MC 748

Inventory to the Records of the New Jersey Folk Festival, 1974-2006

By Judit H. Ward, Allison Klein, Lucy V. Vidal, and Mike Ferrante

January 2007

Special Collections and University Archives, Rutgers University Libraries

Finding aid encoded in EAD version 2002 by Caryn Radick, January 2007

History

The New Jersey Folk Festival is an annual, outdoor, daylong, free event held on the Douglass campus of Rutgers University in New Brunswick. The festival is the culminating event of a Folk Festival Management class offered through the Rutgers American Studies Department (originally offered under the title "Special Problems in American Culture"). The festival is managed by a small number of undergraduates (approximately twelve) who apply to participate in the class. These students are supervised by New Jersey Folk Festival founder and executive director, Professor Angus Kress Gillespie. Each student acts as "coordinator" for a particular aspect of the festival such as general coordination, foods, workshop, children's area, business, publicity, grants, public relations, crafts, music, and art. Volunteers are also solicited to help on the actual day of the festival. Most of the planning takes place in the spring semester as part of Professor Gillespie's class.

For some years, the American Studies Department and Professor Gillespie worked with the New Jersey Folklore Society to produce a journal entitled New Jersey Folklore, later styled New Jersey Folklife. Students also worked to edit and produce the journal and records relating to it are found in this collection.

The New Jersey Folk festival first ran in 1975. It is always scheduled for the last Saturday in April, rain or shine, and is the oldest continuously run folk festival in the state. The Agricultural Field Day event run by Cook College occurs on the same day, so attendees have a choice of festivals and venues. Starting in the early 1980s, the festival has celebrated the diversity of New Jersey by highlighting a particular ethnic culture each year. It aims to inform the public of the rich folk traditions of these ethnic groups with a variety of activities such as craftmaking, food demonstrations, storytelling, and musical and dance performances. In the early 2000s, the festival has attracted more than 15,000 residents, students, alumni, and family members yearly.

The New Jersey Folk Festival is a multifaceted event. A printed program providing a full description of performers, presentations, and schedule of events is available to attendees. Musical and dance performances are usually held on two different stages at the festival, while workshops are conducted on a third stage. In addition to traditional American folk music, many of the performances correlate with the ethnic culture featured that particular year. Although many artists come from New Jersey, fieldwork is often conducted to identify performers that represent the annual ethnic feature. Some artists are brought from overseas and most are paid an honorarium. Student coordinators work to ensure that the festival offers food vendors with a wide variety of choices; volunteers in the children's area keep young children entertained; and vendors in a craft market display and sell clothing/clothwork, leatherwork, jewelry, pottery/ceramics, stained glass and other works.

Early in its history, the festival relied on food and alcoholic beverage sales to fund its activities; however, the University prohibited the sale of alcohol in 1988. Soon after, festival organizers solicited corporate sponsorships as well as grants from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts.

For more information about the Folk Festival and its history, see the festival web site, and the following papers by Angus Kress Gillespie, "The Founding of the New Jersey Folk Festival" and "Beyond the Ivory Tower: Reaching Out to the Community", which can also be found at the Folk Festival web site.

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Scope and Content Note

The Records of the New Jersey Folk Festival are organized chronologically as General Files. The files document the preparations, the day of the event, and follow-up activities of the festival and related programs with correspondence, area reports, background materials, and notes by the festival staff. The records also include documentation of the course at the American Studies Department, related financial records, newspaper clippings, and photographs.

Student coordinators' (sometimes called "officers") reports are the most comprehensive part of the records. Each student coordinator handed in a report of the year's activities, which also served as the term paper for the course at Rutgers. Reports were filed by the following coordinators: Art, Children's Area, Crafts, Food, General, Grants, Journal, Music, and Publicity, among others (the number and responsibilities of the coordinators changed over the years). A report typically describes the timeline and the activities in the particular area of responsibility and as such provided invaluable guidelines for the next year's student officers. The number of reports varies by year. Length, content, and accompanying material also vary. Regular monthly reports are provided in a few years only, such as the Coordinators' Monthly Report and Grant Budget Report. Most years also feature a comprehensive report of all activities submitted by the general coordinator.

The level of documentation for each festival varies. For most of the 1980s and 1990s, the documentation includes the entire year of preparation from the preliminary steps of determining theme proposals (occasionally as early as years in advance), the collection of background material, and the course organization through the concluding evaluation of activities in comprehensive reports from each area of the festival organization.

Other folders include background materials (on participants and thematically-related festivals), advertising (flyers, brochures, posters), business records (invoices, contracts, beer license), public relations documents, area correspondence, photographs, and journals/publications as well as course syllabi. In the early years, there are some materials related to New Jersey Committee for the Humanities grant programs.

For several years, the American Studies Department and Professor Gillespie worked with the New Jersey Folklore Society to produce a journal entitled New Jersey Folklore, later known as New Jersey Folklife. Students also worked to edit the journal, and records relating to it are found in this collection.

A small quantity of folk art is documented in the festival's records, in the form of questionnaires and photographs relating to about a dozen pre-1940 American quilts. These items were brought to the 1985 festival by their private owners as part of a quilt sharing event.

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Arrangement Note

Records of the New Jersey Folk Festival are grouped chronologically by festival year and then arranged alphabetically by folder headings within each year.

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Restrictions

No Restrictions.

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Name and Subject Tracings

Researchers can facilitate access to related materials in other collections by searching the Rutgers University Libraries' online public catalog (IRIS) and other union catalogs under the following index terms used for people, organizations, and subjects represented in these records.

Personal Names

Corporate Names

Subject Headings

Genres/Forms

Geographic Locations

Titles

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Administrative Information

Preferred Citation

Records of the New Jersey Folk Festival. MC 748. Special Collections and University Archives, Rutgers University Libraries.

Processing Note

Approximately thirty of the boxes in the New Jersey Folk Festival collection were processed by students in the "Manuscripts and Archives" class that is part of the MLIS program at Rutgers University's School of Communication, Information, and Library Studies. These remaining boxes were processed by a Special Collections and University Archives archivist.

Because the New Jersey Folk Festival is a class along with an event, a small quantity of material regarding students' grades was discarded for reasons of privacy. Where they appeared, Social Security numbers were removed from the documents.

Note: For reasons of copyright protection, unpublished student papers may be photocopied only on a limited basis unless permission to do so has been obtained from authors.

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