Florida Folklife Collection

Related Resources

Florida Resources
  • Florida Folk Festival
    Founded in 1953, the Florida Folk Festival is one of the nation's oldest continuing folk festivals. The annual three-day festival, held within the 888-acre Stephen Foster Folk Culture Center State Park in White Springs, serves as the cultural crossroads of the Sunshine State with concerts, folk artist demonstrations, craft workshops, food, games and dances. This website by the Florida Park Service gives a detailed history of the festival, images of recent festivals, and schedules for future events.
  • Florida Folklife Program
    The Florida Folklife Program, a component of the Florida Department of State's Division of Historical Resources, documents and presents the folklife, folklore, and folk arts of the state.
  • Florida Folklife from the WPA Collections
    The Library of Congress's Florida Folklife from the WPA Collections web site is a multiformat ethnographic field collection documenting African-American, Arabic, Bahamian, British-American, Cuban, Greek, Italian, Minorcan, Seminole, and Slavic cultures throughout Florida.
  • National Public Radio: The Sound of 1930s Florida Folk Life
    NPR radio story that highlights the Florida WPA folklife recordings and images housed in the American Folklife Center. Featured in the story are anthropologist and author Zora Neale Hurston and Florida folklorist and writer Stetson Kennedy.
  • Stetson Kennedy
    Web page for Florida folklorist and writer Stetson Kennedy. Born and raised in Jacksonville, Florida, Kennedy worked for the Florida WPA's folklife division, where he supervised novelist Zora Neal Hurston. He later wrote Palmetto Country, Southern Exposure, and South Florida Folklife (with folklorists Peggy Bulger and Tina Bucuvalas.) His papers from the WPA can be found in the Florida State Archives' Florida Folklife Collection.
  • Friends of Florida Folk
    The Friends of Florida Folk serves to identify, protect, preserve, encourage and promote folk arts, crafts, dance and music. They also advise government and educational agencies, and other folk-related organizations as well as educate the public in folk culture by encouraging, publicizing, sponsoring and producing newsletters, films, tapes, records, festivals, and other events.
Society and Council Resources
Florida Regional Resources
  • Historical Museum of Southern Florida
    Documents South Florida's cultural diversity and examines the traditional arts people have brought with them to South Florida.
  • UCF Florida Heritage Alliance
    The Heritage Alliance seeks new and meaningful ways to bring the Central Florida community together by celebrating the region's rich diversity through education, technology-based heritage projects, folklife research, preservation and network-building.
Southern United States Resources
  • Alabama Center for Traditional Culture
    The Alabama Center for Traditional Culture, a division of the Alabama State Council on the Arts, was created in 1990, and is dedicated to the research, documentation and preservation of the state's folk cultures. Their webpage features a selection of music clips and essays regarding Alabama's rich folklife heritage.
  • Alabama Folklife Association
    A statewide non-profit organization created to promote knowledge and appreciation of Alabama folklife through activities such as festivals, conferences, fieldwork, videos, recordings and publications.
  • The Center for Southern Folklore
    The Center is a non-profit organization that showcases and celebrates the wonders, lifestyles, people, history, and cultures of the South.
  • Crossroads of the Heart
    Music, handmade objects, maritime traditions, quilting and and narrative genres from Mississippi are represented.
  • Folklife in Louisiana
    The Louisiana Folklife Program, within the Division of the Arts, is designed to identify, document, conserve, and present the folk cultural resources of Louisiana.
  • Georgia Folklife Program
    The state folklife program for Georgia, which is a division of the Georgia Council for the Arts.
  • Mississippi Arts Commission
    The Mississippi Arts Commission promotes and fosters Mississippi artists and folk culture through public programs, publications, and grants.
  • North Carolina Folklore Society
    Founded in 1913, the North Carolina Folklore Society promotes the appreciation and study of North Carolina's folklife. Through its annual meeting, programs, awards, and publications, the North Carolina Folklore Society encourages the study and preservation of local folklife and provides a state folklife information center and resources center.
  • South Georgia Folklife Project
    South Georgia Folklife Project is a collaboration between the College of the Arts at Valdosta State University and the Georgia Council for the Arts Folklife Program to identify, document, encourage, and present through public programs, the traditional arts and folklife of South Georgia.
  • Southern Arts Federation
    The Southern Arts Federation (SAF) is a not-for-profit regional arts organization that has been making a positive difference in the arts throughout the South since 1975. SAF creates partnerships and collaborations; assists in the professional development of artists, arts organizations and arts professionals; presents, promotes and produces Southern arts and cultural programming; and advocates for the arts and art education.
  • Southern Folklife Collection
    The Southern Folklife Collection (SFC) ranks as one of the nation's foremost archival resources for the study of American folk music and popular culture. Housed at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, SFC holdings extensively document all forms of southern musical and oral traditions across the entire spectrum of individual and community expressive arts, as well as mainstream media production. The web site contains finding aids, collection descriptions, and samples from their vast holdings.
  • Southern Foodways Alliance
    The mission of the SFA is to celebrate, preserve, promote, and nurture the traditional and developing diverse food cultures of the American South.
  • Southern Spaces
    Southern Spaces is an interdisciplinary journal about regions, places, and cultures of the American South and their global connections supported by the Robert W. Woodruff Library of Emory University.
  • Hoboken Style: Meaning and Change in Okefenokee Sacred Harp Singing
    This essay explores "Hoboken-style" Sacred Harp singing of the Okefenokee region of southeast Georgia and northeast Florida.
  • University of South Carolina Folklife Resource Center
    Created in 1985 as a repository for fieldnotes, photographs, slides, audio tapes, video tapes, albums, publications, and other information of value to Southern folklife scholars and interested members of the general public.
National Resources
  • American Folklife Center (Library of Congress)
    The American Folklife Center aims to be the national center for folklife documentation and research, and this Web site offers a virtual destination for those who cannot visit the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. On this Web site you will find not only an introduction to the activities of the American Folklife Center and its Archive of Folk Culture but also online presentations of multi-format collections, and other resources to facilitate folklife projects and study.
  • The American Folklore Society
    The American Folklore Society (AFS) is an association of people who create and communicate knowledge about folklore throughout the world. Founded in 1888, and with more than 2,200, the AFS publishes the Journal of American Folklore, holds an annual meeting of American folklorists, and takes a leading role in national and international folklore projects.
  • The Folk Alliance
    The North American Folk Music and Dance Alliance exists to foster and promote traditional, contemporary, and multicultural folk music and dance, and related performing arts in North America. The Folk Alliance seeks to strengthen and advance organizational and individual initiatives in folk music and dance through education, networking, advocacy, and professional and field development.
  • National Council for the Traditional Arts
    The National Council for the Traditional Arts (NCTA) is a private, not-for-profit corporation dedicated to the preservation and documentation of traditional arts in the United States. Founded in 1933, NCTA is the nation's oldest presenting organization that deals with folk, ethnic and tribal arts.
  • Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage
    The Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage is a research institute of the Smithsonian that promotes the understanding and continuity of diverse contemporary grassroots cultures in the United States and abroad. The Center produces the annual Smithsonian Folklife Festival, Smithsonian Folkways recordings, museum and traveling exhibitions, documentary films, as well as maintains an extensive folklife archive.

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