September at Texas Folklife: The Traditions We Carry Forward
September at Texas Folklife: The Traditions We Carry Forward
Dear Texas Folklife Friends
September has always felt like a month of transition. Summer begins to loosen its hold, school and community rhythms return, and we find ourselves settling into the final stretch of the year. At Texas Folklife, this season also invites us to think about something central to our work: what we carry forward and who carries it with us.
Folk and traditional arts live through people. They are carried in songs remembered from childhood, recipes prepared without written instructions, stories told so many times they become part of a family’s vocabulary, dances learned by watching, and skills passed carefully from one set of hands to another.
September has been widely recognized as the month to honor elder generations. This month, I have been thinking especially about the role of our elders in the processes of passing down memories, stories, traditions, and lifeways.
Too often, conversations about aging focus primarily on what is lost. Folk and traditional arts offer us another way of seeing. Our aging community members are not simply recipients of cultural programming. They are cultural knowledge holders, tradition bearers, storytellers, makers, musicians, cooks, gardeners, teachers, and keepers of community memory. Their knowledge tells us not only how something was made or performed, but why it mattered and why it may still matter today. This is one of the reasons Texas Folklife is continuing to deepen our work at the intersection of creative aging, folk arts, and wellness. My colleague Jon Kay brilliantly captures the way that “older adults’ creative practices improve their overall well-being” (Jon Kay, Jason Baird Jackson, and Sanjida Islam, Everyday Arts in Later Life, Traditional Arts Indiana, 2024, p. v).
A familiar song can call forward a memory. Working with fiber, wood, food, or another traditional art can reconnect someone with skills learned decades earlier. Storytelling can give elders an opportunity to place their own experiences within the larger history of their families and communities. Just as importantly, intergenerational folk arts experiences create opportunities for younger Texans to listen, learn, and recognize elders as sources of knowledge. This is an essential exchange.
When we create spaces for elders to teach, make, sing, remember, and share, we are doing more than presenting an arts program. We are strengthening belonging. We are honoring lived experience. We are helping ensure that cultural knowledge does not disappear simply because a generation is getting older. We are assisting the communities we serve in creating spaces for wellness and connection that benefit our elders.
Fall is taking shape at Texas Folklife. September begins an exciting season of programming at Texas Folklife. Across our work in Music Heritage, Folk and Traditional Arts Education, and Folk Arts Wellness, we are creating more opportunities for Texans to encounter the traditions that shape the places they call home.
This fall, look for upcoming Texas Folklife events and programs including:
Community Folk Scholars
Our Community Folk Scholars initiative continues to build a network of people equipped to document, interpret, and celebrate the traditions within their own communities. As we prepare for the next cycle of the program, we are especially interested in the knowledge that already exists within Texas communities—and in giving people the tools to document it responsibly.
Roots & Rhythm Salon Series
Our Austin, Dallas, San Antonio, and Nacogdoches programming continues with the Roots & Rhythm Salon Series creating space for music, conversation, cultural memory, and community. Held at our offices and partner organizations, these gatherings remind us that music is never simply entertainment; it carries histories of migration, family, place, language, labor, and belonging.
Our Youth Folk & Traditional Arts Program at Voice of Hope returns with weekly Thursday programming, creating a consistent space for young people to learn through storytelling, music, making, cultural traditions, and hands-on exploration. These weekly gatherings are complemented by once-a-month Saturday camps, giving participants additional time to learn directly from artists, tradition bearers, and community knowledge keepers.
Cultivating Community at Voice of Hope
This fall, our work at Voice of Hope will also extend beyond arts programming and into the physical spaces where community happens.
I am participating in Better Block University, an opportunity that is helping me think more intentionally about how small-scale, community-centered design can strengthen the places where people gather, learn, and build relationships. As part of that work, I am developing an activation for Voice of Hope centered on a community garden and Little Free Library.
The vision is simple but meaningful: create a welcoming place where neighbors can grow something, take something, leave something, read something, and share something.
For Texas Folklife, this is also an extension of our understanding of folk and traditional arts. Gardens carry knowledge. Recipes carry memory. Books spark stories. Neighborhood spaces create opportunities for traditions to be exchanged across generations. Together, the garden and library will help us explore how placemaking can support cultural stewardship while creating something tangible for the Voice of Hope community.
The Apprenticeship Program
Applications for the Texas Folklife Apprenticeship Program open this fall, continuing one of the most direct ways we support the transmission of traditional knowledge across generations.
The program brings experienced tradition bearers together with committed apprentices for sustained, hands-on learning in folk and traditional arts. Rather than simply observing a tradition, apprentices have the opportunity to learn the techniques, histories, values, and community knowledge that give a cultural practice its meaning.
The Apprenticeship Program reminds us that traditions survive because people make the decision to teach—and because someone else makes the commitment to learn.
MOSAIC
And, of course, September brings us further into the world of MOSAIC, Texas Folklife’s publication dedicated to the people, places, traditions, and ideas that make Texas culture so extraordinarily rich. MOSAIC gives us another way to document the stories we encounter through our work—and to place those stories directly into the hands of readers across Texas and beyond.
The Work of Remembering
At its heart, Texas Folklife’s work is about relationships: between generations, between communities, between people and place, and between memory and the future.
As we move through September and toward the close of another year, I invite you to think about the tradition bearers in your own life.
Who taught you a song?
Who showed you how to cook the dish everyone requests at family gatherings?
Whose stories taught you where your family came from?
Who taught you to sew, braid, fish, garden, dance, pray, build, play an instrument, or make something with your hands?
And perhaps most importantly: Have you asked them to tell you the story again?
Thank you for continuing to stand alongside Texas Folklife as we document, celebrate, and sustain the living traditions of this remarkable state. There is much more ahead this fall, and I look forward to sharing it with you.
Pass it on.
With gratitude,
Elisha R. Oliver, PhD
Executive Director
Texas Folklife
Quote I’m Pondering:
“If you see someone without a smile today, give ’em yours.” -Dolly Parton
Book I’m Reading:
The Very Hungry Caterpillar’s Vegetable Garden: A Search-and-Find Book (World of Eric Carle) – A Dolly Parton Imagination Library Selection
On Repeat:
Before The Next Teardrop Falls performed by Dolly Parton & Freddy Fender
Artist I’m Celebrating:
Katie Murray aka @katiepaintbrush
