Folklife Area

 What's New at Florida Folklife?

Housed within the Division of Arts and Culture in Tallahassee, Florida Folklife Program has documented, presented, and preserved Florida’s vibrant folklife and traditional culture for more than forty years. State Folklorist Dr. Dom Tartaglia and Vanessa Navarro Maza from HistoryMiami completed the 2023 Fieldwork Survey, conducting ethnographic research on traditions involving the Earth in Florida. Apart from the fieldwork survey and last year’s festival, Dom presided over the nominations of the 2024 Folk Heritage Award, coordinated the 2023 Artist Residency (with Artist-in-Residence Lili Forbes) and coordinated the 2023-24 Apprenticeship Program (all four teams will perform on the Folklife Stage).  Dom would also like to welcome two new members of the team to the Folklife Stage, Zach Moreau and Peter Abello. Zach is a folklorist at the Division of Arts and Culture and a PhD student in Musicology at Florida State University. He was last at the Folk Festival in 2022 when he volunteered on the Folklife Stage for FSU’s “Making the Folk Festival” class. Peter Abello is the new Public Information specialist at the Florida Division of Arts and Culture.

Earth

For four years at the Folk Festival, the Folklife Area will be covering how the elements influence traditions in the state of Florida. Based on survey fieldwork conducted in 2023, the theme of this year’s Folklife Area is Earth.

Florida is many things. It’s the people and the people groups who have moved here, some centuries ago, some last year. It’s the lines drawn on the map and the places we live. But most of all, it’s the earth beneath our feet. The dirt, the trees, the sand, the land, is all Florida. The people of Florida have made their homes on this land and make their lives here, often off the land. Florida Folklife interviewed more than thirty people last year whose traditions involve the Earth. We spoke to farmers and farmworkers, woodturners, hunters, potters, worm grunters, gardeners, and more to find the answer to the question of what makes the land we live in unique.

The tradition bearers on the Folklife Stage come from across our state, from Big Cypress to the Big Bend, from the 305 to the Panhandle, Gainesville, the Gulf Coast, and many more. This year, the stage brings you seven Earth tradition bearers, four teams from the Apprenticeship Program, and six traditional musicians returning to the stage. 
 

Invited Artists

Daniel Tommie

Daniel is a member of the Seminole Tribe of Florida and represents the Bird clan.

He is a traditional artist specializing in dugout canoe carving and presents on Seminole camps and hunting traditions. Daniel works at the Ah-Tah-Thi-Ki Museum as an educator and Interpretive Guide Coordinator. He recreated a hunting camp at the museum complete with two chickees, pelts, and a variety of dugout canoes.

Daniel grew up in his grandparents’ camp in what is now the Everglades National Park and drew from memories of spending time in traditional camps with his family as well as his vast knowledge of Seminole history to recreate the hunting camp at the museum. 

Daniel feels his job is more important than ever seeing how some Seminole traditions are being lost. He does his best to maintain the Seminole language in conveying values and preserving memories within his family. At work, he also feels he is fulfilling his duty of keeping these traditions alive. During his interactions with guests, he discusses carving traditions, chickee making, the importance of protecting and restoring the Everglades, and even tells stories about war tactics during the Seminole wars. Daniel also discusses Seminole cooking traditions, especially in relation to the cooking chickee at the camp. All the traditions he focuses on at the museum are closely tied to the natural environment, whether he is discussing wood carving, acquiring, and preparing the materials for chickee making, or how hunting traditions are entrenched in the unique ecosystem of the Everglades. 

Danny Sylvester

Jackson County is an important place in Florida for rural African American folkways, and Danny Sylvester is an important figure for the preservation of African American folkways and history in the Panhandle.

 Mr. Sylvester owns and operates Renaissance Park, a 40-acre wilderness park about 8.5 miles northeast of downtown Marianna. This bi-annual festival and the open-air museum in which it is housed not only curates an important perspective on Florida’s history and folkways but it also supports economic development of Jackson County by promoting minority-owned small businesses. A member of the Florida Folklife Council, Danny is also a contributor to the Florida African American Heritage Preservation Network, where he has developed landmarks for African American tourism sites in North Florida, contributed content in the Florida Black Heritage Trail Magazine, and is currently the process of restoring and preserving Graham’s Place, an African American historical landmark in Marianna. 

Mr. Sylvester also serves as a Cultural Preservationist for the John G. Riley House & Museum, where he is a specialist on historical techniques used and passed down by rural African American communities in Florida, such as cane syrup refinement, broom making, and jelly making. You will see Danny displaying broom making and other rural African American folkways from the Panhandle. 

Heather Goston

Just outside of Gainesville, a bowl-shaped cavity 120 feet deep leads down to a miniature rain forest. 

This is called the Devil’s Millhopper, one of the most remarkable features in Florida’s landscape. Small streams trickle down the steep slopes of this limestone sinkhole, disappearing through crevices in the ground. Lush vegetation thrives in the shade of the walls even in dry summers. Fossilized shark teeth, marine shells and the fossilized remains of extinct land animals found in the sink. 

This dramatic feature has been a part of Florida since before Florida has had human inhabitants, and Park Manager Heather Goston will be at the Folklife Stage representing Devil’s Millhopper Geological State Park and explaining how it has changed Florida’s culture and the land itself.

Ralph Callander and David Freundlich

Many woodworking traditions have flourished in Florida. Ralph Callander and David Freundlich are woodturners and leaders in the south Florida woodturning community. Ralph serves as the President of the South Florida Woodturners Guild and David is one of the organization’s founding members. The South Florida Woodturners Guild’s mission is to advance and promote the craft of woodturning, and both David and Ralph serve as mentors to other woodturners to help preserve and promote this tradition. Ralph and David were both introduced to woodturning at a young age in their respective shop classes. David became interested from the very beginning and sought out mentors to help him hone his craft. He was a Special Education teacher but continued to practice and teach woodturning. Ralph rediscovered woodturning only recently and has since dedicated much of his time to the art form. David describes Ralph as a jack-of-all-trades who can fix anything because of his experience working as a plumber, welder, mechanic, and fabricator. Ralph also credits his mother, who was a clay artist, with instilling in him a love of handmade crafts. For more about the South Florida Woodturner’s guild, or to see Ralph and David turn wood, stop by their booth at the Folklife Area. 

Leandro Rojas 

Born in Holguín, Cuba, Leandro Rojas is a master musician and instrument builder who specializes in the tres, a guitar-like instrument with three pairs of strings, and the primary instrument in the Cuban son genre. 

Born into a family of popular musicians, Leandro learned to play and build this instrument from his uncle. His uncle first taught him when he was about 12 years old. Tired of waiting for his uncle to repair his guitar, Leandro brought a piece of wood from a fruit crate to his uncle’s shop to make an instrument for himself. He watched his uncle work, and with his guidance, Leandro made his first tres guitar. He has since mastered the craft and constructs guitars, lutes, requintos, and baby bass guitars. 

Leandro has amassed a wealth of knowledge about the types of wood that are best for each part of an instrument and considers not only the aesthetics of the wood but the sound it will produce. He performs primarily Cuban son music throughout Florida, Cuba, and Mexico and has lived and worked in Miami since 2006. He will be playing Cuban son musical instruments at the Folklife Area and will be conducting a Q&A in Spanish, with English translation provided.  

Ana Chipana 

Ana Chipana is a Bolivian chef and nutritionist originally from La Paz, Bolivia and now living in Tamarac, FL. 

When she came to the United States in 2000, she worked a variety of jobs including cleaning houses, babysitting, serving at a school cafeteria, and as an operator. She discovered her passion for cooking only after her husband had a serious health scare. Ana’s husband, Ramiro Silvestre, had a severe gastric disease and was told he would need a serious operation. Remembering her mother’s cooking in Bolivia and the nutritional value of quinoa, Ana began cooking quinoa-based meals for her husband, and in a matter of months, he recovered without having to undergo surgery. 

This sparked a desire in Ana to share the incredible properties of this plant using creative recipes that would appeal to a variety of tastes. She had made her kitchen an incubator where she experimented with different dishes through trial and error. In 2010, she began her small business, Wara Quinoa Organic Bakery through which she sold organic quinoa cakes, muffins, cookies, and her famous quinoa huminita dish. In 2013, Ana was considered the informal “ambassador of Bolivian quinoa” and was invited to present her dishes to the United Nations. She will be making quinoa and describing the nutritional value and cultural richness of Bolivia’s foodways at the Folklife Stage, in Spanish with English translation provided.

Folklife Apprenticeship Program

The Florida Folklife Apprenticeship Program supports the preservation of folklife and traditional arts through one-on-one apprenticeships. These awards fund three-, six- or eight-month periods of study between a master artist and apprentice in recognition of the value of folklife and traditional arts in Florida while enabling participants to work together to maintain and share traditional knowledge, skills and techniques. At the end of the apprenticeship term, the master artists and apprentices take to the folklife stage to demonstrate the finished product from their months of classes. This year, the folklife stage will present three apprenticeship teams.

2023 Folk Heritage Award winner Concepción Poou Coy Tharin is a master weaver in the traditional indigenous Guatemalan style known as pikb’l. Ms. Tharin grew up in a village in the Alta Verapaz region in the central highlands of Guatemala, speaking only the indigenous Q’eqchi’ language. Now living in Tarpon Springs, Florida, she demonstrates and teaches classes in this traditional Mayan technique. She has demonstrated, lectured, exhibited, or had residencies at numerous institutions across Florida and the United States, including the Dunedin Fine Arts Center, New College of Florida, Polk State College, the Maxwell Museum of Anthropology at the University of New Mexico, the James Museum in St. Petersburg, the Nelson Poynter Memorial Library at the University of South Florida, and the Weedon Island Cultural and Natural History Center. She is currently a Master Artist in the Florida Folklife Apprenticeship program, where she is teaching her daughter Lorelai Tharin the traditional pikb’l weaving of her village. The two of them will demonstrate together on the Folklife Stage. 

Florida Folk Heritage Award recipient and Haitian cultural advocate Liliane Louis and apprentice Marie Romaine Desir have explored the intersection of Haitian food, folk medicine, and folk narratives over their Folklife Apprenticeship Program. Here, they showcase the product of their apprenticeship, including a live cooking demo of traditional Haitian foods. “Food is so much a part of our culture and our history.” Says Liliane. I’m always happy cooking, especially when I have someone to share it with.”

Dr. Panayotis “Paddy” League is Assistant Professor of Musicology at Florida State University and Director of the Center for Music of the Americas. He specializes in the traditional music of the Greek islands, northeastern Brazil, Ireland, and their respective diasporas. While he lives in Tallahassee, Tarpon Springs is his home, and he is a master of the traditional folk songs and oral poetry from the Greek island of Kalymnos, the folk song repertoire that has flourished in Tarpon Springs amidst years of Kalymnian immigration to the town. Through the support of the Florida Folklife Apprenticeship Program, he is teaching his apprentices, daughters Jasmine League and Violet League the folk songs of Kalymnos and Tarpon Springs. 

Miami has a small but dedicated community of Irish musicians, such as concertina and accordion player Paul Groff. Originally from outside of Syracuse, New York, Paul moved to Boston and worked as an Irish Traditional musician and instructor. His family relocated to Miami close to twenty years ago, which gave him less opportunities to perform than in Boston, but he still found himself sharing the stage with the likes of Heritage Award winner James Kelly or serving as an apprenticeship master artist to Sarah Kelly in 2007. When champion Irish dancer Shauna O’Hara wanted to learn more about Irish music, James put her in contact with Paul, and they became student and teacher. Shauna’s extensive knowledge of Irish music from her many years of dance informs her piano playing, she can be heard accompanying Paul on the Folklife Stage. 

Traditional Music and Dance

Karibbean Groove is a dynamic six-piece dance band that has been entertaining audiences since 2004 with the sounds of the Caribbean. They specialize in many genres of music including Reggae, Zouk, Merengue, Salsa, Calypso, and Konpa. The band members were born in Haiti or the Dominican Republic but met at church in Immokalee, where their families work as farmworkers.  Karibbean Groove is also well known for being involved in events that highlight diversity, celebrate culture and community empowerment locally and around the world. At the Folklife Stage on Friday afternoon, Karribean Groove will be playing songs and telling stories related to the Earth in the Caribbean and in Florida. 

Sarah McCulloch is a singer-songwriter, vocalist, and guitarist who, since starting as recent as 2020, has been taking the Florida country and folk scene by storm. Born in Miami and raised in northeastern Collier County, McCulloch grew up in a hand-built house crafted from cypress wood from her father’s sawmill. Living in and around the Big Cypress Seminole Reservation, she was inspired by her lived experiences of Seminole and local Floridians. 

While not writing and recording, Sarah performs all around the state at various festivals and venues. Grounded in family and tradition, her music is supported by lyrics that speak to her deep and meaningful lived experiences. Sarah is featured in the 2024 Edition of Florida Music Tours, the Department of State’s online encyclopedia of music in Florida, the theme of which is country music in Florida. In addition to the various stages in which she will be appearing on this weekend, she will appear Saturday afternoon on the Folklife Stage for a solo acoustic set. 

Lili Forbes is a singer-songwriter based in Tallahassee. She was raised on the Caribbean Island of St. Maarten in the Dutch Antilles and spent her youth between there and Curacao. She first came to Tallahassee to study Music Education and Theater at Florida A&M University. Lili has recorded six albums with her sister Ilismo as Jumelle (formerly The Johnson Sisters), three have which were awarded Caribbean Gospel Music Marlin Awards. Forbes has performed with The FAMU Essential Theatre, the FSU Triple threat Theatre Troop, A&A Production & SOMO Playhouse and she produces FAMU’s annual Sankofa concert. Lili is the Vice- President of the Tallahassee-St. Maarten Foundation (TLH-SXM), an organization which seeks to promote peace and prosperity in Tallahassee and its sister city St. Maarten through people-to-people relationships in both the public and private sectors via professional student exchanges, cultural and educational programs, and tourism. 

Lili was selected in 2023 as the Florida Folklife Artist-in-Residence, performing the music of St. Maarten and the surrounding Caribbean islands at schools and local venues across Tallahassee. On Sunday at the Folklife Stage, she will be performing traditional music and stories from St. Maarten.

In the sweltering heat of a Florida summer, packed in a warm church for a Sunday service, the swell of the organ gets replaced by the keening whine of the steel guitar. In Florida, we call this particular genre of country-inflected gospel music Sacred Steel.

The Second annual Sacred Steel Summit occurs inside the Florida Folk Festival and is organized by Florida Folk Heritage Award winner Alvin Lee of The Lee Boys. At the Sacred Steel stage, you will be able to see more than thirty-five sacred steel musicians, including legends of the genre like Check Campbell, Lonnie Bennett, Aubrey Ghent, and Ted Beard. Three players from the Sacred Steel Summit will be coming to the folklife stage. Dontrail Wright will be performing on Friday, Frank Owens on Saturday, and Tommy Phillips will perform on Sunday. 

Archivists Adam Watson and Chelsea Joslin assist patrons with research requests at the State Archives of Florida.  In addition, they collaborate with the State Archives' Florida Memory Program to select and add digitized archival collections to FloridaMemory.com.  Here, they present a sampling of Florida Folklife records—including film footage clips from previous Florida Folk Festivals and segments from documentaries created by Florida Folklorists, as well as photographs and music selections from the Florida Folklife Collection that are held by the State Archives and accessible on FloridaMemory.com.