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"Tribute to Sarah Gertrude Knott" by Michael Ann Williams, Western Kentucky University
The nation's oldest multicultural folk festival was founded by a Kentuckian, Sarah Gertrude Knott. When she created the National Folk Festival in the 1930s, most folk festivals celebrated only Anglo-Saxon culture and a single region, southern Appalachia. From its inception, the National Folk Festival always featured regional and cultural diversity. It had strong African American and Native American components on the program and also highlighted the folklore of various immigrant and occupational groups.
How did a young woman from rural western Kentucky come to found the first major folk festival to be both national and multicultural in scope? Sarah Gertrude Knott was born in 1895 in Kevil, a small rural community on the Ballard-McCracken county line. In high school, Knott discovered a love for drama. Aspiring to be an actress, she studied drama at various institutions and eventually landed a job at the Bureau of Community Drama in North Carolina working for Frederick Koch, founder of the Carolina Playmakers. It was the idea of "folk drama" promoted by Koch, Paul Green, and others that would eventually inspire the idea for a national folk festival.
At the beginning of the Great Depression, Knott moved to St. Louis, hoping to finish her education at Washington University. In response to the economic conditions of the time, she again became involved in community arts projects. This work led Knott to the idea of a folk festival, and she wrote to Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Paul Green for help and support. Green in turn wrote to President Franklin Roosevelt, who gave the enterprise his blessing with these words:We in the United States are amazingly rich in the elements from which to weave a culture. We have the best of man's past on which to draw, brought to us by our native folk and folk from all parts of the world.In binding these elements into a National fabric of beauty and strength, let us keep the original fibres so intact that the fineness of each will show in the completed handiwork. The National Folk Festival premiered in St. Louis at the new Keil Auditorium in May 1934.
Sarah Gertrude Knott's greatest talent was her ability to harness the energy and talents of others for the sake of her festival. The lists of advisers for the National Folk Festival, especially in the early years, read as a veritable who's who of prominent academic folklorists, collectors, and promoters, including George Lyman Kittredge, Zora Neale Hurston, George Pullen Jackson, Vance Randolph, and Bascom Lamar Lunsford. Although primarily a staged event, the early festivals included exhibits of folk crafts, special programming and printed materials for school children, and conferences of academic folklorists.
Knott's festival was seldom a financial success, though support was found from state governments (for the Texas Centennial and the Oklahoma Semi-Centennial festivals) and from newspapers (the Washington Post and the St. Louis Globe-Democrat both sponsored the festival at two periods in its history). Mostly the festival moved from city to city, as Knott did herself. Still, Kentucky was always "home." In the 1940s, her sister Gladys Knott took a teaching job in Princeton, Kentucky, and that town would remain Sarah's home base until her death. The National Folk Festival was only held in the state twice, in Covington in 1963 and in Florence in 1964.
By the 1960s, Knott, then in her seventies, found herself increasingly out of touch with the new generation of academic folklorists and folk revivalists, many of whom found the National to be stagnant and old fashioned. Knott officially retired in 1971, although she was reluctant to give up the reins of the festival she had devoted her life to running. Until ill-health intervened, Knott devoted her retirement years to continuing her activity promoting folk culture, particularly in her home state. Sarah Gertrude Knott died in a nursing home in 1984. She is buried at the Spring Bayou Baptist Church cemetery in Kevil.
The festival Knott founded continues under the auspices of the National Council for the Traditional Arts (as the National Folk Festival Association was renamed during the 1970s). Although the National Folk Festival has undergone considerable changes in the past twenty-five years, Knott's vision of a multicultural festival, national in scope, is still alive.
One of Knott's final dreams was of a statewide festival in Kentucky. Sarah Gertrude Knott did not live to see this dream come true, but surely her spirit is with us now as we celebrate the diversity of Kentucky's folk traditions.
