Each year brings talented new participants to the Festival of American Folklife. It is indeed fortunate for the Smithsonian, but even more fortunate for our Nation as a whole, that traditional culture still survives and even thrives in places, and that some of its practitioners are generous and brave enough to come to Washington to demonstrate and perform their cultural legacy before national audiences. Every year these keepers of tradition come to speak with their own voices under the aegis of our National Museum. We are honored by their presence and grateful to them for maintaining, often in the face of powerful totalizing forces, a ...