The Alan Lomax collection of Michigan and Wisconsin recordings (AFC 1939/007) documents Irish, Italian, Finnish, Serbian, Lithuanian, Polish, German, Croatian, French Canadian, Hungarian, Romanian, and Swedish songs and stories, as well as occupational folklife among loggers and lake sailors in Michigan and Wisconsin. Lomax’s itinerary took him from Detroit through the Saginaw River valley to the northern counties of the Lower Peninsula, including Beaver Island. Crossing the Straits of Mackinac, he collected across the Upper Peninsula to the far northern Calumet area and then along the Lake Superior coast to easternmost Wisconsin.

This collection provides a remarkable survey of living folk musical traditions found in Northern California during the late 1930s and 1940 in a wide variety of musical styles. It includes the folk music of immigrants who arrived in the United States from the turn of the century through the 1920s, American popular songs current from 1900 through 1940, not to mention old California songs from the gold-rush era and before, old medicine show tunes, San Francisco Barbary Coast songs, and ragtime.

Fiddle Tunes of the Old Frontier: The Henry Reed Collection presents traditional fiddle tunes performed by Henry Reed of Glen Lyn, Virginia. Recorded by folklorist Alan Jabbour in 1966-67, when Reed was over eighty years old, the tunes represent the music and evoke the history and spirit of Virginia's Appalachian frontier. Many of the tunes have passed back into circulation during the fiddling revival of the later twentieth century. Documentation includes 184 sound recordings, 19 pages of fieldnotes, and 69 musical transcriptions (with descriptive notes on tune histories and musical features) .

Consists of approximately one hundred sound recordings, primarily blues and gospel songs, and related documentation from the folk festival at Fort Valley State College (now Fort Valley State University), Fort Valley, Georgia. The documentation was created by John Wesley Work III in 1941 and by Lewis Jones and Willis Laurence James in March, June, and July 1943. Also included are recordings made in Tennessee and Alabama (including six Sacred Harp songs) by John Work between September 1938 and 1941.

Through a tour of (mostly blues) clubs and musical hot spots, Chicago Blues and Jazz spotlights musicians and singers who have become part of the American Folklife Center’s online Chicago Ethnic Arts Project Collection. The collection is based on a cultural documentation project undertaken in 1977 by a team of American Folklife Center (AFC) fieldworkers and photographers. Over the course of a year, the fieldworkers fanned out across the city to document the cultural, spiritual, and traditional arts practices of roughly 25 cultural communities. As a result, the collection comprises 344 sound recordings (interviews and musical recordings), 14,141 photographs, 269 folders of manuscript materials, field notes, and other items.

Between the mid-1970s and the late-1990s, the American Folklife Center coordinated a series of field surveys across the United States. Many of these projects occurred with the help of partner organizations at the federal or state level, and were intended to generate significant bodies of cultural documentation that could serve multiple purposes. Fieldworkers included AFC staff as well as specialists in various fields that the AFC contracted for the duration of a given project. This interactive Story Map guides visitors across the country from east to west, visiting each online field survey collection.