What happens when you mix a nearly 100-year-old sacred music tradition, add talent from across the region and up the eastern seaboard, and mix in guests from Florida, Tennessee, and Georgia with the nation’s oldest state-sponsored folk festival? The 2024 Scared Steel Summit at the Florida Folklife Festival! 

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Conceived by Alvin Lee, a founding member of the Lee Boys, an internationally recognized tradition-bearing sacred steel group out of Kissimmee Florida, the Sacred Steel Summit brings together musicians to share techniques and enthrall new audiences and aficionados. “We have assembled the greatest tradition bearers of pedal steel and lap steel guitars from within the Sacred Steel tradition,” says Alvin Lee, “People will be educated and entertained by this unique American gospel tradition.”

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The Sacred Steel Summit is part of the Florida Folklife program. It will present three days of presentations about the history of the musical tradition, workshops with innovators of the sacred steel tradition, performance workshops showcasing the styles with the major houses of worship, and evening concert performances with the Living Legends of the genre and the brightest emerging talent.