Paper short abstract:

This presentation examines Pennsylvania Dutch oral histories recorded at the annual Kutztown Folk Festival, the oldest continuous folklife festival in the United States. Participants recount growing up Pennsylvania Dutch and attending the folk festival, narrating festival folklore and identity.

Paper long abstract:

The Kutztown Folk Festival is the oldest continuously held folklife festival in the United States, having been established in 1950 as the Pennsylvania Dutch Folk Festival by preeminent American folklife and folklore scholars, Alfred Schoemaker, J. William Frey, and Don Yoder, the father of the American Folklife movement. The purpose of the Folk Festival was to present the folk culture of the Pennsylvania Dutch (also referred to as the Pennsylvania Germans) through enactments (and not re-enactments) of their practices; participants are “bearers of the culture” (Donmoyer 2019). The festival has undergone numerous iterations under different festival directors; regardless of these changes, the festival remains an annual touchstone for many families in the area in their roles as participants, volunteers, and attendees, so much so that the annual return to the festival itself serves as an ethnic ritual. Beginning in 2015, the seminar stage, an original feature of the festival, has provided a space for people to provide oral histories about what it means to have grown up Pennsylvania Dutch, and what the Kutztown Folk Festival has meant for them. In this regard, the Kutztown Folk Festival is now generating its own folklore, an addition to the body of lore for this distinctly American ethnic group who date to the beginning of the eighteenth century. This presentation addresses the role of these oral histories in generating a new area of focus for the examination of Pennsylvania Dutch belonging and identity in the twenty-first century.