There’s a place in Fort Worth, Texas, that breathes Black American old-time tradition, where, each spring, jammers, dancers, and community members gather to contemplate and celebrate the central role of Black people in developing, sustaining, and innovating upon American roots music. At the Fort Worth African American Roots Music Festival, or FWAAMFest, string instruments speak directly to our feet and detail a slice of sonic history, one long obscured by forces of oppression and a narrow frame of national identity.

Presented by nonprofit Decolonizing the Music Room, FWAAMFest boasts a mission to not only visibilize the hidden truths behind Black American roots tradition but to make the knowledge and camaraderie of the movement more accessible to folks across the state. Since its virtual inauguration in 2020, the festival has evolved to include educational workshops, jam sessions, and an all-star lineup of musicians. This year, it features artists Jake Blount and Kaia Kater—one half of the Sable Sisters—who grace the Smithsonian Folkways catalog.

In 2026, the Smithsonian Folklife Festival is collaborating with FWAAMFest to kick off the Of the People: The Smithsonian Festival of Festivals initiative, Texas style. Performances and sessions will take place at Fort Worth’s Southside Preservation Hall on Saturday, March 21, with a free pre-fest community square and contradance on Friday, March 20, and a post-fest live documentary experience called German Soul at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth on Sunday, March 22.

Leading the Friday community dance is FWAAMFest’s newest wing: African American Dance Caller Pathways. Comprised of three apprentice callers and three expert instructors, AADCP is a cohort program that aims to (re)connect Black people to the practice of traditional dance calling in square and contra spaces, explains Brandi Waller-Pace, festival founder and Decolonizing the Music Room director.

In community dance spaces, the caller links the rhythm of the music to the movement of the people. The practice combines technique with storytelling, as the caller teaches paths and formations at the beginning of the song and then guides dancers with cues that follow the contours of the sound. The vocabularies of dance calling are threaded by the participants’ roles and relationships, traditionally directing women and men with different steps. Throughout its history, the community dance ecosystem, and in turn opportunities for dance calling, have become predominantly white and less accessible to Black people, who had long sustained the culture.

The program, which began last September, shouts across these gaps in cultural transmission and engaged identities, seeding dynamic curriculum and new relationships in Fort Worth and beyond. From reinterpreting classic songs and teaching with new music, to reimagining the possibilities of physical accessibility and non-gendered language, AADCP bridges the long-time principles of community dance calling with the consciousness of the modern era.

For Waller-Pace, this effort is also steeped in music education. Through her life as a roots artist, purpose as an organizer, and role as a programmer in various old-time spaces, she’s committed herself to understanding the ways in which Black music history has been abstracted, and why. She developed the program not only to open doors to dance calling as an intergenerational practice, but to integrate a critical curiosity of American musical narratives into community dance spheres.

“Even if you don’t know how to do it, even if you see a caricatured version of it, community dances and dance calling are such distinct practices—and it’s because the contributions of Black folks run so deep,” she says.

“But, like so many things that we call quintessentially American, Black folks have been erased from it,” she continues. “The Americanness is, of course, in the innovation, in the creativity, in the core place of Black folks... I want Black people to know that, in this space, they are culture bearers of a Black-rooted tradition. And I want everyone else to know that they are learning from a Black-rooted tradition that has engaged people across all stripes.”

As Waller-Pace also explains, the cohort’s inaugural instructors—Dr. Clover Johnson, Becky Hill, and Phil Jamison—helped shape the mission of the program as much as they continue to shepherd it. Jamison’s 2015 book, Hoedowns, Reels, and Frolics: Roots of Southern Appalachian Dance, reinforced Waller-Pace's understanding of the contributions of enslaved Africans and their descendants to the historic formation of community dance. Hill, after a casual reconnection at the Baltimore Old Time Music Festival, worked with Waller-Pace to conceptualize the programmatic netting between FWAAMFest and AADCP. Johnson, informed by her work with Southern Illinois Community Contra Dance, brought a staunch commitment to local engagement that laid the foundation for a truly equitable, people-centered calling curriculum. It is precisely their fervor and artistry as individuals that cultivate the energy and integrity of the AADCP space.

“A key thing that I’ve noticed in talking to all three instructors is their insistence on finding ways to connect the cohort members into their own communities,” Waller-Pace says. “A big piece of the program is setting the new generation up to know what they can do with the people and places that are immediately around them. The line between instructor and mentor is really blurred, and we saw this mentorship dynamic really take action when we had one-on-one, in-person time in January. They would all pair off and rotate throughout the workshop, and you could feel the energy of this shared knowledge take up the whole room.”

At a broad scale, AADCP is a program that both celebrates the richness of American old-time tradition and interrogates the disempowerment embedded in it at the same time. Yet, while this historical framing and the possibilities for future-building meet and dance at the helm of the caller, Waller-Pace also advocates for moments of reflection in the current moment.

At FWAAMFest, with Decolonizing the Music Room, and in the African American Dance Caller Pathways program, she finds her way back to the question of what it means, or could mean, to be a Black caller, a Black dancer, a Black musician in a predominantly white space. The sounds and footsteps and laughter of AADCP lend to one another in the making of collective knowledge, sharing of community truths, and understanding of real American roots.

“There’s a myth that, because our ancestors were enslaved, all our culture was stripped, and we had to rebuild completely,” she says. “There are so many of us who are storytellers, or who engage storytellers in our work, that want to do more than explain that Black people really were and are a key part of so many things. It’s about also asking why [society doesn’t] know that. You have to tell real stories for folks to understand that we are real people, out here doing real things, and that we have been for generations.

“When we share in that way, it allows us to properly confront our history, to see how we can make good on what we claim our country represents, and to try and repair the harms of the past. When you shine a light on something, the darkness cannot stay.”

Angelina Rios-Galindo is a program coordinator for the 2026 Smithsonian Folklife Festival.