The Common Thread Stage: Three Days of Story, Craft, and Conversation

When the Arkansas Folklife Festival opens at Riverfront Park on June 26, the Common Thread Stage will be the place where Arkansas’s living traditions sit down and tell their stories.

Presented by the Arkansas Folk and Traditional Arts program, the Common Thread Stage hosts thirteen narrative sessions across three days, each one a conversation between the artists, tradition bearers, and culture keepers who make Arkansas’s folk heritage a living, breathing practice. These are not lectures. They are gatherings: the kind where a master bladesmith sits across from a young apprentice, a glass bead pioneer describes life off the grid, and a former presidential diarist traces her path from a sharecropping childhood in the Delta to the White House.

Friday, June 26

The stage opens Friday evening with Building Community Traditions at 4:30 PM, a conversation between Pat Johnson, founder of the Eddie Mae Herron Center and Museum in Pocahontas and 2024 NEA National Heritage Fellow, and Meredith Martin-Moats, cultural worker and cofounder of the McElroy House in Dardanelle. Together they explore the patient, generational work of building community through place, story, and shared tradition.

At 5:30 PM, the Mosaic Templars Cultural Center presents Braiding Hair, Intertwining Community, led by Director Quantia Fletcher and Curator Courtney Bradford, with Tongela Curry and Donyale Morris. The session showcases the traditional art of African American hair braiding as an enduring cultural practice in Central Arkansas.

Saturday, June 27

Saturday is the stage’s fullest day, with seven sessions running from morning through evening.

Old Time Scene: Ozark Strings (11:00 AM) brings together Clarke Buehling, Pete Howard, and Pam Setser for a conversation about old-time banjo, fiddle, and the musical traditions of the Arkansas Ozarks. Buehling, one of the foremost champions of the nineteenth-century banjo, is joined by veteran fiddle player Howard and Mountain View tradition bearer Setser.

At noon, Celebrating the Arkansas Living Treasure Award marks 25 years of the program with master bladesmith Jerry Fisk and Arkansas Arts Council Program Coordinator Scarlet Sims. Their conversation traces how the award came together, the artists it has honored, and what it means to keep this recognition rooted in Arkansas community.

Colorful Traditions: Glass Bead Making (1:00 PM) features Tom and Sage Holland, pioneers of the contemporary glass bead making movement who live off-grid in the Meadowcreek Valley of Fox, Arkansas. ASL interpretation is provided.

At 2:00 PM, Bharatanatyam: Indian Classical Dance brings Guru Anupriya Krishnan and her apprentice Sangamitra Reshmy to the stage. Krishnan, who trained under Padmabhushan Shobana Chandrakumar and holds a Master’s in Bharatanatyam from Tamil University, has performed across India and the United States for more than 30 years. Reshmy, a Bentonville West High School graduate and incoming University of Arkansas freshman, has trained under Guru Krishnan for over a decade.

The Evolving Legacy of the Committee of 100 for the Ozark Folk Center (3:00 PM) pairs Alison Lee, the Committee’s current chair and President of the Buffalo River Foundation, with traditional musician Pam Setser for a conversation about the citizen organization’s decades of work sustaining one of Arkansas’s most significant living heritage institutions. Music Roots students join the conversation.

At 4:00 PM, Forging Heritage: Knifesmithing in Arkansas brings together two master bladesmiths: Jerry Fisk, who has practiced for more than 40 years in Nashville, Arkansas, and Ricardo Vilar, who came to Arkansas by way of Brazil and is recognized by the Historic City of Washington as their Master Bladesmith.

The day closes with a second session of Building Community Traditions at 5:00 PM, giving Saturday visitors the chance to hear Pat Johnson and Meredith Martin-Moats in conversation.

Sunday, June 28

Sunday’s programming opens at 11:00 AM with AR Folksong Digital Archive, a conversation with Joshua Youngblood, Associate Dean for Special Collections at the University of Arkansas Libraries, about the ongoing effort to digitize and share the field recordings, manuscripts, and ephemera that document Arkansas’s deep folk music heritage.

At noon, Delta Dreams Realized features Janis F. Kearney, author, publisher, founder of the Celebrate! Maya Project, publisher of the historic Arkansas State Press, and the first and only personal diarist to a U.S. president, serving Bill Clinton from 1995 to 2001.

Sacred Harp: Shape Note Singing in Arkansas (1:00 PM) is led by Cory Winters, a shape-note singer and traditional Irish musician whose song appears in the Sacred Harp: 2025 Edition. Winters is joined by Allison Langston, Elizabeth Janes, and Mckenna Mullis for a conversation about the practice of shape-note singing in Arkansas.

The Common Thread Stage closes at 2:00 PM with Celebrating Georgia Hudson, a tribute to the late gospel tradition bearer by three generations of her family: Agnolia Gay, educator and Park Ranger at Little Rock Central High National Historic Site; Chy’Na Nellon, Ph.D. candidate at the University of Arkansas and co-founder of Cultural Immersion Media; and Agnolia Johnson, an eighth grader and co-author of A Little Different: Somewhere on the Spectrum, who apprenticed with her grandmother in the tradition of African American gospel.

A stage built on conversation

The Common Thread Stage is not a performance venue. It is a place where tradition is spoken aloud, where master and apprentice sit together, where the work of keeping culture alive becomes visible in the stories people tell.

All Common Thread Stage sessions are free and open to the public. Several sessions include ASL interpretation, marked with an asterisk (*) on the festival schedule.

The Arkansas Folklife Festival runs June 26 to 28, 2026, at Riverfront Park in North Little Rock. Admission is free.