Florida Music Collection.

Printed music and sound recordings.

The nation's largest collection of Florida-related sheet music and sound recordings, the Danny O. Crew Florida Music Collection contains over 850 pieces of originally published and unpublished sheet music, song sheets, broadside ballads, songbooks, and original manuscripts spanning 1850 to the mid 1990s - all related to Florida. Included are numerous rare and unique works including a first edition of Steven Foster's "Old Folks at home."

The collection also contains over 1350 sound recordings spanning the entire breath of the 20th century from early Edison cylinders, player piano rolls, 78 rpm, 45 rpm, and 33 1/3 rpm LPs, cassettes, videos, and 8-track tapes. This collection of music and recordings reflects the broad spectrum of Florida-related musical material about Florida, its people, cities, politics, geographical features, and other topics; music written and or performed by Florida-based studios.

The collection offers primary resource materials for broad scholarly aspects of Florida music and music publishing. it was purchased by the Smathers Libraries for the Department of Special and Area Collections as part of the Belknap Collection from music collector Danny O. Crew.