National Folk Festival brings wide sweep of traditions to Jackson

For centuries, the customs and traditions of the Choctaw nation have been passed from one generation to the next. About two decades ago, William Dan Isaac, a member of the tribe’s Mississippi band, helped form the Mystic Winds Social Dance Group to hand down traditions of dance, music and storytelling to Choctaw youth. 

The endeavor not only exposed Choctaw youth to the wider world but also shared their culture and traditions across other communities.

Another opportunity comes this weekend when Mystic Winds joins dozens of other groups for the 83rd National Folk Festival, which returns Friday and runs through the weekend in downtown Jackson.

This year’s festival commemorates the country’s founding 250 years ago, but Mystic Winds provides a reminder of the Indigenous cultures that existed across the Mississippi River valley before Europeans settled the area.

“A lot of our people were removed from here,” Isaac said. “But the state itself, its rivers and creeks and the names of the counties, hold our roots here.”

Taking part in this year’s folk festival, he said, will “honor and share this connection to our homeland.”

The festival showcases early Indigenous and African American traditions alongside folk traditions from Hawaii and the U.S. Virgin Islands, offering “a snapshot of the nation’s cultural fabric” woven over two and half centuries, said Blaine Wade, the executive director of the National Council for the Traditional Arts, which puts on the national festival. 

“I cannot think of a better place to celebrate America at 250 than Mississippi,” he said.

“You cannot tell the story of American popular music, and really cultural achievement, from food to music, literature – all forms of artistic expression – without Mississippi,” Wade said. 

Last year’s inaugural Jackson gathering, organizers said, was the first time the festival has taken place in the Deep South.

The festival features genres that span the blues and hip-hop to country, as well as other traditions such as Brazilian capoeira, Cajun, Filipino rondalla, Mardi Gras Indian and Texan conjunto.

“A few years back we were invited to the B.B. King Museum,” Isaac recalled, noting a connection between the “call and response” pattern of blues and the rhythm of native stomp dancing the Choctaw call “chahta hihla.” 

Geno Lee, the fourth-generation owner of the Big Apple Inn on Farish Street, usually arrives at events as a vendor selling food, but this time he’ll be more directly part of the festivities when he offers a food demonstration on the Mississippi Folklife Narrative Stage on Saturday. 

“Folk history is passed down through stories,” Lee said, and this festival is important because “it centers on stories passed down through music and culinary traditions.” 

There are ancillary events outside of the festival, such as the art museum’s exhibition featuring Tom Pich’s portraits of folk masters, which runs until January, and a community block party Thursday that runs until 3 p.m. at the Medgar and Myrlie Evers Home National Monument. 

“We also see how business owners within the festival’s footprint” benefit from the increased foot traffic, said Thabi Moyo, a Jackson native serving as a local festival manager. 

The Rookery, an event space a couple blocks from the new Shivers Creek Catfish House on East Capitol Street, will host an open house during festival hours. Tony Davenport, a visual artist and educator from Vicksburg, will be a part of the festival’s marketplace. He has one of his largest murals in the Rookery.

Eddie Cotton Jr., who lives in Clinton, is a nationally recognized blues musician who has performed at several national folk festivals.

“I’ve played in Richmond, Virginia, and Maryland, even drove to Montana,” said Cotton. “I’ve seen a lot in my career traveling for 30 years, but there’s nothing like playing at home.”

Cotton said the festival is good at bringing in talented artists who represent different cultures. “I’ve seen amazing Japanese musicians, and I didn’t know what they were saying, but you see the authenticity and can tell they are the best at what they do.” 

Raiatea Helm is one such master of her craft, having gained international fame performing traditional Hawaiian falsetto. “From the early 1900s Hawaiian bands were traveling with string, brass, and woodwind instruments,” Helm said. 

Noting the influence of the lap steel guitar, a traditional Hawaiian instrument, on early blues music, Helm said that Hawaii has long had a presence in Mississippi. 

“It’s my first time visiting Mississippi,” Helm said, but the musical traditions she participates in and “the stories of our ancestors passed down in them” spread across the country long ago.