Now in its forty-first year, the Smithsonian Folklife Festival continues an important tradition by featuring Roots of Virginia Culture, Mekong River: Connecting Cultures, and Northern Ireland at the Smithsonian.

The Roots of Virginia Culture program helps mark the 400th anniversary of the founding of Jamestown. The founding was a seminal event, although not for the reasons thought at the time. For the nation that subsequently emerged, Jamestown set in motion relationships among Native Americans, English, and Africans. They interacted through war, slavery, and strife, as well as through a growing economy and an unfolding democracy to define, in large measure, American culture and traditions. Musicians, artisans, cooks, boat builders, farmers, archaeologists, and genealogists from Virginia, England (mainly Kent County), West Africa, and Native communities throughout Virginia will demonstrate root traditions, cultural parallels, and the ways their expressions and those of later immigrants formed a dynamic American heritage.