The Florida Folklife Reader

Tina Bucuvalas

• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9781617031410, 9781617031403
• eBook ISBN: 9781496801098
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: Social Sciences

Florida is blessed with a semitropical climate, beautiful inland areas, and over a thousand miles of warm seas and sandy beaches. And Floridians are every bit as colorful and diverse as the tropical foliage. The interaction between Florida's people and its environment has created distinctive mixes of traditional life unlike those anywhere else in America.

Florida's cultural foundation includes Seminoles, Anglo-Celtic Crackers, African Americans, transplanted northerners, and ethnic communities, as well as cultural syntheses developed from the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries in Key West, Tampa, St. Augustine, and Pensacola. In recent decades, the state's population has been strongly impacted by large-scale immigration from Cuba, South America, Central America, the Caribbean, Africa, and Asia. South Florida leads other regions in the development of a contemporary cultural synthesis, but Orlando and Tampa are rapidly evolving. Even sleepy north Florida is experiencing a significant shift.

Although several books detail the traditions of specific Florida regions or folk groups, this is the first to provide an overview of Florida folklife. The Florida Folklife Reader brings together essays written by folklorists, anthropologists, and ethnomusicologists on a wide array of topics. The authors examine topics as diverse as regional and ethnic folk groups, occupational folklife, the built environment, musical traditions, rituals, and celebrations.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Key Largo to Marathon A Report on the Folklife of the Upper and Middle Keys
• African American and West Indian Folklife in South Florida
• The Patronal Festival of Vueltas in Cuban Miami “No One Loses, They Always Win!”
• Michael Kernahan A Life in Pan
• Folklife of Miami’s Nicaraguan Communities
• Exploring Peruvian Music in Miami
• The Seminole Family Camp
• Sacred Steel
• Musical Practice and Memory on the Edge of Two Worlds Kalymnian Tsambóuna and Song Repertoire in the Family of Nikitas Tsimouris
• Eternal Be Their Memory!
• Richard Seaman’s Presence within Florida’s Soundscape
• Legacy and Meaning in the Changing Sacred Harp Tradition of the Okefenokee Region
• Nativism and Cracker Revival at the Florida Folk Festival
• “The Rest Is Up to You and Me” Sunday Morning Band and Ritual Identity in the Florida Panhandle
• Maritime Folklife
• Selected Florida Folklife Bibliography
• Appendix I Early Folklife Research in Florida
• Appendix II Public Folklife Programs in Florida
• Contributors
• Index