We’ve added a link to the open-access Traditional Music and Spoken Word Catalog to our Databases A-Z page. Most of the audio recordings included were produced 1933 and 1950. From the American Folklife Center description:
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.
