1936-37 Festival
"Holy folk" settin' there? Not a bit of it. The holy folk are standing outside the ropes while a handful of city folk sit... According to David Whisnant, Charles Seeger was not as impressed with the White Top Folk Festival, which he attended in 1936 and considered elitist, as he was with Basom Lundsford's Mountain Dance and Folk Festival, in Asheville, N.C.
This picture was most likely taken in 1931 0r '32 before a pavilion was erected in adavnce of Eleanor Roosevelt's visit in 1933.
[Source:All That is Native and Fine: the politics of culture in an American region, David E, Whisnant, p. 206]
John Powell "coaching" a musician
"What sorts of music were they [John Powell and Annabel Morris Buchanan] looking for?
"[T]hey wanted old time "folk music of white mountaineers... .
"To get what they wanted, they knew they would have to exercise considerable control over the musicians."
[Whisnant, "White Top Festival: What we have learned... ," p. 2-3]
"Crowds were...smaller (about three thousand on Friday and five thousand on Saturday), but newspapers reported more than two hundred contestants, and the festival even turned a small profit."
Those in attendance included Captain and Mrs. Kettlewell of the English Folk Dance and Song Society, Carleton Smit of the New York Public Library's Music Division,Frank C. Brown, folksong collector and organizer of the North Carolina Folklore Society, and Robert Winslow Gordon, formerly Director of the Library of Congress's American Folklife Festival.
Also in attendance that year was Charles Seeger, musicologist,composer, and father of folk music legends Pete, Mike, and Peggy Seeger. He observed that the "holy folk" who saw themselves as the preservers of a national culture strictly screened those who sought to take part. "Altogether a feast of paradox...[Such] preposterous self-sufficiency I have never seen at other festivals."
[All That is Native and Fine, p. 204-207]
"In 1936 Buchanan moved to Richmond to work for the Works Progress Administration and withdrew from active involvement in the White Top Festival, partly as a result of her new position and partly from escalating disagreements with promoters John Augustus Blakemore and John Powell over the commercialization of the festival. Buchanan's husband, who had remained in Marion (Virginia) and from whom she had become estranged, died on 15 September, 1937."
["Buchanan, Annabel Morris," Dictionary of Virginia Biography, p. 364]
"Many people thought the festival would become a permanent fixture on the mountain, especially after the 1933 festival was attended by Eleanor Roosevelt and 22,000 other people. But in 1937 the organizers decided not to hold it because of the death of Mrs. Buchanan's husband as well as the threat of polio epidemics. Though Buchanan kept her official title as Director of the festival, she had no active part in it thereafter."
["Annabel Morris Buchanan: Folk Song Collector,"p. 29]