Bascom Lamar Lunsford was born in 1882 in Madison County, learned fiddle from his father and ballads from his mother, and spent decades walking the isolated hollows of western North Carolina collecting what people sang. He performed in a starched white shirt and black bow tie — a campaign against the hillbilly caricature, dressed like a man making a case that this music mattered. On June 6, 1928, he founded the Mountain Dance and Folk Festival in Asheville, the first event ever publicly described as a "folk festival," and ran it every year until a stroke took him out in 1965. Harry Smith put Lunsford's 1928 recording of "I Wish I Was a Mole in the Ground" on the Anthology of American Folk Music; Dylan later echoed it. The Folk Heritage Committee carries the festival forward today at Pack Square, alongside Shindig on the Green — free, every Saturday evening in summer, lawn chairs and fiddles welcome, still not charging admission, still trusting the tradition to keep itself alive.
