Fifty-Five Years of Fiddles and Front Porch Music

Every July, the small town of Smithville, Tennessee, pulls off something that might seem impossible. A place with roughly 4,300 residents welcomes tens of thousands of visitors to a free, two-day music and crafts festival on its courthouse square. They come for old-time fiddle tunes, banjo picking, dancing, and handmade crafts.

In recent years, they also come for something newer: inclusive competition categories for participants with disabilities. Smithville’s Jamboree is one of the few traditional arts festivals where people of all abilities compete for real awards on the same stage.

How It All Started

The festival began in 1972, when Congressman Joe L. Evins suggested to friends Berry C. Williams and James G. “Bobo” Driver that they put together a country music gathering. Bobo traveled the country recruiting contestants – clogging classes, small festivals, anywhere he could spread the word. Williams personally wrote every winner a note and mailed a stage photograph to their hometown newspaper. The first event drew 714 musicians from 16 states. By the mid-1990s, more than 100,000 people were showing up.

The founders chose the Fourth of July weekend to boost the local economy in a rural area. That mission holds. The 55th annual Jamboree is set for July 3–4, 2026. There is no gate and no ticket booth. As board president Kim Driver Luton puts it, the festival is “determined to stay free to the public.”

Luton is Bobo Driver’s granddaughter. She is also a polio survivor. Born in Honolulu in 1959, she was found paralyzed in her crib about two weeks after birth. Polio left her right leg permanently paralyzed.

“My mom and dad really didn’t treat me like I had a disability,” she says. A doctor told her early on she could do everything everyone else was doing.

She did – public school, marching band, a degree from MTSU, more than 40 years of work. She did not think of herself as disabled until, in her late fifties, she filed for disability benefits after being diagnosed with post-polio syndrome. “And I’m like, well, wait a minute. I do have a handicap.”

That experience shapes how she leads the festival, using tourism grants to add ADA-compliant ramps and railings and working with the city on sidewalk access. She uses the ramp to get on stage herself. “I’m not done with it,” she says, “but we’ve come a long ways.”

Same Stage, Same Weekend

The inclusive categories grew out of the COVID-19 pandemic. When the 2020 Jamboree moved online, participants with disabilities entered for the first time, including a clogging team from California. A former board member helped organize inclusive categories. The same judges scored all the categories. All winners were announced on stage and broadcast on YouTube.

The board kept the inclusive categories after the pandemic and worked to grow them. Today, each of the Jamboree’s 36 competition categories has an inclusive counterpart. Participants who cannot travel to Smithville can still submit videos – a rule that applies only to inclusive entries.

The inclusive categories are not a separate event on a different day. They appear on the same schedule, on the same stage. A musician with a physical disability can choose whether to compete in the open or inclusive category. “It’s their choice,” Luton says. “It’s an option that we’re giving.”

Amateur Only, Handmade Only

Around the stages, more than 200 craft booths line the square. Everything must be handmade. “We lean more towards a true Appalachian craft,” Luton says.

All contestants are amateurs, but some have gone on to Grammy Awards and Grand Ole Opry membership. This year, the Opry invited the Grand Champion Fiddler to perform on its stage.

When asked what she wants the Jamboree to look like in 10 years, Luton does not hesitate. She wants the inclusive categories full – especially music, which has not drawn as many entries as dance. “Where would I go to find those folks that would want to play on the Jamboree stage?” she asks. It is a real question, not a rhetorical one.

Asked what she would tell a person with a disability thinking about entering for the first time: “It’s very friendly. It’s very exciting. These people become lifelong friends. People would make you feel welcome and comfortable.”

The Council has partnered to feature the Jamboree for this year’s arts issue because the festival lines up with what the Developmental Disabilities Act asks us to do. The DD Act says that inclusion means “full access to and active participation in the same community activities” as people without disabilities.

It is one thing to say that the arts belong to everyone. It is another to hand someone a registration form, point them toward the stage, and show they belong there with everybody else.