It’s his first year at the helm of the Richmond Folk Festival but Víctor Hernández-Sang knows the assignment.
“At the festival, we try to feature as many artists from different music traditions as possible,” explains the programming manager for the National Council For the Traditional Arts (NCTA), which is based in Silver Spring, Maryland and works with Venture Richmond (and a local programming committee) to book the annual event. “At the same time, we also maintain the quote unquote staple genres, the typical ones like blues and bluegrass.”
The ethnomusicologist makes it sound simple but it’s a gargantuan task — it takes a village to bring the sounds of the world together every year for a weekend in Richmond. In its 21st installment, on the weekend of Oct. 10-12, the Richmond Folk Festival will once again grace the downtown riverfront with multiple stages and more than 30 performers. As programmed by the NCTA, which practically invented the idea of a “folk festival” with the National Folk Festival, this year’s offerings include styles you know and love — country, reggae, gospel, zydeco, funk — as well as some you never knew of (but may go crazy for) like qawwali, juré and Togolese. And it’s all free, although donations to the cause are greatly appreciated.
For a complete history of the Richmond Folk Festival, including the three years that RVA served as the host city of the National Folk Festival, read Style Weekly’s 20th anniversary oral history here: https://www.styleweekly.com/twenty-years-of-folk/
Style recently talked with Hernández-Sang about this year’s RFF, some of the key acts on deck, and what the future might hold for Richmond’s grand celebration of diversity.
Style Weekly: Is there an overall theme for this year’s festival?
Víctor Hernández-Sang: Not particularly. We try to find things that haven’t been featured on stage before, perhaps even traditions that are not as common in folk festivals, music traditions that are common in other regions but don’t necessarily make it onto a stage in a [normal] festival.
Richmond has become known for that, right? We don’t mind coloring outside the lines sometimes. What would you point to on the 2025 schedule as new and rarely showcased?
The first one that comes to mind this year is the Broussard Sisters that sing Creole juré. We haven’t had it in a festival before so it’s new to Richmond and to the NCTA. It’s a style that is rarely performed outside of Louisiana, a tradition that has fallen out of favor. It’s one that gets passed down within families and is rare, not a commercialized genre and not widely popular. If you haven’t been learning about music from the deep south and music of Louisiana, you would never come across this, let alone see it on a big stage.
Then there’s Dogo Du Togo and the Alagaa Beat Band. You don’t see a lot of Togolese performers either.
That’s another one. They are the first Togolese musicians to be featured in any of the NCTA festivals. We haven’t had any music from Togo before or anyone playing music from that country. [Serge Massama Dogo] is taking a lot of the music that he grew up with in Togo, these various traditional African musics, and he and the band are playing it on electric instruments and making it their own.
There’s also some excitement about the Saami Brothers and their very unique “Qawwali” and “khayal” music.
Right. That’s a very special thing too. The Saami brothers and their father, Ustad Naseeruddin Saami, represent one of the last generations performing this particular style of Qawwali from Pakistan. They represent the last living practitioners of this 49-note, microtonal vocal scale that is not common outside of the region where they come from.
Is it music that is disappearing?
They’re kind of like the last ones doing it. And all of us will learn more about it in the workshop we have planned, titled ‘Endangered Traditions.’ They will be there along with the Broussard Sisters and Raiatea Helm, the Hawaiian singer, and Richard Hagopian, the Armenian oud player. They all perform music that has fallen out of favor over generations, and is less commonly performed.
It’s important to document that.
Yes, we also document them. That’s why we record all of the stages. All sets are recorded, and we have those recordings. They are kept in our archive and people can have access to that. So, however many years go by, we’ll have recordings of the Saami Brothers and of Ustad Naseeruddin Saami.
Richard Hagopian has played here before, back in 2006 when Richmond initially hosted the National, but I heard that his appearance in Richmond this year is special.
[Original RFF programmer] Julia Olin has been trying for a while to get Richard on stage with his children and grandchildren, and that’s what we’ve got this year. We’re showcasing three generations of Hagopians playing together on stage. That’s another thing that we highlight at the festival, and with all of the festivals that the NCTA programs, like the National Folk Festival, is that these are music traditions that passed down through family. The Hagopians are a very good example of that.
“When we showcase the deep, diverse breath of cultures in the U.S., that strikes an uncomfortable chord with those who are now in power and they see it as a threat.”
The singer Riatea Helm is another one. She’s keeping alive that Hawaiian falsetto tradition that her father and uncle exposed her to.
Exactly. And, as we will learn, her latest project [“A Legacy of Hawaiian Song & String”] is to preserve and record these old songs and try to revive them and keep them there.
I know that it’s hard to pick, but what’s the one act this year that people shouldn’t sleep on?
Well, I’d say it’s the Beat Ya Feet Academy. This D.C.-based group that teaches a dance that started spreading in the early 2000s in go-go music. We’ve worked with a lot of go-go bands over the years in Richmond, as you know. So we’ve got two of the pioneers of that dance, John ‘Crazy Legz’ Pearson and Porshe ‘Queen P’ Anthony, and they teach this dance to kids as young as four and five years old. They’re going to bring a kind of multi-generational representation of their group and lead these dances in Richmond. People will love it.
In the current political environment, has it been more difficult to get bands to come and perform?
Most of the people we try to work with are already in the U.S., or they have their papers in place. But we have had some cases where we knew that artists that we wanted to present to the local programming committee would have trouble with visas. Dogo, for instance. He’s based in the U.S. but was going to bring [players] from his original Alaaga Band, all Togo-based. But because of all the stuff happening around immigration, they were not able to get their visas to come in. So he had to get together a band from around D.C., other musicians who were from Togo and people he’s collaborated with in the past. So, yeah, that’s just one example that I know of that has impacted the festival.
Looking at the future, how will the loss of federal funding affect the festival?
That’s a great question. As you know, it’s been challenging. This is new territory for everybody in terms of not only the cuts in funds for the traditional arts, but also the pushback against, quote-unquote, DEI language and all the talk about immigration and so on. And those are the things that are a part of our nature, you know? That’s what the festival is all about. When we showcase the deep, diverse breath of cultures in the U.S., that strikes an uncomfortable chord with those who are now in power and they see it as a threat.
The Richmond Folk Festival will be held Oct. 10-12 along the Richmond riverfront. www.richmondfolkfestival.org. The event is free although donations are appreciated. (Disclosure: Don Harrison is a member of RFF’s local programming committee)
