folklife Program has a statewide mission to promote traditional arts
through its folk heritage awards, apprenticehip program, festival
outreach, folklife days, school programs, radio shows, and publications.
The Folklife Program continues to coordinate a folklife area within the
Folk Festival that annually focuses on different aspects of traditional
life and lore in Florida. In 2002 the participants at the Florida Folk
Festival include Seminole, Minorcan, Peruvian, Guatemalan, Jewish,
Spanish, Hungarian, Greek, African, Trinidadian, Haitian, Serbian,
Armenian, Sephardic, Irish, Acadian, East Indian, and Hawaiian
traditions, along with those of the Florida Cracker. Like the earliest
days of the folk festival movement, the event is a celebration of the
many cultures and traditions that call Florida home.
American
Folklife Center, Library of Congress