Browse Items (24 total)

Miami’s business and political elite developed “slum clearance” plans during the 1930s designed to remove the city’s African American population beyond the city limits. While New Deal housing projects created new segregated areas in Dade County in…

Agriculture and other industries brought thousands of laborers to South Florida every year. Alan Lomax recorded Booker T. Sapps in Belle Glade in 1935. Sapps and other local musicians worked in the citrus fields. They entertained other farmworkers…

Library of Congress folklorist Alan Lomax discovered Booker T. Sapps in Belle Glade, Florida. Sapps and other musicians worked the citrus fields in Belle Glade and entertained other farmworkers during their off hours. Working-class audiences across…

Folklorist Alan Lomax recorded this selection in 1935 in Eatonville, Florida. The selection is broken into two parts demonstrating Florida A&M College graduate Gabriel Brown’s exceptional guitar talent. Brown alludes to working-class hero John Henry…

This photograph shows blues musicians Gabriel Brown and Rochelle French in Eatonville, Florida in 1935. Zora Neale Hurston introduced Library of Congress folklorist Alan Lomax to Brown. Lomax’s recordings for the Library of Congress led Brown into a…

Though much of the Circuit remained “underground” throughout the 1960s and 1970s, national and international artists often toured the larger stops in Florida. This promotional billboard advertised an Aretha Franklin performance in Miami’s Overtown…

The blues allowed performers and audiences to criticize racial oppression, working conditions, and other aspects of life in the South. This lyric fragment recorded by Zora Neale Hurston displays a common form of social criticism in blues lyrics.…

The Red Bird Café was situated at the center of the historic Frenchtown neighborhood in Tallahassee throughout the 1960s and 1970s. A popular dance club and bar, the Red Bird Café hosted both local acts and groups touring the Circuit. Activists held…

Music on the Southern Circuit returned to the grittier roots of the blues with eclectic new styles like boogie-woogie and rhythm & blues in the 1950s. African American popular musicians in the 1950s expressed a new, aggressive stance in keeping with…

African American performers created Dixieland jazz from the blues and ragtime in the early twentieth century. This 1982 recording of jazz pioneer Ida Goodson demonstrates a transitional style between traditional blues and the more polished jazz style…