Next month, Riverfront Park in North Little Rock will come alive with traditions from every corner of Arkansas. The Arkansas Folklife Festival is June 26-28. It will highlight music, dance, food, craft and storytelling from six different cultural regions of the state.
Program director Rachel Reynolds says the program is co-curated with "Of the People: The Smithsonian Festival of Festivals," in celebration of America's 250th anniversary. Reynolds spoke with Ozarks at Large's Jack Travis to explain how they managed to get so much of the state into one weekend.
It wasn't easy, but Reynolds says she has experience in this kind of undertaking.
"Back in 2023, I was invited to co-curate the Smithsonian Folklife Festival and the topic was the Ozarks. And from the first conversation I had with that team, I said, can we tell the real story? The whole story hadn't really been told. It's a very narrow story when we think about what's been told about Ozarks culture. And I really wanted to approach it from First Nations through new immigrant populations. And thankfully, they supported that sort of behavior. It was a year-and-a-half process curating that festival with the team and others in the Ozarks that were on that team. But it made for an incredible festival, to be able to really tell the breadth of the story of in-migration and out-migration and the impacts that that has had on the culture of the Ozarks."
Reynolds says that through the process of curating that original festival three years ago, she met a group of people passionate about preserving and emphasizing Arkansas's heritage. She had a really fun time over the two-week-long festival and made friendships through shared culture.
"Those relationships continue on to this day, and some of them bleed over into the festival that we're doing now for the Arkansas Folklife Festival. But I came home wanting that for our state, because we do not hang out together across those cultural geographies. So the running joke has been, the Delta's not hanging out with the Ozarks, and nobody knows what's going on in Texarkana. We need to come together and celebrate the best of who we are. And in my mind, expressive culture, traditional culture is one of the best ways we can do that. And so that was the genesis of the idea."
Not too long after, Reynolds received a mysterious email.
"I got a random email from Palo Alto from a place called the Emerson Collective that said, 'We found you and your work, and we would like to know, through the lens of your work, how you would choose to celebrate America 250.' This was back in 2024, and I thought it was spam. I live in the Ozark National Forest. I'm a folklorist who has spent her whole career studying and digging in the Ozarks. And that just didn't ring very true to me, so I didn't respond to it. And thankfully, a couple weeks later, they reached out and said, 'You probably thought that was spam. It wasn't. We're really interested to know how you would choose to celebrate America 250 through the lens of your work.' And I knew immediately what I would want to do. It was this idea of bringing a statewide folklife festival that covers the entirety of the state — that had not happened. And in these moments we find ourselves in, as many spaces of shared joy that can unify people is where my heart's at. And I felt like this festival would be the perfect way to center the people that make this country great every day. So we call it the People's 250."
The team has divided Arkansas into six distinct cultural and geographic regions: Northwest Arkansas, Central Arkansas, the Delta, Southeast Arkansas, Southwest Arkansas and the Central River Valley. Reynolds says she had to cut through some preconceptions about the regions to isolate them for the event. For example, most people would group Southeast Arkansas into the Delta, yet Reynolds found that towns like Pine Bluff have unique heritage and deserve their own spotlight. Another tough spot was the Ozarks.
“Northwest and North Central — we separated. And that's basically your Ozarks regions. But Northwest Arkansas is such a special critter, as I say. Because it's international headquarters to major corporations, and for other reasons, there is a really rich breadth of community in Northwest Arkansas and pieces of our cultural story that the rest of Arkansas and a lot of the nation don't know about — in particular the Marshallese community, and there's a strong and vibrant Hispanic/Latinx community there, as well as other cultural communities. So I knew that the process we were going to go through meant I needed to make it its own point of focus.
“And then there's — in the map, we have a map you can find on our website, arkansasfolklifefestival.org — that cultureshed map has those really interesting areas. They're my favorite parts of the state that share cultural aspects of more than one cultureshed. So those are kind of identified within the map as well. Pocahontas is a really great example of that. You can be driving and saying 'Ozarks, Ozarks, Ozarks,' looking around, and you cross that bridge over the Black River and you start saying 'Delta, Delta, Delta.' But the culture, because of that geography, is also a blend of the two regions. So those are identified on the map."
And like she said, it's the People's 250. Reynolds wanted to ensure that the people who made up the culture helped curate the Folklife Festival.
"We want to center the people that make this country great every day, but we also wanted to center voices that haven't historically had a say in who and what Arkansas culture is, to ensure full representation of all of who we are as Arkansans. And to do that — a gift from the Emerson Collective, they supported this — I was able to take a year, with a team, through 18 community engagement events across those six cultural regions where we asked the people: who is Arkansas culture, and what is Arkansas culture? We had a cultural survey that was translated in multiple languages. We built community partnerships with community-based organizations in each of these regions, and they worked with us to invite people to our events. We asked these questions, we unpacked who we are as Arkansans and what is special to us. And ultimately, we asked the people from each region how they would want to be represented in music, dance, craft, food and outdoor recreation, and who they would want to represent them. And we collected all that data. Every day Arkansans — how they want to be represented and what they want to celebrate about who we are — has directly programmed this festival."
Music is woven into the fabric of the state, and the Folklife Festival is no different. The festival's headliners both have long ties to the Natural State. The first is Grammy Award-winning blues player Bobby Rush.
"Bobby Rush grew up in Pine Bluff, Arkansas. If you're unfamiliar with his work, he's a legend of the Chitlin' Circuit. He is 92 years old, and he's getting around and dancing better than I can. He was just on the Sinners soundtrack and was part of the big production number there. But throughout his very long career he has constantly made Arkansas a hub. He celebrates his birthday at Heston Stadium Rodeo Arena in Pine Bluff. He plays a party every year in Mountain View, where I live up here. He's just constantly been a touchstone — not only for him, but for the people of Arkansas, especially in the African American community, who revere him as our star. He was a perfect fit for us to have as a headliner."
After Rush, attendees will hear Lucinda Williams, another Grammy winner. The singer-songwriter possesses and regularly displays Southern roots, and Reynolds says she even has a tie to Fayetteville.
"When she was young, she was there. Her father, Miller Williams, was a very well-known poet who taught at the University. And I ended up — there's a really great story of Arkansas culture in Northwest Arkansas — Sarge and Shirley West were the first African American country music duo to tour the country, and they lived in South Fayetteville. They have two sons who are also country music performers, Luke and Joe West. I was working on a project with Luke West in Fayetteville, and I had just moved houses — I lived in South Fayetteville and hopped over two blocks and moved into a new house. Luke was coming to town and I said, 'Come over for coffee,' and he asked the address, and I told him and he said, 'You're kidding me. That was our house when I was a kid. Lucinda Williams babysat me.' That house — which I recently told that story to her manager, who got a very big kick out of it, imagining Lucinda Williams as someone's babysitter — is pretty fun to think about. She also has family in Little Rock, and has talked quite a bit about how Arkansas has shaped her songwriting. And of course she also ties in with our People's 250 theme. Her new album World Gone Wrong is a protest album questioning where we're at and where we could be and how we get there. The two of them are really wonderful headliners for this first year.”
They'll be joined throughout the weekend by musicians like Nick Shoulders, Dylan Earl, Willi Carlisle and more, all for free. Plus, the festivities will continue across the river, with some activations in collaboration with the Clinton Presidential Library in Little Rock. Again, all of this is free.
Making this experience as accessible as possible was important to Reynolds as she worked to bring the Folklife Festival together. She says it wouldn't have been possible if the statewide community hadn't stepped up.
"Funding is the biggest challenge in doing something like this,this year. A lot of federal funding was cut for the arts in general. And of course, that has ripple effects down through the state level, so our state arts agency has been struggling with funding cuts. Luckily, with the Smithsonian, they have this three-pronged approach for this year — they're taking their festival off the National Mall and plugging in to 34 festivals around the country. We're thankful to be one of them, along with Burning Man and Farm Aid and these big festivals. The funding that they gave us pretty much supported that community engagement piece and came from private foundation funding, so it wasn't tied to the same restrictions. But it has been an incredible struggle to find funding for this festival this year. At the same time, you do the thing that needs to be done. We are hungry to have shared joy together and we need it. We just have to hope that the community will come on board to support us."
The Arkansas Folklife Festival runs June 26-28 at Riverfront Park in North Little Rock. Find more info and a full lineup at arkansasfolklifefestival.org. And stay tuned to Ozarks at Large toward the end of June, as I will be heading down to Central Arkansas to cover the festival.
Ozarks at Large transcripts are created on a rush deadline and edited for length and clarity. Copy editors utilize AI tools to review work. KUAF does not publish content created by AI. Please reach out to kuafinfo@uark.edu to report an issue. The audio version is the authoritative record of KUAF programming.
