The American Folk Festival on the Bangor Waterfront celebrates the rich traditional folk, ethnic and tribal cultures of the people of Maine and the United States. The nation’s earliest immigrants and settlers brought the music, arts and customs of their countries of origin with them to their new homeland, where they encountered the land’s First Nations.

These peoples worked to maintain their unique traditions while at the same time adapting to new conditions and a rich confluence of cultures. Those musical traditions that we think of as quintessentially “American” – jazz, blues, gospel, bluegrass, old-time, Tex-Mex, Cajun, zydeco, cowboy and others – spring from the interaction and intertwining of these varied cultural roots.

Today, renewed immigration from an even wider range of nations brings new sounds, dances, foods and customs to enrich our American cultural landscape. The American Folk Festival celebrates this diversity through performances by our nation’s finest traditional artists.