The 2023 class of the National Recording Registry adds music from Mariah Carey, Queen Latifah, Daddy Yankee, the Eurythmics, Jimmy Buffett, Wynton Marsalis, Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Ellen Taaffe Zwilich and several others. The 25 additions range from 1908 to 2012 and includes early blues and Mariachi music, along with radio broadcasts from the 1930s. A highlights video, with interviews with several of the artists, is included.
Lizzo set the social media world afire last fall by playing, in concert, a short solo on a rare crystal flute that once belonged to President James Madison. The flute is one of the Library's most prized musical instruments and a showpiece of the collection of Dayton C. Miller, the famed physicist, astronomer and major flute aficionado. The collection, preserved in a vault at the Library, is not just the world’s largest of flute-related material, it is perhaps the largest collection on a single music subject ever assembled — and it’s what drew Lizzo to the Library in the first place.
The Library wrapped up its tribute to Joni Mitchell on a high note last week with a conversation between the 2023 Gershwin Prize winner and Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden. In an exchange punctuated by laughter and ending in song, Mitchell detailed her unexpected evolution as a musical pathbreaker. The article contains a link to a video of the conversation.
The Library of Congress on Wednesday bestowed its Gershwin Prize for Popular Song on Joni Mitchell, the singer-songwriter best known for such 1970s classics as “Both Sides Now,” “Big Yellow Taxi” and “Help Me.” The celebratory concert included performances by Annie Lennox, Graham Nash, James Taylor, Cyndi Lauper, Diana Krall, Angélique Kidjo, Ledisi, Lucius and modern folkies Brandi Carlile and Marcus Mumford. It will air on PBS stations on March 31.
From 1961 to 1976, Ed Beach hosted “Just Jazz” on WRVR-FM in New York City. Beach played jazz — soloists, bands, traditional, modern — ranging from the early 1920s to the 1970s. He featured artists who achieved great fame — Charles Mingus, Duke Ellington, Max Roach — along with musicians new to his audience. The show is now preserved online by the American Archive of Public Broadcasting, a joint project of the Library of Congress and the Boston public broadcaster GBH.
The Library’s Mark Hartsell, in the Communications Office, and Mark Horowitz, in the Music Division, contributed to this post. Burt Bacharach, the elegant songwriter and composer whose lifetime of work the Library honored with the 2012 Gershwin Prize for Popular Song, died yesterday in Los Angeles. He was 94. Bacharach’s iconic career stretched for more than …
Most folks know the ridiculously catchy instrumental theme song for the 1960s classic TV comedy “I Dream of Jeannie.” But how many can recite its lyrics — “Jeannie, fresh as a daisy!/Just love how she obeys me” — or even knew it had any? The theme for “Bewitched,” another ’60s favorite, briefly had its day: …
Marvel Studios President Kevin Feige was excited, explaining why he and his filmmaking team were thrilled that their cornerstone feature, 2008’s “Iron Man,” was being inducted into cinematic Valhalla, the Library’s National Film Registry, in the class of 2022. “All of our favorite movies are the ones that we watch over and over again, and …
Leslie Jordan died of an apparent medical emergency this morning while driving in Los Angeles. His beloved BMW crashed into the wall of a building. He was pronounced dead at the scene. No one else was hurt. He was 67. Adorable, generous and hilarious to the very end, one of his last public appearances was …
