The Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage promotes the understanding and continuity of diverse American and world cultures through research and educational activities. It is responsible for the Smithsonian Folklife Festival, Smithsonian Folkways Recordings, Smithsonian Global Sound, the Ralph Rinzler Folklife Archives and Collections and other cultural heritage research, education and policy projects.

To support its various activities, the center receives funds from federal appropriations, Smithsonian trust funds, grants from state and national governments and foundations, gifts, and income from its annual Festival and Folkways product sales. Its programs and products have received critical acclaim and have earned Academy, Emmy, Grammy and Webby awards and nominations.

Smithsonian Folklife Festival
The annual Folklife Festival highlights grassroots cultures across the nation and around the world through performances and demonstrations of living traditions. The Festival, which began in 1967, occurs for two weeks every summer on the National Mall and attracts more than 1 million visitors. To date, the Festival has featured traditions from more than 90 nations and every region of the United States. It has brought more than 23,000 musicians, artists, performers, craftspeople, workers, cooks, storytellers and others to the nation’s capital to demonstrate their skills, artistry, knowledge and wisdom.

The Festival is typically organized into three or four thematic programs each year. Programs have featured U.S. cities and states (Virginia, Wisconsin, Iowa, New Mexico, Hawaii, Michigan, Alaska, New York City and Washington, D.C., among many others); countries around the world (Oman, Mali, Scotland, South Africa, the Czech Republic, Haiti, Japan and India); and special themes ("Family Farming," "Culture and Sustainable Development," "Masters of the Building Arts," "Borderlands," "El Río," "Musics of Struggle," "Nuestra Música" and "Workers of the White House"). "The Silk Road: Connecting Cultures, Creating Trust," co-produced with Yo-Yo Ma and the Aga Khan Trust for Culture in 2002, and "Tibetan Culture: Beyond the Land of Snows," which included the participation of the Dalai Lama, are among the Festival’s most popular programs.

The Festival has served as a model for other events on the National Mall. In 2004, the center produced the National World War II Reunion for the opening of the World War II Memorial and the Native Nations Procession and First Americans Festival for the opening of the National Museum of the American Indian. It has co-produced festivals beyond the Mall, including "Southern Crossroads" in Centennial Olympic Park for the Atlanta Olympics, and inspired numerous festivals in the United States and in other nations. The center also organized the Smithsonian’s 150th birthday party on the National Mall in 1996 and has co-produced numerous presidential inaugural festivals.

Smithsonian Folkways Recordings
Smithsonian Folkways Recordings is the nonprofit record label of the Smithsonian Institution that aims to document community-based music and to preserve historical recordings of both music and the spoken word. It is dedicated to fostering people’s appreciation of their own cultural heritage as well as introducing them to the traditions of others through the production and distribution of audio recordings and educational materials.

Smithsonian Folkways Recordings includes a number of historic labels formerly operated by independent collectors and record producers—among them Folkways Records, the life’s work of Moses Asch. Included in the more than 2,000 Folkways Records titles still reproduced and distributed are the recordings of Woody Guthrie, Lead Belly, Bill Monroe and Doc Watson; Civil Rights Movement songs and speeches; the poetry of Langston Hughes; historical Native American traditions; varied regional and immigrant songs; and music and spoken word traditions from across the globe.

The center established Smithsonian Folkways with the acquisition of Folkways Records in 1987. Since then Smithsonian Folkways has continued to produce about two dozen new recordings annually, some from the archives, and others from contemporary documentation and recording projects. Highlights include the gold record Harry Smith "Anthology of American Folk Music" that won two Grammy Awards in 1997 and the five-CD set "The Best of Broadside 1962-1988" that documentsAmerican protest music. In recent years, Ella Jenkins won a Grammy Lifetime Achievement award and a Smithsonian Folkways tribute album to her won a Grammy for best children’s music recording.

Smithsonian Global Sound
Smithsonian Global Sound is a virtual encyclopedia of the world’s musical traditions. It communicates the "people’s music" from archives around the world to a wide audience, allowing listeners to discover and appreciate new forms of music as well as strengthen their bonds with their own heritage. Recordings are available for sampling and downloading at smithsonianglobalsound.org (standard charge applies).

The core digital collection is provided by Smithsonian Folkways, but it also includes archives from Central Asia, India and Africa—and archives from other countries and regions will become available online soon. Users can search for music by genre, instrument, geographical location and cultural group. The Web site includes video performances from the Folklife Festival and the center’s other research and documentary projects; interviews with artists; streaming radio stations; and special educational features, including recordings and lesson plans for teachers. Smithsonian Global Sound was nominated for a Webby award in 2006. The revenue earned from sales of downloads and subscriptions supports the creation of new educational content and is shared with archival partners, who share a portion of those revenues with artists and communities.

The Ralph Rinzler Folklife Archives and Collections
The Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage includes the Ralph Rinzler Folklife Archives and Collections. The archives contain an extensive collection that document American and world traditions in research notes, videos, CDs, audio tapes and still images. Particularly strong are those collections of traditional music, occupational folklore, narrative, immigration and family folklore. American regional and ethnic cultures—Native American, African American and Latino culture—are well-represented.

In 2000, the Rinzler Archives was designated an American Treasure under the Save America’s Treasures program. The center spearheaded a "Save Our Sounds" project with the Library of Congress’ American Folklife Center to preserve thousands of endangered sound recordings stored on old wax cylinders, decaying wire, decomposing acetate and deteriorating audio tape.

Cultural Heritage Research, Education and Policy
The Center’s scholarly staff is continually engaged in research on a variety of cultural heritage topics and annually collaborates with hundreds of researchers around the world to document folklife traditions. Recently published books by staff include "Mariachi Music in America: Experiencing Music, Expressing Culture" (Daniel Sheehy), "The Stone Carvers" (Marjorie Hunt), "Lacrosse Legends of the First Americans" (Thomas Vennum) and "Hope Diamond: The Legendary History of a Cursed Gem" (Richard Kurin).

The center also develops and participates in conferences, documentary films, educational material and traveling exhibitions based upon its research work and productions for the Smithsonian Folklife Festival and Smithsonian Folkways Recordings. It actively collaborates with a variety of national and international agencies and organizations in the analysis and research-based formulation of cultural heritage policy. Its joint conference and ensuing publication with UNESCO—"Safeguarding Traditional Cultures: A Global Assessment"—contributed to the development of the 2003 International Convention on the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage.

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