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Songs of the Seminole Indians of Florida album art

Contributed by Florian Hardwig on Nov 17th, 2024. Artwork published in .
Songs of the Seminole Indians of Florida album art 1
Source: archive.org Internet Archive. License: All Rights Reserved.

From Folkways Records:

Weakened by war and disease, Native peoples of Florida banded together with members of other tribes whom Europeans had forced southward from their homelands to form the Seminoles in the 18th century. Though a large number of Seminoles were relocated to Oklahoma, many stayed in Florida, especially in the Everglades. Dr. Frances Densmore (1867–1957) collected these recordings from 1931 to 1933 on repeat visits to two reservations in Florida. Densmore spent most of her life studying and recording American Indian music, an unlikely career path for a woman at a time when it was unheard of for a proper lady even to travel to “wild” areas.

Ronald Clyne designed the cover using a photograph taken by Densmore, plus one of the more ridiculous additions to the Bookman genre: the single-style Bookman Meola comes with “197 rather clumsily-drawn swash characters”, in the words of Mark Simonson. Although the typeface offered up to eight different glyphs per character, Clyne stuck to one form per glyph – with the exception of the a. The cover was produced in two color variants, in a reddish brown and in purple.

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Songs of the Seminole Indians of Florida album art 2
Source: folkways.si.edu License: All Rights Reserved.

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