In 1991, the band was featured by the Smithsonian Institution in the Festival of American Folklife in Washington D.C. On six occasions EIBB has been invited to present a feature program at the annual convention of the Iowa Bandmasters Association, and recently performed to a sellout crowd at the American School Band Directors Association convention.
Galway City Museum collects, perserves and displays materials relating to the history of Galway City; Archaeology, Art, Geology, Natural History, Social, Political and Industrial History and Folklife.
Playing such venues as Carnegie Hall, Wolf Trap, The Smithsonian Institution, The Festival of American Folklife (now the Smithsonian Folklife Festival), the Milwaukee Irish Fest, and The National Folk Festival, the Five members of the band – Liz Carroll, Jack Coen, Michael Flatley, Donny Golden and Mick Moloney – have received National Heritage Awards.
At the Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage, Mason oversees the Smithsonian Folklife Festival on the National Mall, Smithsonian Folkways Recordings, and other cultural educational programs.
Library of Congress, Florida Folklife from the WPA Collections; performed by Naomi Nelson on 15 January 1940 in Riviera, Florida.
Turner was greatly influenced in 1986 when she saw photographs of Alabama Black Belt quilters taken by Roland L. Freeman, shown in that year’s catalog for the Festival of American Folklife in Washington, D.C. There, as a young folklorist, Turner spent two weeks with Alabama quilters who participated in the festival and with Gladys-Marie Fry, who facilitated public workshops with the quilters.
Peggy Bulger, the head of the American Folklife Division of the Library of Congress, who wrote her Ph. D. dissertation on Kennedy and interviewed him extensively, maintains that Kennedy was always candid with her and others about his combination of two narratives into one in I Rode With the Ku Klux Klan: "His purpose was to expose the Klan to a broad reading audience and use their folklore against them, which he did."