Suite of Photographs of the Famed Music Festival on the Mayo Trail near Ashland, Kentucky.

Jean Thomas (1882–1982) founded the American Folk Song Festival in 1930, organizing the Kentucky-based event every year until her retirement in 1972. The festival was arranged like a pageant, following a script intended to illustrate Thomas’s belief that “the speech, song, and traditions of old England still survived” in Appalachia (The Sun Shines Bright, Jean Thomas, 1940). As can be seen in the present photographs, performers wore homemade traditional clothing, including bonnets for the girls and shawls for the women. Famed ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax made numerous recordings at the festival for his Archive of American Folk Song.

The photographs, taken by Jack Jacumski of Georgetown, Ohio, capture both the audience and performers. Thomas herself can be seen in one of the photographs, seated to the right of Jilson Setters (1861–1942), the blind fiddler she rebranded as the “Singin’ Fiddler of Lost Hope Hollow.” Another photograph shows a white woman, possibly Thomas, in Native American garb, performing in front of the Traipsin’ Woman Cabin, which bears the nickname Thomas had earned for herself as a teenager in the 1890s while bucking convention to attend business school. Three photographs of Thomas taken by Jacumski are included in the collection of the University of Louisville.