The first Azalea Festival was hosted by the City of Charleston in 1934. Like many festivals of the time, it was a season celebration. This recording was broadcast by NBC to a potentially national audience, providing another glimpse into what was a widening fascination with the South Carolina Lowcountry and Gullah culture. The programming lineup included the Preservation for Negro Spirituals, now known today as the Society for the Preservation of Gullah Spirituals, a white storyteller, potentially as a minstrel, who delivered a series of Gullah stories, and a voice artist who described the waterfront in Charleston. DuBose Heyward introduced the Society for the Preservation of Spirituals. Heyward’s novel Porgy (inspired by the Johns Island recordings of Lorenzo Dow Turner), would be translated into the famed opera Porgy & Bess. The Gullah Geechee Digital Project digitized the Society’s performance of the spirituals as a potential counter-point and conversation piece to the other field recordings of Gullah singers up and down the coast. These relatively privileged men and women collected spirituals for fear that they would disappear and change, but ostensibly translated them for a white audience. Their records are some of the only remaining of transcriptions dating back well into the antebellum period.