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The Mountain Dance and Folk Festival, the country�s longest running folk festival, marks another year of highlighting mountain culture. The 80th annual Festival runs for three full evenings of dance, music and storytelling, Thursday, August 2, through Saturday, August 4 at the Diana Wortham Theatre at Pack Place in downtown Asheville. Founded by Bascom Lamar Lunsford in 1928, the Festival celebrates the early musical traditions handed down by generations and recounted at the homes of the early settlers in the Blue Ridge and Great Smoky Mountains. Mountain fiddlers, banjo pickers, dulcimer sweepers, dancers, balladeers and others have come to enjoy themselves �along about sundown� the first weekend in August at the Mountain Dance and Folk Festival. Bascom Lamar Lunsford founded the Mountain Dance and Folk Festival as a means for people to share and understand the beauty and dignity of the Southern Appalachian music and dance traditions that have been handed down through generations in western North Carolina. He saw the Mountain Dance and Folk Festival grow to be the oldest gathering of its kind in the nation and it continues in this way, a platform for the talented of the high country lying between the Great Smoky and the Blue Ridge Mountains. Since 1928, the Mountain Dance and Folk Festival has served a crucial role in raising awareness and understanding of the vitality and importance of Southern Appalachian culture throughout the region, nation and world. Bascom Lunsford�s mission was to present the finest of the Appalachian ballad singers, string bands and square dance teams for education and entertainment. The songs and dances shared at this event echo centuries of Scottish, English, Irish, Cherokee and African heritage found in the valleys and coves between the Great Smokies and the Blue Ridge Mountains. Lunsford�s was the first dubbed a folk festival, and he later consulted with many communities across the country interested in organizing similar festivals. For more information on the Mountain Dance and Folk Festival or Shindig on the Green, please call the Folk Heritage Info Line at 828-258-6101 x.789, or visit their web site at www.folkheritage.org. (Images provided by the Mountain Dance & Folk Festival)
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