White Top Folk Festival

[2] The idea for the festival came to John Blakemore after a local musician suggested holding a Fourth of July fiddler's contest on Whitetop Mountain.

Blakemore, who was politically powerful in the area, had the roads to the festival expanded in anticipation of the crowds Roosevelt's visit would draw.

The festival grew increasingly elaborate and culturally significant, with attendance and attention from academic folklorists, musicologists, and journalists.

He proposed opening a folk school that might serve as a tax shelter for the White Top Company, the corporation that owned Whitetop Mountain and of which he was the principal stockholder.

Charles Seeger, who attended the 1936 festival, noted that many poverty-stricken spectators had to stand outside the performance pavilion because they could not afford to pay to sit on the shaded benches inside.

Black people were prohibited from attending or performing at White Top, and exceptions were made only for the servants who accompanied Eleanor Roosevelt during her 1933 visit.