This blog post reflects on the life and legacy of salsa pioneer Willie Colón following his death in February 2026. It highlights copyright deposits from the album "El Juicio" held by the Library of Congress. Through songs such as “Timbalero” and “Aguanilé,” it explores how Colón and Héctor Lavoe helped shape the sound of New York salsa by blending Afro-Caribbean rhythms with urban storytelling and musical innovation.
In January of this year, concert producer Claudia Morales served as a panelist at Jazz Congress, a multi-day gathering produced by Jazz at Lincoln Center. The panel led by Loren Schoenberg, composer, bandleader and director of the National Jazz Museum in Harlem, focused on identifying available collections and making archival materials from institutions such as the Library of Congress, Smithsonian Associates, and the National Jazz Museum in Harlem accessible to artists, scholars, and presenters. The panel underscored the ongoing need for information sharing and accessibility within the jazz archival community.
Learn about 2024-2025 Library of Congress Jazz Scholar Willard Jenkins' time exploring the Music Division's jazz collections. Jenkins, who is the artistic director of the DC Jazz Festival, conducted research in the archives this spring and presented a lecture on "The Enduring Importance of Jazz Archives" on June 18, 2025.
August 2023 marks the fiftieth anniversary of Hip-Hop, said to have begun in 1973 at a little South-Bronx party hosted by DJ Kool Herc. But years before Herc introduced New York to the breakbeat, African-American music and spoken-word traditions had been brewing in the great social unrest of the 60s and 70s to create a …
While Walter Kent and Kim Gannon are the only names credited on the original copyright deposit for the Christmas classic, "I'll be home for Christmas," the label on Crosby's recording credits the song to three names: Kent, Gannon, and Buck Ram. Read about the history of the song and its copyright backstory, illustrated in records from the US Copyright Office. Download the original printed sheet music, registered as an unpublished copyright deposit on September 28, 1943.
Part two of this three part travel series takes - through music - a road trip through the historic sites Chalmette Battlefield, Keweenaw National Historical Park, and National Historic Landmark in Kent, Ohio.
The concluding part of this two-part survey of music and disease looks at examples that arose from pandemics in the 19th and 20th centuries, including: works by Stephen Foster and Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel written in the wake of a series of cholera outbreaks, and the sometimes curiously lighthearted musical response to the 1918 influenza pandemic.
The following is a guest post by Reader Services Technician Mary Joy Lamb. While working as a technician in the Library of Congress Music Division I came across Clifford Hayes’s copyright lead sheet for “Bye Bye Blues” from 1928. The yellowed paper, the rushed corrections, and the date caught my eye. I snapped an image …
