White Top Folk Festival

UE-9

The White Top Folk Festival was held annually from 1931 to 1939 (except 1937) on Whitetop Mountain, Virginia’s second-highest peak. Organizers Annabel Morris Buchanan, John Powell, and John A. Blakemore sought to celebrate and preserve “old time music” that originated in the British Isles. The festival featured fiddlers, banjo players, ballad singers, and string bands as well as storytelling, theatrical presentations, and clog, Morris, and sword dancing. Thousands of people attended each year, including nationally known academic folklorists, music critics, composers, and in 1933 First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt. The festival was cancelled in 1940 because of heavy rains and never resumed.

Department of Historic Resources, 2025

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References/Bibliographic Citation:

“And the Mountains Sing With Joy: White Top Musical Festival” Southern Magazine, 2 (April 1935): 10-11; Thomas H. Biggs, Geographic and Cultural Names in Virginia (Charlottesville, Va.: Commonwealth of Virginia Department of Conservation and Economic Development, Division of Mineral Resources, 1974), 307; John T. Kneebone, J. Jefferson Looney, Brent Tarter, and Sandra Gioia Treadway, eds., Dictionary of Virginia Biography, Vol. 1 (Richmond, Va., The Library of Virginia, 1998), 345-346; Robert F. Nelson, “White Top Folk Festival,” The Commonwealth 2 (August 1935): 15; Douglas Summers Brown, “Sweet Singer of the Virginia Highlands,” Virginia Cavalcade 45 (Winter 1996): 100-109; Ulrich Troubetzkoy, “Music on the Mountain: Traditional melodies brought by early settlers were heard at the White Top Festival in the 1930s,” Virginia Cavalcade 11 (Summer 1961): 4-10; David E. Whisnant, All That is Native & Fine: The Politics of Culture in an American Region (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1983), 11-12, 187-194, 209; David E. Whisnant, “White Top Folk Festival,” in Charles Reagan Wilson and William Ferris, eds., Encyclopedia of Southern Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989), 1089.