Sounds to be saved by the SOS project cover a wide spectrum. Examples are noted below, and some of these can be heard. This list and its audio links will be updated over the course of the Save Our Sounds project as more items are digitized.

To hear the sounds linked to this page  you will need the RealPlayer plug-in for your web browser. If you find it is not already installed, you can download it for free by clicking here.

Among the important recordings to be saved are:

• Authentic Native American music, dance, and story recordings of the late 1800s
• Unique oral histories of the last living ex-slaves recorded for the WPA project in the 1930s
• Songs of Americans of Chinese, Irish, Italian, Jewish, Indian, and Latino heritage (La Cuquita by Narciso Martínez)
• Anglo and Mexican American cowboy songs from the early 1900s
• The first-ever recording of "We Shall Overcome" from 1948 (version recorded in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, November, 1964, in a mass meeting by Moses Moon)
• Woody Guthrie's songs, including the original "This Land Is Your Land"
• Songs and stories of the Farm Workers Movement
• The poetry of Langston Hughes
• Speeches of every U.S. president since Teddy Roosevelt (J. F. Kennedy honoring the poet Robert Frost: "Poetry and Power")
• Sounds of technology from steam locomotives to space satellites
• Speeches of Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., and Civil Rights leaders including "I Have a Dream"
• Interviews with coal miners, mariners, farmers, factory workers, artists from every region of the U.S., and from around the world
• The recordings documenting American life in the Library of Congress Archive of the American Folklife Center
• The Folkways Collections at the Smithsonian Institution (the Stanley Brothers' "Rabbit in a Log"
• The voices of musicians, artisans, and carriers of community cultural heritage recorded for three decades at the annual Smithsonian Folklife Festival on the National Mall