This chapter describes the visionary role of Ralph Rinzler, who is considered the primary impresario of the Festival of American Folklife and the individual who orchestrated its establishment as a presence on the National Mall. Although Rinzler never curated a program himself, he modelled the Festival curator’s sensibilities and shaped the Festival’s occupational culture. The author examines how Rinzler would become the personification of the intersections of academic and applied folkloristics, of idealism and pragmatism, of traditional and groundbreaking conceptions of what folklore and folklife were and how–and why–they should be represented in the national museum and presented to the public. It delineates the principles put into presentational practice; his concepts of the “folk,” of democratic populism, and of social justice in the context of the Folklife Programs, 1975–1983.