It started as an anniversary party. The Fairbanks Daily News-Miner traces the festival to elder Poldine Carlo and her husband Bill. They asked some local musicians to play at their anniversary celebration, and "the next year it outgrew their house," KRFF general manager Ann Fears told the paper. The party moved to the Elks Hall and later to Chief David Salmon Tribal Hall, where it opens again this afternoon.
The group running it, the Athabascan Fiddlers Association, later went further and built a radio station so the festival could reach well beyond the hall.
The Station Came Out of the Dance
KRFF 89.1 FM, known on air as Voice of Denali, was created by the Athabascan Fiddlers Association. On the station's About page, the association's board says it set the station up for a "sustainable, year-round, culturally-focused public radio presence in Alaska's Interior," and lists a 10,000-watt signal. The News-Miner describes the association as the station's owner.
So the festival is designed for listeners as well as dancers. Each year it goes out live on KRFF and on Facebook Live. Smithsonian magazine reported in November 2025 that the association broadcasts the whole festival, "carrying the music back into the villages that gave it life." The same piece noted that many of the elders who carried the tradition have died, and that rising travel costs make it harder for village musicians to get to Fairbanks.
Fears explained to the News-Miner why the airtime matters.
Having the music on the station is a nice way to document their music, playing it back on the airwaves and keeping memories and people alive through the station.
That is the News-Miner's paraphrase of Fears, and it captures the setup. For three days, a hall on Clay Street works as a studio for the whole Interior. People who come in person are part of the broadcast.
Two River Styles, One Stage
That broadcast is also how the music got to sound the way it does today. Smithsonian dates the fiddle's arrival to the 1840s, when Hudson's Bay Company fur traders came down the Yukon River with fiddles and sheet music from Scotland, Ireland and France. Fears gives a slightly different account. She told the News-Miner that trappers and miners on the river brought the instruments, and that fiddles were popular because they were light and easy to carry to a celebration.
Over the generations that followed, the music split along the river.
| Upriver style | Downriver style | |
|---|---|---|
| Rooted in | Gwich'in communities | Tanana and Koyukon Athabascans |
| Sound | Lean and rhythmic | Slower tempos, wide repertoires |
| Typical lineup | Solo or twin fiddles with guitar | Larger groups adding piano and vocals |
| Built for | Square dances, jigs and reels | Community halls |
According to Smithsonian, distance kept the two styles apart until the festival started, and from then on they mixed on a single stage. Sources disagree on the first year. Smithsonian says 1983, and the festival page on KRFF's site says 1984. Either way, Fairbanks has been the meeting point for more than four decades, and the radio signal sends the blended sound back out to the communities that had kept the styles apart.
Afternoons Belong to the Students
Doors open at 1 p.m., and the early hours have their own crowd. Fears told Smithsonian that school groups come in the afternoons: "They learn how to two-step, and they learn some of the dances from the elders."
Effie Kokrine Charter School is one long-running example. At an earlier festival, the News-Miner reported that the school brought 18 high school students on Thursday and planned to bring 16 junior high students the next day. Students used dance cards to pair up with each other and with elders. Math teacher Wayne Horine told the paper the school had sent kids "pretty much every year."
Smithsonian describes the dancing as functional music that has to keep moving: jigs, waltzes, two-steps and square dances, with four generations often on the floor together. The Rabbit Dance and the Duck Dance are favorites, especially with young people. The News-Miner's coverage of the 2025 festival says the crowd grew as the night went on, the floor was always full, and food and jars of salmon were for sale.
Names Worth Knowing Before You Go
The 2026 lineup has not been posted, so these are musicians the festival is known for, not confirmed bookings for this week.
Marc Brown & the Blues Crew. Smithsonian describes Brown as a Koyukon Athabascan guitarist, singer and bandleader from Huslia who has played the festival since its second year. He moves between blues, Americana, gospel and country, and calls himself an accidental bridge: "I can play the old style, but I can also play newer rock to back up the younger guys."
Angela Oudean. An Anchorage-raised bluegrass fiddler and a co-founder of the band Bearfoot. Smithsonian calls her one of the festival's most in-demand performers, hired year after year to back up bands that need a fiddler. She and Brown are known for guitar-fiddle duels.
Two songs to listen for. Smithsonian names "Eagle Island Blues," written in the 1940s by Tom Patsy while he was snowshoeing to Nulato, and "Indian Rock 'n' Roll," which puts a backbeat under traditional fiddling, as festival mainstays.
That mix of a decades-old snowshoe ballad and a rock beat fits the festival. Fears told Smithsonian the music is changing because younger players "mix their own music now" and pick up different stringed instruments.
This Year's Details
The Explore Fairbanks listing calls this the 44th annual festival. KRFF's homepage banner says 43rd, but 44th follows the News-Miner's count, which called 2024 the 42nd year and 2025 the 43rd.
- Dates: Thursday, Nov. 5 through Saturday, Nov. 7, 2026
- Hours: 1 p.m. to midnight daily, according to KRFF. The FairbanksAlaska.com listing shows a 10 p.m. end on Saturday, so check the final night before you plan around it.
- Cover: $20 for full-day access
- Venue: Chief David Salmon Tribal Hall, 111 Clay St., Fairbanks
- Ground rules: Sober and family-centered, open to all ages
- Can't make it: Tune in to KRFF 89.1 FM or the Facebook Live stream
KRFF says the festival draws 300 to 400 people each night. If you want room to learn a two-step, the afternoons are the quieter time to come. The late sets are when the hall fills up.
What Keeps Going After Saturday
The festival is the association's best-known event, but KRFF describes it as "just one mechanism" for preserving the culture of the Interior's Indigenous peoples. The station stays on air all year. Its schedule includes a segment in which Ann Fears introduces a word or phrase from various Native dialects.
The teaching also continues year-round. In Fairbanks, Young Native Fiddlers meets on Saturdays during the school year and teaches fiddle and guitar to children and teens. Out in the villages, Dancing With the Spirit, founded by Gwich'in fiddler and spiritual leader Chief Trimble Gilbert, has run more than 50 weeklong music camps over the past two years, as reported in Smithsonian's November 2025 piece. Gilbert received a National Heritage Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts in 2024.
The festival will be on KRFF all three days this week, carried across the Interior by the station it built.
I've spent more than 30 years in Interior Alaska, and our local calendar still has weeks that surprise me. If you go this weekend and want to talk about the music, the dancing, or anything else in Fairbanks, Ginger Orem is always glad to hear from neighbors. Let's Connect.
