That's an interesting article, Russ. Thanks for bringing it to our attention.

Here's a couple of excerpts from The White Top Folk Festival: What We (Have Not) Learned:

"Ultimately, however,[John]Blakemore was not the worst of the festival's problems. John Powell was. When Charles Seeger said that the political-cultural ideas that undergirded the festival were sinister and "reactionary to the core," he was referring principally to Powell. For all his cultivated elegance as a classical composer and pianist and champion of the folk, Powell was a thoroughgoing racist who had worked for years to maintain and strengthen the racist social and political structure of Virginia. As early as 1922 he had organized the Anglo-Saxon Club of America in Richmond, which was dedicated to "the maintenance of Anglo-Saxon institutions and ideals." It was open only to white males. The Club proposed, promoted, and gained passage of Virginia's Racial Integrity (that is to say, anti-miscegenation) Law of 1923. In articles written for newspapers, Powell warned darkly of the "dangers of injecting into a white population a mass of primitive savages."[240f]

It turned out that Powell's racist ideas meshed neatly with his folk-based compositions and the cultural promotion work he did at White Top. The underlying aim in each case was to develop a national culture expressive of the values and esthetics of a lily white America. [242] Powell read musical and cultural history in strictly racial terms: "Negro music," he said, was "meagre and monotonous," but the "beauty of Anglo-Saxon folk music surpasses any other in the whole world . . . [and] promises a solution to our [national] problem." [243] Thus C. B. Wohlford's picking of "Cluck Old Hen" on his banjo or Council Cruise's singing of "Pretty Polly" on the mountaintop seemed to Powell a welcome "prophecy of the cultural future of Virginia."

With Powell's ideas as central as they were to the festival, it is not surprising that none of the more than three thousand blacks who lived in the three adjacent counties from southwest Virginia were allowed up John Blakemore's newmade road to the top of the mountain as spectators or performers. Black musicians had been documented in the area as early as the 1890s, and there was an especially vital group of black banjo players. Even some spiritual-singing black youngsters from a nearby CCC camp were refused admission to the festival. The only blacks Blakemore ever allowed on the mountain during the festival were the aged John Smith, Eleanor Roosevelt's father's servant, who came to present a gift to her in 1933 [slide #9: John Smith], and the two black men who cooked her meals.[slide #10: black cooks]"

-snip-

I consider it as one of life's little ironies that I share the same surname as the person who was considered the worse of the bad guys in that folk festival's history.