Shining a Light with the African American Dance Caller Pathways in Fort Worth, Texas

There’s a spot in Fort Worth, Texas, that breathes Black American old-time custom, the place, every spring, jammers, dancers, and group members collect to ponder and have fun the central position of Black folks in growing, sustaining, and innovating upon American roots music. At the Fort Worth African American Roots Music Festival, or FWAAMFest, string devices converse on to our ft and element a slice of sonic historical past, one lengthy obscured by forces of oppression and a slender body of nationwide id.

Presented by nonprofit Decolonizing the Music Room, FWAAMFest boasts a mission to not solely visibilize the hidden truths behind Black American roots custom however to make the data and camaraderie of the motion extra accessible to people throughout the state. Since its digital inauguration in 2020, the competition has developed to incorporate instructional workshops, jam classes, and an all-star lineup of musicians. This 12 months, it options artists Jake Blount and Kaia Kater—one half of the Sable Sisters—who grace the Smithsonian Folkways catalog.

In 2026, the Smithsonian Folklife Festival is collaborating with FWAAMFest to kick off the Of the People: The Smithsonian Festival of Festivals initiative, Texas fashion. Performances and classes will happen at Fort Worth’s Southside Preservation Hall on Saturday, March 21, with a free pre-fest group sq. and contradance on Friday, March 20, and a post-fest reside documentary expertise known as German Soul on the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth on Sunday, March 22.

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Music: “Genuine Negro Jig” by Carolina Chocolate Drops

Video: Some Sweet Photo

Leading the Friday group dance is FWAAMFest’s latest wing: African American Dance Caller Pathways. Comprised of three apprentice callers and three knowledgeable instructors, AADCP is a cohort program that goals to (re)join Black folks to the follow of conventional dance calling in sq. and contra areas, explains Brandi Waller-Pace, competition founder and Decolonizing the Music Room director.

In group dance areas, the caller hyperlinks the rhythm of the music to the motion of the folks. The practicecombines method with storytelling, because the caller teaches paths and formations on the starting of the tune after which guides dancers with cues that observe the contours of the sound. The vocabularies of dance calling are threaded by the members’ roles and relationships, historically directing men and women with totally different steps. Throughout its historical past, the group dance ecosystem, and in flip alternatives for dance calling, have develop into predominantly white and fewer accessible to Black folks, who had lengthy sustained the tradition.

The program, which started final September, shouts throughout these gaps in cultural transmission and engaged identities, seeding dynamic curriculum and new relationships in Fort Worth and past. From reinterpreting traditional songs and instructing with new music, to reimagining the probabilities of bodily accessibility and non-gendered language, AADCP bridges the long-time ideas of group dance calling with the consciousness of the trendy period.

For Waller-Pace, this effort is additionally steeped in music schooling. Through her life as a roots artist, goal as an organizer, and position as a programmer in varied old-time areas, she’s dedicated herself to understanding the methods during which Black music historical past has been abstracted, and why. She developed this system not solely to open doorways to bounce calling as an intergenerational follow, however to combine a crucial curiosity of American musical narratives into group dance spheres.

“Even if you don’t know how to do it, even if you see a caricatured version of it, community dances and dance calling are such distinct practices—and it’s because the contributions of Black folks run so deep,” she says.

“But, like so many things that we call quintessentially American, Black folks have been erased from it,” she continues. “The Americanness is, of course, in the innovation, in the creativity, in the core place of Black folks… I want Black people to know that, in this space, they are culture bearers of a Black-rooted tradition. And I want everyone else to know that they are learning from a Black-rooted tradition that has engaged people across all stripes.”

As Waller-Pace additionally explains, the cohort’s inaugural instructors—Dr. Clover Johnson, Becky Hill, and Phil Jamison—helped form the mission of this system as a lot as they proceed to shepherd it. Jamison’s 2015 e-book, Hoedowns, Reels, and Frolics: Roots of Southern Appalachian Dance, bolstered Waller-Pace’s understanding of the contributions of enslaved Africans and their descendants to the historic formation of group dance. Hill, after an informal reconnection on the Baltimore Old Time Music Festival, labored with Waller-Pace to conceptualize the programmatic netting between FWAAMFest and AADCP. Johnson, knowledgeable by her work with Southern Illinois Community Contra Dance, introduced a staunch dedication to native engagement that laid the inspiration for a very equitable, people-centered calling curriculum. It is exactly their fervor and artistry as people that domesticate the power and integrity of the AADCP house.

“A key thing that I’ve noticed in talking to all three instructors is their insistence on finding ways to connect the cohort members into their own communities,” Waller-Pace says. “A big piece of the program is setting the new generation up to know what they can do with the people and places that are immediately around them. The line between instructor and mentor is really blurred, and we saw this mentorship dynamic really take action when we had one-on-one, in-person time in January. They would all pair off and rotate throughout the workshop, and you could feel the energy of this shared knowledge take up the whole room.”

At a broad scale, AADCP is a program that each celebrates the richness of American old-time custom and interrogates the disempowerment embedded in it on the similar time. Yet, whereas this historic framing and the probabilities for future-building meet and dance at the helm of the caller, Waller-Pace additionally advocates for moments of reflection in the present second.

At FWAAMFest, with Decolonizing the Music Room, and within the African American Dance Caller Pathways program, she finds her method again to the query of what it means, or may imply, to be a Black caller, a Black dancer, a Black musician in a predominantly white house. The sounds and footsteps and laughter of AADCP lend to 1 one other within the making of collective data, sharing of group truths, and understanding of actual American roots.

“There’s a myth that, because our ancestors were enslaved, all our culture was stripped, and we had to rebuild completely,” she says. “There are so many people who’re storytellers, or who interact storytellers in our work, that wish to do greater than clarify that Black folks actually have been and are a key a part of so many issues. It’s about additionally asking why [society doesn’t] know that. You have to inform actual tales for people to perceive that we’re actual folks, out right here doing actual issues, and that we have been for generations.

“When we share in that way, it allows us to properly confront our history, to see how we can make good on what we claim our country represents, and to try and repair the harms of the past. When you shine a light on something, the darkness cannot stay.”

Angelina Rios-Galindo is a program coordinator for the 2026 Smithsonian Folklife Festival.