25. The Mountain Dance and Folk Festival
In 1927, in an effort to increase tourism given the rise of automobile travel in the United States, Asheville, North Carolina organized a Rhododendron Festival. The following year Bascom Lamar Lunsford, a musician with a law degree from what was then Trinity College (today’s Duke University) organized the festival as the Mountain Dance and Folk Festival. Bascom performed dressed in formalwear while playing his banjo, in order to distance himself from the image of being a hillbilly. The festival he organized, no longer centered on rhododendrons, continues to celebrate Appalachian music and dance, and is the longest-running celebration of Appalachian music and culture in the United States.
