Last year, the American Folklife Center brought our Archive Challenge model to the Smithsonian Folklife Festival on the National Mall…and you can watch it all at Folklife Today! Our good friends and colleagues across the Mall cooked up a great festival on the theme of “Youth and the Future of Culture.” As part of the festivities, we engaged groups of young musicians to learn pieces from the Archive of Folk Culture and play them on the festival’s main stage. Some of those sets were streamed in the Festival livestream. As a result, you can see and hear Persian classical music, Appalachian ballads, old-time fiddle tunes, Caribbean steel pan music, traditional Irish music, and Balkan dance music—the last two with special guest Christylez Bacon on human beatbox. Organizing these Archive Challenge sets was a highlight of our year last year, and we feel the result was a highlight of the Smithsonian Folklife Festival as well. In this blog, we've embedded one of the videos and included a little information on the performers and their selections from the AFC Archive.