Top of page
Posted by: Pat Padua
The following is a guest post by Julianne Mangin, a retired Network Specialist from the Library of Congress. The sounds of a summer night can be charming — a light breeze rustling the trees, the chirp of crickets, perhaps the occasional hoot of an owl or croak of a frog. But on one such night …
Posted in: Guest bloggers, Sheet Music, Special Collections
Posted by: Pat Padua
The following is a guest post from retired cataloger Sharon McKinley. May is Jewish American Heritage Month. Over three million Jews, mainly from Eastern Europe, flooded into the United States between 1880 and 1920. Like other large immigrant populations, they crowded into cities such as New York, living in often squalid conditions as they tried …
Posted in: Jewish American History, Sheet Music
Posted by: Pat Padua
The following is a guest post by retired cataloger Sharon McKinley. Perhaps you saw SNOW showers earlier this month, but there’s no doubt that April can be a rainy time of year. Trust a songwriter to take advantage of the old saw, “April showers bring May flowers.” In 1921, Tin Pan Alley greats Louis Silvers …
Posted in: Sheet Music, Special Collections
Posted by: Pat Padua
The following is a guest post by retired cataloger Sharon McKinley. We all know that the concept of occasionally adding a day or more to the calendar to keep the seasons where they belong has been around for a long, long time. A couple of millennia, in fact. I was wondering how long the term …
Posted in: Guest bloggers, Sheet Music
Posted by: Pat Padua
It is a long cultural journey from President Teddy Roosevelt to pop singer Anne Murray to art house film director Peter Greenaway. But this is just one of the paths you can take using the new web presentation The Library of Congress Celebrates the Songs of America as a starting point. At the turn of …
Posted in: Composers, Digital Collections, Sheet Music, Sound recordings, Special Collections
Posted by: Pat Padua
The following is a guest post by Stephanie A. Hall, American Folklife Center. World Mosquito Day, August 20th, commemorates the day in 1897 when Dr. Ronald Ross of Great Britain discovered that female mosquitoes transmit malaria. Many items in the Music Division of the Library of Congress and other performing arts materials throughout the Library …
Posted in: Guest bloggers, Sheet Music, Sheet Music of the Week, Special Collections
Posted by: Pat Padua
The following post is by Carlos Martinez III, Office of Strategic Initiatives. In a recent blog post, I discussed a World War I Sheet Music digitization project and some of my contributions to it. I had the pleasure of working alongside several team members and Paul Fraunfelter, Digital Conversion Specialist from the Music Division. Over …
Posted in: Interviews, Sheet Music, Special Collections, Staff, Staff Interviews
Posted by: Pat Padua
Like the tale of the blind men and the elephant, an artifact of popular culture as vivid as today’s featured sheet music at right has a variety of angles worth pursuing. What of the career of Austrian composer Heinrich Reinhardt, or lyricist Robert Bache Smith? And what of that fantastic cover art, which features besotted …
Posted in: Sheet Music, Sheet Music of the Week, Special Collections, Theater
Posted by: Pat Padua
The following is a guest post from retired Senior Music cataloger Sharon McKinley. The Academy Awards are over, and I was definitely rooting for Lincoln. Daniel Day-Lewis in particular was wonderful, but then, we’re Lincoln partisans here at the Library, which is the home of the Lincoln papers. Staffers were consulted during production of the …
Posted in: Guest bloggers, Newly Cataloged, Sheet Music, Special Collections