Masters of Tradition

To honor her nona, Flory has made it her life’s mission to preserve the songs, music, and language of her Ladino family...

Phil Wiggins and John Cephas became the best guitar-harmonica duo on the Piedmont Blues scene, following in the footsteps of the great Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee...

Mestre João Grande founded his own academy in New York City in 1990, where he has trained thousands of students in the tradition of capoeira Angola.

In New Mexico, the name Roberto Martínez is synonymous with royalty...

"You'll sing a song and I'll sing a song, and we'll sing a song together." That is what Ella Jenkins has done for more than 50 years in preschools, festivals, auditoriums, early childhood conferences, and concerts around the world...

The legacy of Ella Jenkins is a musical one. Born in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1924, she spent her childhood on the south side of Chicago...

“Who the hell is Ralph Rinzler?” I asked. “The director of the Smithsonian’s Festival of American Folklife, you idiot!”...

Born and raised on the Costa de la Palma (Palm Coast) ranch near the town of Alvarado, an hour's drive south from the port city of Veracruz, Mexico, José Gutiérrez Ramón...

Now a Smithsonian Folkways Recordings artist based in Fresno, Agustín Lira continues to chronicle the experiences and little-known...

Los Pleneros de la 21 gelled as a group in 1983, when conservatory-trained percussionist Juan "Juango" Gutiérrez followed his pride in his Puerto Rican culture...

The legendary kabuki dancer and instructor Madame Fujima Kansuma has dedicated her life to teaching and celebrating kabuki culture and history since the 1930s...

Mike Seeger, who devoted his life to documenting, teaching, keeping alive, and carrying forth the sounds of traditional music of the American South...

The North American continent has long been hospitable to immigrants--to the first Americans, to Hispanics, to French, to Russians, to English...

Only a year ago, the Folk Arts Program at the National Endowment for the Arts joined with the Smithsonian Institution's Office of Folklife Programs...

The Folk and Traditional Arts Program of the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) is pleased to join with the Smithsonian's Center for Folklife Programs...

Back in 1977 it was what everybody thought the Folk Arts Program at the National Endowment for the Arts ought to do...

Blues artist, songster, and storyteller, John Jackson was the most important black Appalachian musician to come to broad public attention during the mid-1960s...

February 19, 2017, marked the 75th anniversary of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s signing of Executive Order 9066...

On April 22, our dear friend Hazel Dickens passed away. Hazel was one of the most important bluegrass singers of the last fifty years and the writer of very poignant songs drawn from her personal experience...

Smithsonian Folkways is saddened to learn of the passing of Jean Ritchie. An inimitable force in traditional music, Ritchie was a songwriter, ballad singer...

Relevant to Southern potters Jerry Brown, Burlon Craig, Lanier Meaders, and Vernon Owens...

Quick wits, a keen ear, a powerful voice, and a thousand rhymes—these are the instruments of the Basque bertsolari...

In over his 50-plus years as a bandleader and charismatic teacher, Natividad “Nati” Cano took the humble musical tradition he inherited from his family to the most prestigious concert stages in the United States and Mexico...

Smithsonian Folkways mourns the passing of bluegrass legend Dr. Ralph Stanley (1927-2016). As one of the patriarchs of bluegrass music, Stanley had an otherworldly voice that seemed to come from deep within his soul...

Family is central to Sheila Kay Adams’s music and identity. She is, after all, a seventh-generation Appalachian ballad singer...

Nick Benson is a third-generation stone carver and letterer who specializes in hand-carved gravestones and elegant architectural lettering...

Oud soloist and composer Rahim Alhaj has carried his (roughly) five-thousand-year-old music tradition more than seven thousand miles, from his birthplace in Baghdad to his current home in Albuquerque, New Mexico...