American Folklife Center: Traditional Music and Spoken Word Catalog

This searchable database provides bibliographic information on approximately 34,000 ethnographic sound recordings. Most were recorded between 1933 and 1950… The majority of these are lacquer and aluminum-based instantaneous disc recordings made between 1933 and 1950. The handful of collections that fall outside this date range is described at the end of this page.

The card catalog represented in this online database was first created by Work Projects Administration (WPA) workers in the late 1930s and early 1940s, and continued by the Archive of Folk Song (now part of the American Folklife Center) staff into the early 1960s. Its purpose was to provide the public with access to the thousands of individual songs, tunes, folk tales, sermons, monologues, and life stories in the Archive’s collections.

Included are the seminal field recordings associated with John A. Lomax and Alan Lomax’s Library of Congress collecting work (Leadbelly, Woody Guthrie, Jelly Roll Morton), and Alan Lomax’s less well-known field collections in Haiti in 1936 to 1937 and in the upper Midwest of the United States in 1938. There are hundreds of well-known and lesser-known treasures by other notable collectors including Herbert Halpert, Zora Neale Hurston, Henrietta Yurchenco, Vance Randolph, and Helen Creighton, among many others. The catalog also reflects exchange projects with institutions outside the United States, notably the Discoteca Pública Municipal de São Paulo Collection (1938-1943) of field recordings from Brazil; and field recordings collected in Oceania.

Source: American Folklife Center, Library of Congress

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