Like any organization that brings people together, Folkmoot USA had a difficult 2020. Without the ability for travel or gathering, there was no chance for the annual international festival or any of the other in-person programming planned throughout the year. During that time of cutbacks, former Executive Director Angie Schwab resigned to begin other work. 

Folkmoot is proud to partner with the Mountain Memories organization and Waynesville’s own Bob Plott to launch the Mountain Memories performance series at historic Queen Auditorium on the Folkmoot campus.

The series opens with “Mountain Memories No. 1: A Hazelwood Gathering” at Saturday, Nov. 16, at the Folkmoot Friendship Center in Waynesville. Doors open at 6 p.m. with food and beverages available in the cafeteria. The “Mountain Memories” show starts at 7 p.m. in the auditorium. 

Waynesville arts and cultural organization Folkmoot has reached an agreement with the Academy at SOAR, a longtime boarding school in the Balsam community of Jackson County, to move its school operations on the Folkmoot Friendship Center campus.

The voice of Claire Lynch is incredibly soothing — in conversation and in front of a microphone.

With a songbird tone and cadence, the singer is like a free-flowing breeze, something that swirls around you and picks you up, as if you’re a fallen leaf at the peak of beauty, eager to once again sit high in the sky.

I’ve always been fascinated by storytellers and the stories they tell. As a small child, I loved hearing my parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, or any other willing grown-up tell stories of their childhoods, the experiences they had, the people they knew, and the people they once were. I could listen to these stories for hours, as long as they were willing to tell them.

Lori and I have always loved to travel, to go to new places or to get better acquainted with places we’ve been before. It’s part curiosity, part adventure. As the now more famous dead than alive chef and world traveler Anthony Bourdain put it in his show’s title, it’s the thrill and the surprises that come with discovering “Parts Unknown.” 

The proud communities that make up Western North Carolina were once mountain towns that played host to several successful blue-collar industries. We’re talking about logging, furniture, paper products, auto parts, beverages, textiles, and so on. The country needed things, and needed them fast, and folks here made those products with their bare hands.

These companies found a crucial, much-needed balance alongside the serene beauty and endless natural resources of our forests, rivers and wildlife.

The Folkmoot Friendship Center on Virginia Avenue in Hazelwood is central to the festival’s operation.

At the heart of Asheville is a funky soul. And providing the soundtrack to that carefree and self-less attitude of the city and greater Western North Carolina is Empire Strikes Brass.

Cultural bias and conflict aren’t new to Western North Carolina; chattel slavery and Cherokee removal still leave a deep and painful legacy for many in the region — something Folkmoot’s Cultural Conversations program seeks to remedy.