In the United States, the first Monday of September is the holiday celebrating American workers. Labor Day became a legal holiday in 1894 and while it has morphed into a day of shopping, picnics, speeches and sadly, summer’s farewell, the true meaning of the day, celebrating the American worker, should not be forgotten. In its …
The following is a guest post by Matt Barton, Recorded Sound Curator, National Audio-Visual Conservation Center This Monday marked the hundredth anniversary of the beginning of World War I. Songs relating to World War I are very well documented in the Library’s National Jukebox, which provides over 10,000 78-rpm discs recorded in the 1920s and before. For …
As Mike Mashon mentioned in his recent blog post, Tales of the Unexpected, you never know what you’ll find in the Library’s collections. While the Library has great interviews of musicians, as found in the Joe Smith Collection, the Studs Terkel Collection contains interviews of musicians and performers that are particularly fascinating and revealing. Since …
The following is a guest post from Carla Arton, a Processing Technician in the Recorded Sound Section. Here at the Packard Campus of the Library’s National Audio-Visual Conservation Center, we not only pride ourselves on providing excellent reference and preservation services for our collections, our staff also actively participates in ongoing professional development. In addition …
I recently returned from visiting Nashville, Tennessee, and while there visited the Ryman Auditorium. Being a fan of country music, I knew the Ryman was called “the Mother Church of Country Music,” and was the home for many years of the radio program The Grand Ole Opry, but I was very surprised to learn about …
This post was co-written by Karen Fishman and Mike Mashon. Here are some selections from the film and audio collection to help you celebrate The Fourth of July. The audio comes from the Library’s National Jukebox which includes over 10,000 streaming recordings dating from 1900 to 1925, a time when patriotic music was extremely …
The following is a guest post by Daniel Blazek, Recorded Sound Technician, National Audio-Visual Conservation Center The Tonight Show has become such a cultural institution in America that it is hard to imagine that early episodes were lost, as so many early television programs on tape were erased when subsequent broadcasts were taped over …
Imagine looking page by page at magazines devoted to radio, recorded sound, film, and television that previously could only be viewed by a visit to a library or an archive. In the past few years, we’ve been working with the Library’s Document Scan Center to digitize around 1 million pages of public domain media-related periodicals …
Fans may have difficulty imagining Little Richard, the self-professed “King of Rock and Roll” as a struggling newcomer, but in a recording acquired last year Richard registers his surprise at first hearing his hit “Tutti Frutti” on the radio while lying in bed one night, (at about 8 minutes 50 seconds into the interview). …