Walker Library: HIST 2020: Survey of US History, 1877-Present: Music

Digital Collections

The John and Ruby Lomax 1939 Southern States Recording Trip
(Library of Congress)
This ethnographic field collection that includes nearly 700 sound recordings, as well as fieldnotes, dust jackets, and other manuscripts. These recordings represent a broad spectrum of traditional musical styles, including ballads, blues, children's songs, cowboy songs, fiddle tunes, field hollers, lullabies, play-party songs, religious dramas, spirituals, and work songs.

Greatful Dead Archive Online
Emile Berliner and the Birth of the Recording Industry
Spanning the years 1870 to 1956, this collection offers more than 400 items from the Emile Berliner Papers and 118 Berliner sound recordings from the Library of Congress's Motion Picture, Broadcasting and Recorded Sound Division.
The Strachwitz Frontera Collection of Mexican and Mexican American Recordings
The 30,000 recordings (78 rpm phonograph) in this collection date from the first half of the twentieth century.
Cultural Equity (Field recordings of Alan Lomax and associates)
California Gold: Northern California Folk Music from the Thirties
This collection includes 35 hours of audio recordings of folk music, as well as photographs, drawings, and written documents from a variety of European ethnic and English- and Spanish-speaking communities.
Cylinder Preservation and Digitization Project
Woody Guthrie and the Archive of American Folk Song: Correspondence, 1940-1950

Jazz: Digital Collections and Documentaries

William P. Gottlieb Collection: Photographs from the Golden Age of Jazz
This collection of more than 1600 photographs documents the jazz scene in New York City and Washington, D.C. from 1938 to 1948.
Hogan Jazz Archive Photograph Collection
This collection documents the people, places and events important to the study of New Orleans jazz.

Trade Periodicals

The Blues

The Blues Photograph Collection (University of Mississippi)

Tennessee Connections

Ryman Auditorium Collection (TSLA)

Tennessee State Parks Folklife Project, 1979-1984 (TSLA)

Charles K. Wolfe Audio Collection (Center for Popular Music) includes descriptions of oral histories and interviews with many pioneering country and gospel musicians, singers, songwriters, producers, and publishers. This site includes sample audio clips of Wolfe's interviews with Roy Acuff, Dick Burnett, Lester Smallwood, and Kasper "Stranger" Malone.

My Homeland Tennessee: A Research Guide to Songs About Tennessee (Center for Popular Music)