University of North Carolina: Grant Will Preserve More than 1600 Hours of Rare American Music Recordings

From UNC Library News:

Dolly Parton’s first recording is among the items that the Southern Folklife Collection (SFC) in the Wilson Special Collections Library will preserve, thanks to a new grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.
The $131,765, three-year grant is called “From the Piedmont to the Swamplands: Preserving Southern Traditional Music.” It will help the SFC digitize and make available more than 1,650 hours of rare sound recordings and 4,500 photographs of musical figures from the 1920s to the 1980s.
Other rarities to be preserved include:

• Studio and field recordings of musicians B.B. King, Elizabeth Cotten, Hazel Dickens, Bob Dylan, Iry LeJune, and Tommy Jarrell;
• African-American musician “Boozoo” Chavis’s “Paper in My Shoe,” the first commercial recording of Zydeco music (1954); and
• Early photographs of the musical Seeger family, whose members include musician and folklorist Mike Seeger and his sister Peggy and half-brother, Pete.

Learn More About the Grant and Preservation Project

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