Each year brings talented new participants to the Festival of American Folklife. It is indeed fortunate for the Smithsonian, but even more fortunate for our Nation as a whole, that traditional culture still survives and even thrives in places, and that some of its practitioners are generous and brave enough to come to Washington to demonstrate and perform their cultural legacy before national audiences. Every year these keepers of tradition come to speak with their own voices under the aegis of our National Museum. We are honored by their presence and grateful to them for maintaining, often in the face of powerful totalizing forces, a cultural and aesthetic richness on our planet.

This year marks a change in Festival administration, noteworthy not because of any change in goals or policies, but because the transition gives us opportunity to remember publicly that it was Ralph Rinzler who began the Festival in 1967 and directed it until last year when he became the Institution's Assistant Secretary for Public Service. Ralph devised the model for scholarly research, planning and production that has made the Festival unique and worthy of continued support by the Institution and of emulation by other Folklife festival planners around the Nation.