Florida Folklife from the WPA Collections, 1937-1942
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Florida Folklife from the WPA Collections, 1937-1942, provides access to sound recordings of regional and ethnic music of Floridians collected during the Great Depression. The collection also includes recording logs and transcriptions of interviews conducted by fieldworkers. Correspondence between field personnel and the Library of Congress regarding the collection of material and problems encountered with recording equipment are likewise included.
President Franklin D. Roosevelt created the Works Progress Administration (WPA) by executive order on May 6, 1935, as part of the administration's New Deal program to provide work for those hard hit by the Great Depression. The WPA operated several major programs at the national level and funded numerous state programs providing jobs for both skilled and unskilled workers. One of its programs, the Federal Writers' Project (FWP), hired unemployed writers, artists, actors, and musicians. The Florida Folklife Project was established under the auspices of the FWP and the Florida Music Project to collect sound recordings of folk music representing the diverse ethnic composition of the state and to document folktales from communities throughout Florida.
The collection includes some brief life histories of individuals who contributed music and stories as well as sacred and secular music of African-American, Bahamian, British-American, Cuban, Greek, Italian, Lebanese, Minorcan, Seminole, and Slavic cultures. (Brief background on the Ethnic and Cultural Groups of Florida is provided with the collection.) Unfortunately, the sound quality of some of the online recordings is extremely poor—a problem addressed in correspondence from the state administrator of the project to the director of the Music Division at the Library of Congress early in the process of collecting recordings. Students using the collection should be aware that the "Notes" section of the bibliographic page for each document can be very helpful; in addition, many documents' bibliographic pages have links to "Related Manuscripts," which often have helpful information or transcriptions of the songs.
The collection includes a Special Presentation: "A Florida Treasure Hunt," by Stetson Kennedy, folklore editor of the Federal Writers' Project for Florida. The essay provides a context for the collection and supplies information regarding the collection of recordings and some of the problems posed by rigid segregation in Florida. Note that the recordings were collected in the South in 1939-1940 when segregation was strictly enforced by law; some fieldworkers and performers used pejorative terms in reference to members of other racial and ethnic groups. In addition, some performers freely told stories and sang songs with sexual overtones. Thus, some material in this collection is offensive, and students using the collection should be prepared for the attitudes and language they will encounter. Florida Folklife opens avenues for exploration of popular culture by delving into the folk music and folktales of ethnic communities in Florida. Although the work songs, ballads, and folklore were gathered in Florida, they have much in common with similar works found in the rural South and ethnic enclaves in urban communities throughout the nation.
The lyrics of some of the recorded songs are nonsensical, but others relate a wide range of human experiences and provide various tools to clarify or elaborate upon information presented in historical narratives.
The Great Depression and Works Progress Administration
In the essay "A Florida Treasure Hunt," Stetson Kennedy writes about the Depression:
Those were hard times back then, during the Great Depression of the 1930s. People sometimes referred to them as the "root-hog-or-die" days, meaning that if you didn't keep grubbing you were a goner. Lots of folks were "hollerin' hongry," and longing for a little gravy on their grits. A black preacher on the Sea Islands prayed, "Hear us, Oh Lord, we're down here gnawin' on dry bones!" And on New Year's Eve, Florida Latins intoned, "Go bad year, so we can see if the coming one is better!"
The Works Progress Administration was the largest of all the New Deal agencies established to deal with the economic problems faced by Americans during the Depression. The agency was created in May 1935 by President Franklin Roosevelt and funded by Congress. Most of the funds went toward employing people to build infrastructure—roads, highways, buildings, and airports—but 7 percent went to arts projects, including the Federal Writers' Project, which gave work to approximately 6,600 unemployed writers, editors, historians, and others. Some well-known American writers worked in the FWP, including John Cheever, Ralph Ellison, John Steinbeck, Richard Wright, and Zora Neale Hurston. As Stetson Kennedy reports in his essay, "All of us working on the WPA (except administrators) had to sign a Pauper's Oath--that we had no job, no money, no property, and no prospect of getting any of those things."
Shortly after Roosevelt's executive order establishing the WPA and Congressional appropriation of funds, the Florida Writers' Project (FWP), under the directorship of Dr. Carita Doggett Corse, began a program to reach out to the state's ethnic communities to collect folklore. Stetson Kennedy, who had worked with the FWP, became the director of the Florida Folklore, Oral History, and Ethnic Studies program when it began operation in Florida in 1937. Although initial work collecting recordings for the Florida Folklife program began in 1937, the bulk of the collecting work occurred in 1939 and 1940.
On May 23, 1939, Dr. Corse wrote to the Director of the Federal Writers' Project in Washington, enclosing a "Proposed Recording Expedition Into the Floridas" drawn up by Zora Neale Hurston, an author and Florida Federal Writers' Project editor. Hurston's proposal outlined Florida's diverse heritage and concluded with an emotional appeal for the recording project.
. . . No other State in the Union has had the history of races blended and contending. Nowhere else is there such a variety of materials. Florida is still a frontier with its varying elements still unassimilated. There is still an opportunity to observe the wombs of folk culture still heavy with life. Recordings in Florida will be like backtracking a large part of the United States, Europe and Africa for these elements have been attracted here and brought a gift to Florida culture each in its own way. The drums throb: Africa by way of Cuba; Africa by way of the British West Indies; Africa by way of Haiti and Martinique; Africa by way of Central and South America. Old Spain speaks through many interpreters. Old England speaks through black, white and intermediate lips. Florida, the inner melting pot of the great melting pot -- America.
- What argument does Hurston make to encourage the collection of sound recordings in Florida?
- What values underlie her argument? Do you think similar values provided the foundation for the entire Federal Writers' Project?
- If funding were available for a similar project in your state today, what aspects of culture do you think should be recorded? Provide reasons for your selections.
The establishment of the New Deal programs meant growth in the government. The bureaucracy, the administrative offices of the government, grew substantially in the 1930s. Bureaucracies are sometimes criticized for being too hierarchical, too rigidly bound by complicated rules and procedures, and too slow to act. Read the letter from C.E. Triggs, an administrator at the WPA in Washington, to Roy Schroder, an administrator in Florida. What evidence do you find in this letter that the WPA had some of the negative traits bureaucracies are often said to have?