Ralph Rinzler, founding director of the Smithsonian Folklife Festival, worked with countless gifted musicians, folklorists, and producers to conduct fieldwork, create publications and recordings, present concerts and public programs, and implement new cultural policies that led to diversity in the Smithsonian's workforce and programming. He was a strategic and outspoken promoter of collaboration with community-based artisans, musicians, academics, and cultural activists with whom he diligently worked to facilitate the Smithsonian's acquisitions and employment of professional staff to represent communities that were, in the polite parlance of the time, "underrepresented" at the Institution. The Ralph Rinzler Memorial Concert celebrates Ralph's mind and spirit, his untiring and wide-ranging cultural work, his all-encompassing humanity, his commitment to traditional musicians and artisans, and his never-ending will to increase and diffuse knowledge in support of cultural democracy.