Mississippi has always been at the National Folk Festival. The National Folk Festival has never been in Mississippi.
Until now.
Downtown Jackson hosts the 82nd annual National Folk Festival November 7-9, 2025, celebrating the artistic traditions of all Americans through music, dance, craft, storytelling, food, and more.
“All arrows point to Mississippi when it comes to music,” Cleveland, MS blues singer Keith Johnson, who’ll be playing at the Festival, told Forbes.com. “When you talk about folk music, when you talk about Americana, when you talk about blues music into jazz, to soul, to R&B. By Jackson being so close to Memphis, Tennessee, when you look at Beale Street, all those guys came through Jackson.”
They will all now come to Jackson. The free festival isn’t exclusively a concert series, but music is the centerpiece.
“It was exciting to think about working in a state that has contributed so much to the story of American music,” Blaine Wade, executive director for the National Council for the Traditional Arts, parent organization of the National Folk Festival, told Forbes.com. “We do festivals all over the country and Mississippi is always at those festivals. A lot of Keith’s peers in the blues world, gospel groups, are at our festivals. Mississippi has always been at the festival, but the festival has never been in Mississippi.”
Or anywhere in the Deep South for that matter.
“I clap my hands to say, ‘It’s about time,’” Johnson said. “The blues and folk music is like coming home.”
The event comes home to Mississippi’s capital at a special time and for a special purpose: honoring the 100th birth years of bluesman B.B. King and civil rights martyr Medgar Evers. King and Evers are both Mississippians. Evers was assassinated in Jackson.
In his driveway.
A driveway you can stand in four miles from downtown where the Festival takes place.
King And Evers
The National Folk Festival has as its theme this year “Legacies of Empowerment” in homage to King and Evers. Community and the arts–the Festival’s two purpose pillars–were central to both icons.
“These are both arcs and stories that encapsulate so much about 20th century America, musically, where we went socially, where we went culturally; Mississippi was at the center of that” Wade said.
“What Medgar Evers has done for not only Jackson, but for the country, sacrificing his life, laying it down, fighting for civil rights, all that history, Civil Rights history started in the state of Mississippi in 1955, starting with Emmett Till,” Johnson explained.
Emmett Till was a 14-year-old from Chicago visiting family in Mississippi when he was kidnapped, tortured, and lynched by a pair of white men for supposedly whistling at one of their wives. Neither was found guilty at a subsequent mockery of a trial.
Till’s mother’s brave decision to hold an open casket funeral for her son, allowing the public and media to see his horrifically disfigured face after having been beaten and thrown into a river with a fan around his neck, sparked the Civil Rights Movement that Evers would take up in the 1960s as the first Field Secretary for the NAACP in Mississippi fighting for Black equality in voting, education, housing–you name it.
“Look at BB King, the songs he’s singing connects to the history of what Medgar fought for. ‘Why I Sing the Blues.’ ‘I Pay the Cost to Be the Boss,’ even ‘The Thrill is Gone,’” Johnson explains. “Those southern civil rights songs, blues songs that B.B. wrote tied into what Medgar did, and for both of them to be highlighted in their centennial, that music being highlighted, the history, focusing on Jackson, Mississippi where Medgar was, BB passed through 100 times.”
An aside about Evers and patriotism.
Despite facing terrible racism growing up in Mississippi, Evers enrolled as a 17-year-old into a segregated Army unit and became a decorated combat veteran of World War II. The white supremacist who assassinated Evers surely considered himself a patriot–as white supremacists do today–and couldn’t have cared less about Evers actual service fighting for America.
Be careful who talks about patriotism. Be careful who talks about supporting America’s military; do they support the power or the servicepeople? Be careful who wraps themselves in the flag and attempts to characterize dissent and efforts at progress–as Evers engaged in–as anything less than patriotism, let alone terrorism.
I’m Going To Jackson
Jackson will not only serve as host city for the 82nd National Folk Festival this year, it will host in 2026 and 2027 as well. Festival organizers prefer rotating hosts sites on a three-year basis.
“At every step of the way the city of Jackson just kept checking all the boxes,” Wade said of Jackson’s selection.
After submitting an initial proposal for hosting, Jackson worked its way through the application process becoming one of two finalists. Festival organizers made a site visit in mid-November of 2023 and were convinced by the city’s enthusiasm and universal support from city leaders, state tourism officials, the regional arts and cultural sector, and the downtown business community.
“We saw buy in from everybody around the table that this could be a game changer for Jackson in terms of revitalizing downtown, economic development, (and) providing a signature music festival in the birthplace of America’s music where there is not a signature music festival right now,” Wade continued.
Having hosted festivals for nearly 100 years, The National Council for the Traditional Arts has found cities in need of a signature music festival tend to be the best host sites. After its three years in Jackson, the organization hopes its efforts there will spur the city into carrying on with its own annual music festival.
“We’ll be putting Mississippi on display and Jackson’s downtown area on display,” Thabi Moyo, local manager in Jackson for the National Folk Festival, told Forbes.com. “Three days, six stages, anything from Irish music to blues to go-go, flamenco dancers, reggae. People will be exposed to so many world cultures because of this festival. That’s what they’ll see. They’ll hear. They’ll taste; we’ll have a lot of our Southern cuisine represented in the food ways at the festival.”
Jackson State University’s “Sonic Boom of the South” marching band kicks off the event on Friday evening. In addition to the stage performances, there will be parades, a family activities area with hands-on activities for kids, and a small stage for kids to sing and dance. Lots of dancing, from Jewish dances to Krumping. Food vendors. A crafts marketplace celebrating the best craft makers from around Mississippi and the Deep South. A Mississippi folklife area and stage will be curated by the Mississippi Arts Commission.
“It’s not just music, there’s the literary heritage, there’s the food, there’s the arts and craft, Mississippi is such an exciting place to think about folk life,” Wade said. “The festival is a national celebration of the nation’s best traditional artists, but we want to highlight the best of the host region. The themed folklife area will have its own performance stage as well as craft demonstrators, everything from quilting to instrument making to gardening and farming to skateboarding and zine making and a motorcycle club–the broad view of folk life.”
Folk life. American life. Mississippi life.
“To be able to reflect on all Mississippi has contributed to the national story is an important and special opportunity, and hopefully in the context of this conversation, it’s a chance to bring people to Mississippi to see all the different cultural heritage sites,” Wade said. “(Go) to Vicksburg, go to Faulkner’s house, Elvis’s house, Marty Stewart’s new museum in Philadelphia, all the Civil Rights sites, and really gain an appreciation for what Mississippi has contributed to the national story, and also help drive tourism and give a bump to the economy.”
In the Jackson area alone, festival goers can–and should–see Medgar Evers Home Museum. Tougaloo College. The Mississippi Museum of Art for its special exhibition of Mississippi-born abstract painter Joe Overstreet. The Mississippi Civil Rights Museum. The former Greyhound Bus Station.
What The Folk?
The term “folk art” brings to mind quilts and weathervanes and Grandma Moses and the “Antiques Roadshow.”
How does the National Folk Festival define “folk art?”
“We take a very broad view of what we’re talking about when we’re talking about folklife and traditional culture; it’s really anything that’s passed down informally in families,” Wade explains. “You don’t go to school to learn it. It’s observed, it’s passed down. It’s based in community. It’s not something you just decide, ‘Well, I want to go over here and learn that thing.’ It’s something that you inherit by virtue of the family you belong in, the living community you’re a part of and what you absorb. It’s passed down from generation to generation, from parents to kids, in church communities, from elders to children, in workplaces.”
Johnson embodies that definition.
“My great uncle is Muddy Waters, McKinley Morganfield. Muddy Waters’ dad, my great great grandfather, was a self-taught guitar player. Muddy Waters is self-taught guitar player. My grandfather, whom I still play with today, self-taught guitar player,” Johnson said. “We talk about the spirit of the music, folk music and what’s represented through the culture, through the music, through the civil rights aspects, my presence and my ancestors presence will be tied in the middle of all of it.”
Traditional culture. Whether that culture be Hip Hop or Hawaiian. Irish or Jamaican. A sense of place. Break dancing in Brooklyn. Bluegrass in Kentucky. Salsa in San Juan. Quilting in Alabama.
“We even have John Primer, a Chicago blues man, coming to the festival, who’s originally from Madison County, Mississippi. His life is the story of the Great Migration,” Wade said. “His father passed away when he was four. His mother moved to Chicago and said that John couldn’t come until he was 18. He turned 18 in the 1960s, he’s in Chicago. He’s playing on Maxwell Street. He ends up being Muddy Waters’ band leader. This is a chance for him to come back to Mississippi and be honored. All these stories, going back to the Great Migration, going back to Medgar Evers, going back to BB King’s impact on music in the second half of the 20th century, these are really important stories to be telling.”
They will be told in Jackson during the National Folk Festival.