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The California Traditional Music Society (CTMS) is dedicated to
the preservation and dissemination of the traditional Folk Music,
dance, and related folk arts of America's diverse cultural heritage.  Our
goals are to broaden public involvement with Folk Music, celebrate
ethnic traditions, and promote cross-cultural understanding.
The California Traditional Music Society began in 1978 as a small
amateur Folk Music club. Based on public interest and a growing
recognition that America's folk musical heritage was in danger
of extinction, the Society was incorporated in 1983 by Clark and
Elaine Weissman and a Board of musicians and community representatives,
including Barry Cole, Karen Williams, and Flo Daley.
The original goal was the preservation of American Folk Music
and instruments. For example, Fretted or Appalachian Dulcimer,  Oldtime
and Bluegrass music, and folk traditions that were brought to the
United States during the waves of European immigration as late
as the early twentieth century. Increasingly, the Society became
a presenter of nationally and internationally respected folk musicians.
Its programming is unique among Folk Music organizations in that
it emphasizes teaching as well as performance.
The Society has expanded to include the array of Folk Music forms
of more recent American immigrants and to introduce to American
practitioners parallel folk traditions still practiced in other
parts of the world. The Board believes that America is not a "melting
pot" where diverse cultural backgrounds are diluted and disappear
with time, but rather a richly textured cloth where the threads
of many different peoples are woven together to create a new whole.
Folk Music can be a vital way of learning to appreciate our many
unique cultural traditions in a positive, celebratory context.
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