Palmetto Country: Stetson Kennedy’s Portrait of Old Florida Folklife

If you want to hear the voice of Old Florida, the songs sung in the fields, the tales told on porches, the foods cooked in country kitchens, there is no better guide than Stetson Kennedy’s 1942 classic, Palmetto Country.

Kennedy was a Jacksonville-born folklorist with a deep love for the ordinary people of his state. In the 1930s he worked with the WPA Florida Writers’ Project, traveling the back roads alongside figures like the great writer Zora Neale Hurston, collecting the folklore, music, and customs of Florida and the surrounding Deep South.

Palmetto Country gathers all of that into one rich, affectionate book. It moves from turpentine camps to fishing villages, from Cracker cattle country to Cuban cigar towns, capturing the beliefs, superstitions, recipes, and work songs of a Florida that was already beginning to fade.

What makes the book endure is Kennedy’s ear and his respect. He let people speak in their own voices and treated their traditions as treasures worth saving, preserving a folk culture that might otherwise have vanished without a trace.

For anyone curious about the deep roots beneath modern Florida, Palmetto Country is a warm and fascinating place to start, a vivid portrait of the land and its people drawn by someone who truly loved them.