During the 1930s and 1940s, teams of writers and scholars scoured the United States on behalf of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) collecting materials about the places they saw and the people they met. This particular digital ethnographic field collection brings together materials which document the Arabic, Bahamian, Cuban, Green, Seminole and Slavic cultures across Florida. Here visitors will find folksongs, work songs, dance music, interviews, and religious music from these groups and a number of others. First-time visitors to the site should start by reading an essay by Stetson Kennedy which talks about the "labor and the legacy of the WPA in Florida." Visitors can browse the collection by performer, place, or media format. It's a real treat to listen to some of the folk songs included here, and the collection includes over 300 of them. Archivists will also appreciate the inclusion of interview transcriptions and recording logs which can be viewed in their entirety.
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