Established here in 1949, the annual Choctaw Indian Fair, formerly known as the Green Corn Festival, showcases the cultural traditions of the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians, including food, arts and crafts, stickball (kabotcha toli), and the Choctaw Indian Princess Pageant. Since 1967, it has been a major destination for country music in Mississippi, and since the late 1960s has regularly featured major country artists including Charley Pride, Waylon Jennings, Jerry Lee Lewis, Randy Travis, Blake Shelton, Marty Stuart, and Connie Smith, whose 1970 performance was where Stuart met his future wife. Bob Ferguson, a Nashville-based country producer and songwriter with a long relationship with the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians, began booking artists there and later married a local Choctaw woman and moved there, while Marty Gamblin later assumed booking duties. Annual shows with multiple country stars drew many visitors from outside the area, as did country acts booked at Choctaw-owned casinos that opened there after 1994. The Fair has also presented touring Native American artists including Redbone, Indigenous, the Klaudt Family Band, Crystal Shawanda and Shane Yellowbird, and Billy Thunderkloud and the Chieftones. Evolving from the Green Corn Festival, a traditional harvest celebration shared by Native American groups across the Southeast, the Fair reflects the Choctaws' longstanding efforts to make their presence better known in Mississippi, where they are the only federally recognized tribe. One of its major highlights, the stickball tournament, was once used to settle disputes but is now played for entertainment and bragging rights. Revitalization projects beginning in the 1960s reversed a relative decline in traditional sewing, beadwork, music, and dance activity. The vitality of Choctaw culture is especially evident in the Fair's three types of traditional dances, categorized as war, social, and animal, with animal dances mimicking creatures such as raccoons, snakes, and ticks. These dances feature lines of men and women in traditional clothing guided by lead dancers and chanters with the tapping of chanting sticks. The tradition of house dances, presented at both the Fair and in informal social settings, shares similarities with southeastern country music traditions such as the Anglo-American square dance and the French cotillion and features fiddle and guitar accompaniment. The repertoire of fiddler R.J. Willis included "Sally Goodin" and Bob Wills' 1941 hit "Take Me Back to Tulsa." Choctaw fiddling dates back to the 1700s and gained broader attention in 1929 when Big Chief Henry's Indian String Band recorded for RCA-Victor after H.C. Speir saw them performing at a festival there. Country and Choctaw traditions have sometimes met directly, as in 2009 when Marty Stuart sang "I Met My Baby at the Choctaw Fair" while Choctaw dancers performed onstage in front of his band.
