August 2-4, 2012
Check out the nation’s longest running folk festival. The 85th annual edition of this three-day event showcases the best of the region’s traditional and old-time musicians, ballad singers, mountain dance groups and cloggers. Since 1928, 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 for plenty of authentic bluegrass music. Performers at the Mountain Dance and Folk Festival take to the stage at Diana Wortham Theatre at Pack Place in downtown Asheville on Thursday through Saturday at 7 PM.

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 bluegrass 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.

The Folk Heritage Committee’s mission is to produce Shindig on the Green and the Mountain Dance and Folk Festival in order to support the preservation and continuation of the traditional music, dance and storytelling heritage of the Southern Appalachian Mountains.

For more information, go to their Web site.

Don't miss the Shindig on the Green, a free outdoor music festival on Saturday nights during the summer in downtown Asheville.