More than 1600 Rare Audio Recordings by Roots Music Legends Donated to UNC University Library’s Southern Folklife Collection

From UNC University Library News:

More than 1,600 musical acts have played at McCabe’s Guitar Shop in Santa Monica, California, over the last 45 years. The list on the store’s website even comes with a warning: “We lost track of a few names.”
Now Bob Riskin, the concert venue’s owner, has donated thousands of hours of recordings from those concerts to the Southern Folklife Collection (SFC) in the Wilson Special Collections Library. The SFC will preserve the recordings by creating and archiving digital copies of them.
Steve Weiss, curator of the SFC, said that McCabe’s is a premier venue for roots music. “This collection is a national treasure that documents nearly five decades of top performers in an intimate setting,” he said.
The audio cassettes and open reel tapes from 1969 onward include performances by the likes of Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, John Fahey, John Hammond, Bill Monroe, Odetta, Jean Ritchie, Dave Van Ronk, Mike Seeger, Ralph Stanley, Merle Travis, Kate Wolf, Townes Van Zandt, and North Carolina’s own Elizabeth Cotten and Doc and Merle Watson.

Learn More About the Collection of Recordings in the Complete Blog Post
Direct to Southern Folklife Collection (via UNC University Library)

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