Library of Congress's Blog, page 33

Ulysses S. Grant: 200th Birthday

General Ulysses S. Grant. Brady-Handy photograph collection. Prints and Photographs Division.

This is a guest post by Michelle Krowl, a historian in the Manuscript Division. 

“In June 1821 my father, Jesse Root Grant, married Hannah Simpson. I was born on the 27th of April, 1822, at Point Pleasant, Clermont County, Ohio.”

In his typically concise way, General Ulysses S. Grant, 18th president of the United States, recounted in his manuscript memoirs his own start in life. His unremarkable birth, however, was the beginning of a remarkable life that would see him more than once plummet to the depths of despair and rise to the pinnacle of success. What better way to commemorate his 200th birthday than to explore his extraordinary life through his papers at the Library?

The most personal of Grant’s papers are the letters to his wife, Julia Dent Grant. While stationed in St. Louis, Missouri, after his graduation from the United States Military Academy in 1843, Grant visited the nearby family home of his West Point friend, Frederick Dent. There Grant met Fred’s sister, Julia, and fell helplessly in love. The couple quietly became engaged in May 1844, although “Ulys” would later admit that he had been “so frightened” on the day he proposed that he could not “remember whether it was warm or snowing.” Grant’s military postings and the Mexican War (1846-1848) contributed to their long engagement. He wrote faithfully when they were apart, sending flowers he picked on the bank of the Rio Grande River, sharing his observations of the war in Mexico, expressing his devotion to her, and always urging her to write more often.

Ulysses Grant note to his wife, Julia, on May 22, 1875, on their 31rst wedding anniversary. Manuscript Division.

The couple finally married in 1848 and shared several happy years living together at military posts in Michigan and New York. In 1852, the army sent him to outposts in California and Oregon. The devoted family man missed his wife and their two young sons. An air of desperation crept into his letters home. “You do not know how forsaken I feel here!” he wrote in 1854. “How very much I want to see all of you.” Not being able to “endure this separation” any longer, Grant resigned from the military in April 1854 and returned to St. Louis. Although reunited with his family, he struggled to find steady employment as a civilian. The name Grant gave to a family farm summed up the bleak years just before the Civil War: Hardscrabble.

“My Dear Wife…” Fort Humbolt, California, February 2, 1854. Manuscript Division.

At the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861, Grant returned to the U.S. Army. His series of battlefield successes eventually elevated him to the highest rank of lieutenant general. Despite his increasing responsibilities, he frequently wrote to his wife when she could not join him at the front. In a short but endearing letter on June 7, 1864, for example, the general-in-chief of the Union army thoughtfully enclosed a lock of hair she had requested. Before sending his usual “love and kisses for you and the children,” he joked that “war will get to be so common with me if this thing continues much longer that I will not be able to sleep after a while unless there is an occasional gunshot near me during the night.”

On the professional side, Grant’s military correspondence from 1861 to 1869 is reflected in volumes of Headquarters Records. The content encompasses both the mundane and momentous, including Grant’s notorious December 1862 order expelling Jews from the Department of the Tennessee (which was quickly revoked by President Abraham Lincoln) and the negotiations resulting in Confederate General Robert E. Lee’s surrender at Appomattox in April 1865.

Cartoon of Grant in clothing of various countries he visited on global travels — but always shown with his familiar cigar. Manuscript Division.

After completing two terms as president in 1877, the Grants embarked on a trip that ultimately took them around the world. He learned about foreign governments, the people of other nations, and met Americans abroad, while she recalled in her memoirs the entertainment, sightseeing, and shopping opportunities. The correspondence Grant received between 1877 and 1879 reflects the countries to which he traveled and honors accorded him. A scrapbook of newspaper clippings provides readers a further glimpse into his international travel experiences.

A section of Grant’s insert in his manuscript expressing regret for ordering a disastrous final assault at Cold Harbor in 1864. Manuscript Division.

Grant suffered two crushing blows in 1884.

First, he went bankrupt after the collapse of a Ponzi scheme in which he had invested. Second, and far worse, his persistent throat pain was diagnosed as cancer of the tongue. Fears for his family’s solvency prompted him to write his memoirs, of which his handwritten pages reside in the Grant Papers. The manuscript pages reveal Grant’s writing process, including corrections and additions, notably the later insertion of a section beginning, “I have always regretted that last assault at Cold Harbor was ever made.” The nation went on a death watch as Grant raced against time to complete the manuscript. Children wrote encouraging letters to him. Unable to speak at the end, Grant wrote notes to visitors to the Mount McGregor, New York, cottage in which spent his last weeks. He died in July 1885, just days after completing the memoirs that would earn both critical and commercial success.

From the highest highs to the lowest lows, Grant’s story is always compelling.

The Gorgeous Jazz Age Photography of Alfred Cheney Johnston

Legendary actress Mary Pickford poses for Alfred Cheney Johnston in 1920. Prints and Photographs Division.

In the Jazz Age, when the hot new music and racy new sensibilities were sweeping across pop culture, it perhaps reached its zenith in the Ziegfeld Follies. The Broadway musical revues produced by Florenz Ziegfeld Jr., began in 1907 and ran for more than two decades at the New Amsterdam Theatre. The shows featured dance numbers, comedy acts and shapely young women in skimpy outfits. The shows, particularly those at midnight, became legendary for their style, pizzazz and sex appeal.

The court photographer for the Follies, Alfred Cheney Johnston  ̶  who later donated more than 200 of his photographs to the Library  ̶  captured the era and helped create the celebrity glamour shot, soon to become an industry standard. These were soft-focused, well-composed, sepia-toned portraits with Old Master lighting. In so doing, Cheney also became one of the first celebrity photographers, and certainly one of the most famous of the day.

“I try to make not just a photograph of a girl’s face and figure but one of her personality as well,” Johnston told a newspaper columnist in 1928. “I suit everything to the personality of the person whose picture I’m making. Lights, background, composition – everything.”

Barbara Stanwyck, who would go on a long career in film and television, began her career as a Ziegfeld showgirl in the 1920s. Photo: Alfred Cheney Johnston. Prints and Photographs Division.

Stars flocked to him. Mary Pickford. Clara Bow. Helen Hayes. John Barrymore. Barbara Stanwyck. Dorothy and Lillian Gish. Marilyn Miller. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald. Helen Hays. Mae Murray. Billie Dove.

“His spellbinding portraits … adorned a vast array of newspapers and magazines of the era,” writes author Robert Hudovernik in “Jazz Age Beauties: The Lost Collection of Ziegfeld Photographer Alfred Cheney Johnston,” which draws in part on the Library’s photographs. The book was published in 2006 and reissued late last year. “They dramatically contributed to the adoration of stars by their fans, who worshipfully pasted them in their scrapbooks or tacked them onto their bedroom walls.”

Alfred Cheney Johnston, circa 1921. Photo: Unknown, Public domain, Wikipedia commons.

At the height of Johnston’s career, he sometimes charged $500 to $1,400 for a set of a dozen prints, the equivalent of $14,000 to $40,000 today. In these celebrity shots, and in his stylish, high-end photos for advertising campaigns, he created a sensuous atmosphere. Many stars (and private clients) posed nude and semi-nude, with furs and gowns and scarves draped just so. The oriental rugs and draperies in the background, the ornate furniture, the formal poses, the sepia-toned images were all designed to make the photographs look like classic paintings from an earlier era.

The twist, Hudovernik says, is that he “jazzified” them, with portraits of “modern women in the ’20s.”

This wasn’t by accident; Johnston came from a wealthy New York banking family and studied art as a student. His wife, Doris, was a painter. He was a classy, upscale sort, friends with Norman Rockwell, Ansel Adams and and Charles Dana Gibson, the last of whom had created a standard of female beauty a generation earlier with his “Gibson Girl” sketches.

Johnston’s studio was in the Hotel des Artistes, a luxury co-op on the Upper West Side. He shot with a large view camera on a tripod, which produced a large glass-plate negative. He often painted the background onto the negatives.

“Jazz Age Beauties,” by Robert Hudovernik.

As Johnson’s fame grew, he became regarded as a new arbiter of female beauty. In 1928, he wrote a series of articles for a newspaper wire service about different kinds of classic female archetypes. One was headlined, “Typical Girl of U.S. Blends All Styles of Beauty.” In the article, Johnson dispensed step-by-step makeup advice: “When face rouge is used, it should be applied to the center of both cheeks, skillfully toned from light to dark, and just the merest speck to the center of the chin.”

The Follies came to an end in 1931 and Zeigfeld died in 1932. Still, there were Broadway revivals during the 1930s and a film, “The Great Ziegfeld,” won the Oscar for Best Picture in 1938. But Johnston’s star began to fade by World War II, when he left New York for a rural Connecticut studio, rejecting Hollywood. Times were changing, but he kept to his ways and big box camera, which began to seem not so much classic as old-fashioned. By the time he died in a 1971 car crash at age 86, he was a widower living alone; he and Doris had no children. Hudovernik writes that only two people attended his funeral.

Fine-art connoisseurs never took to his work – too focused on celebrity, too commercial – and thousands of his prints, left to no museum or established collection, began to be pieced out and sold off in various sales and auctions. Hudovernik discovered Johnston’s work in the late 1990s and spent more than five years of research before publishing the first edition of his book in 2006. Cheney’s growing popularity — his prints now routinely sell for a few thousand dollars each — led to the book’s reissue in 2021.

The Library’s collection, featuring stars from the stage and film and from advertising campaigns, were hand-selected by Johnston decades earlier, Hudovernik says, when his life’s work was intact.

“It’s a gem of a collection,” he says. “These are prints he picked out as some of his best work.”

Actor Tyrone Power. Photo: Alfred Cheney Johnston. Prints and Photographs Division.

His photographs still catch the eye; several of his signed prints were pulled out for display on a recent afternoon in the Prints and Photographs Division. Framed in brown mattes, they were a portal to a previous era’s ideals of sensuous beauty.

Julie Newmar, the legendary stage and screen actress (she was the first Catwoman in the original “Batman” TV series), posed nude for Johnston in the 1950s. Her mother, a Follies dancer, had posed for him decades before.

In the introduction to Hudovernik’s book, she remembers him as “distinguished,” and that his studio, even during the mid-century, like a time capsule from the Jazz Age. She lovingly recounts his legacy as a “treasure trove of magnificent photographic images that capture (his subjects) individual incandescence, as well as the energy and glamour of the dizzy, gilded era of which these stars were born.”

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How “It’s a Small World” Turned Into One of The World’s Most Played Songs

The National Recording Registry badge for “It’s a Small World.” Graphic: Ashley Jones.

The National Recording Registry has inducted plenty of popular songs over the years, but few come close to “It’s a Small World,” the theme song to the Disney theme park ride of the same name, as it has been played more than 50 million times since its 1964 debut.

One of 25 songs added to the NRR this year, the little song about world peace was likely the most–played song in global history until the advent of streaming services, where worldwide views and listens can soar into billions of plays. “Small,” though never a radio hit, has played constantly at the Disney theme park rides of the same name, over and over again, all day long, as just about every parent can attest.

“People either want to kill us or kiss us,” laughs co-writer Richard Sherman, now 93, in a recent phone interview from his California home. His brother and songwriting partner, Robert, died in 2012.

They pair didn’t intend for “Small” to become an earworm of historic proportions. The Oscar-winning pair wrote much of the Walt Disney songbook of the 1960s, turning out the music for film hits such as “Mary Poppins,” “The Jungle Book,” “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang,” “Winnie the Pooh,” “The Happiest Millionaire” and “Tom Sawyer.” For good measure, they wrote “You’re Sixteen,” a hit in 1960, which then went to No. 1 in 1974 for Ringo Starr.

The songs from their Disney movies, including “I Wan’na Be Like You,” “Chim Chim Cher-ee” and “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious,” became almost universally known to children of the 1960s and ’70s. Today, “Be Like You,” from “The Jungle Book,” has been viewed more than 64 million times on YouTube alone. Disney eventually renamed its Soundstage A for the pair. When their sons filmed a documentary about them in 2009, “The Boys: The Sherman Brothers’ Story,” the list of stars and studio executives who turned out to be interviewed seemed endless: Julie Andrews, Angela Lansbury, Dick Van Dyke, John Landis and Samuel Goldwyn Jr., to name a few.

“We loved to write songs,” Sherman said. “Our father was a great songwriter. It was just a natural thing for us.”

Indeed, their father, Al, whose family had fled Jewish persecution in Ukraine (then part of the Russian Empire) had an impressive career in the first half of the 20th century. He wrote or co-wrote hundreds of songs for Broadway, Tin Pan Alley and film.

Robert and Richard were born in the 1920s, growing up in the Los Angeles area. Urged by their father to work together in music, they began writing pop songs and were working directly for Walt Disney himself by the early 1960s.

Their film scores were immediate hits. But in 1964, “Small” was just a simple ditty the brothers banged out for what they thought was to be a short-term exhibit at the 1964-65 World’s Fair in New York. The fair’s theme was “Peace Through Understanding” and the Disney exhibit was part of a salute to the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF).

The exhibit was a water ride that would take visitors through models of different nations. Animatronic dolls, portraying children from around the globe, would sing about world peace. The first idea for the music — the dolls singing different national anthems — didn’t work. So, while the project was still being designed, Disney assigned the Shermans to come up with a kids’ song for the ride.

“Just don’t preach,” Sherman remembers Disney telling them.

The context of the era, mostly lost on listeners today, was the Cold War. Threats of atomic bombings by the Soviet Union dominated the national mindset. Schoolchildren practiced duck-and-cover drills; the “Fallout Shelter” sign — orange-and-black with three inverted triangles set inside a black circle — became common on sturdy buildings. The Cuban missile crisis in October 1962 elevated the situation to a fever pitch. (The second line of “Small” is, “It’s a world of hopes and a world of fears.”)

“It came pretty easily,” Sherman remembered. “We didn’t sweat blood over it.”

They previewed it for Disney, he liked it and that seemed that. Then, not knowing of Disney’s plans to create multiple theme parks (only one existed at the time) and that “Small” was going to be a theme park attraction after the World’s Fair was over, the pair mentioned during a brief car ride that they planned to donate the song’s copyright to UNICEF. It seemed like a symbolic gesture, Sherman said, as the World’s Fair would come and go and so would the song.

“He stopped the car, turned and said, ‘Don’t you give that away! That’s for your grandkids! It’ll put them through college!’ ” Sherman laughed. “He was right. It’s our biggest copyright by far.”

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Motown’s Songwriting Stars and “Reach Out I’ll Be There”

“Reach Out I’ll Be There” by the Four Tops was inducted into the 2022 National Recording Registry. Graphic: Ashley Jones.

Lamont Dozier grew up in the last days of Detroit’s Black Bottom, the rough-hewn neighborhood just north of downtown that was adjacent to the jazz clubs and nightlife of the Paradise Valley section of the city.

By the early 1960s, he and his songwriting partners, brothers Brian and Eddie Holland, were in their early 20s. In a furious three-year span, they helped rewrite the city’s history as the home of Motown, the Black-owned record label that reshaped American pop music.

Holland-Dozier-Holland songs, recorded by acts including the Supremes, Marvin Gaye, the Four Tops, the Isley Brothers and Martha and the Vandellas, topped the charts and defined the Motown Sound. “Heat Wave,” “Baby Love,” “I Can’t Help Myself (Sugar Pie, Honey Bunch),” “Stop! In the Name of Love,” and “This Old Heart of Mine” were just some of the hits they wrote between 1964 and 1966.

“Reach Out I’ll Be There,” inducted into the 2022 class of the Library’s National Recording Registry, was a smash for the Four Tops in 1966. The H-D-H trio wrote it, like their other hits, in an upstairs office at Motown Studios, a converted two-story house on West Grand Boulevard. They worked from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., much like the auto factory workers in town. About the only thing in the room was a piano.

“It was a fun time, like kids playing in a playground,” Dozier, 80, said recently in a phone interview from his California home. “Everything we touched turned to gold.”

Life certainly didn’t start out that way for Dozier. Like nearly all of his Motown peers, he grew up in racism-based hardship. Blacks had fled the South for better-paying northern manufacturing jobs in the Great Migration during the first decades of the 20th century. But Detroit, among other destinations, proved to be “the promised land that wasn’t,” in the words of Rosa Parks, who fled Alabama for Detroit.

The new arrivals were forced into downtrodden neighborhoods, such as Black Bottom and Paradise Valley, where living conditions were segregated and often harsh.

“Whatever you called it, it was the ghetto,” Dozier remembers.

But jazz, the pop music of the day, had created a class of Black musicians who recorded, toured and made good money. In Detroit, Black kids grew up on that music. Many of them, like Dozier, also had relatives who played classical piano. Combined with the gospel played every Sunday in churches, a fusion emerged that would create soul, rhythm and blues and greatly influence rock and roll.

Dozier, who took to the piano after his aunt would come to their house and play Chopin and other classical composers, jumped into the local music scene when he was a teenager. He got his breakthrough from Berry Gordy, another musically minded, ambitious entrepreneur who was a few years older.

Soon after Gordy established Motown, Dozier began teaming with the Holland brothers. He and Brian Holland composed the music, sitting side by side at the piano. Eddie Holland added lyrics. They’d take the results to any number of the acts — many of whom were teenagers — who were constantly flowing through the studios.

They had their first national hit in 1963 with “Heat Wave,” recorded by Martha and the Vandellas. The next year, they emerged from their office with a song called “Where Did Our Love Go.” Dozier had composed it with the Marvelettes in mind, but they turned it down. The Supremes, who did not yet have a hit, reluctantly agreed.

It was not a happy recording session. In a 2020 interview with American Songwriter, Dozier said that he and lead singer Diana Ross were “throwing obscenities back and forth” about the key in which the song was to be recorded, and the other two singers did not like his complex arrangements for the backing vocals. They eventually agreed, he said, to just sing, “baby, baby.”

The song became the Supreme’s first No. 1 hit. (It was inducted into the registry in 2015.) The Supremes would go on to become one of the most successful acts in American music history, with 12 No. 1 songs. H-D-H wrote 10 of them.

Dozier remembers it all now with pride, saying it was remarkable how quickly the songs came to the trio in the little upstairs room.

For “Reach Out,” they were partly inspired by Bob Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone,” in which Dylan half sang, half shouted the title refrain. They put “Reach Out” in the highest reaches of lead singer Levi Stubbs’ range, forcing his vocals to sound rough and urgent. The galloping percussion sound at the beginning of the song, which helped make it so instantly identifiable, came from musician and producer Norman Whitfield hitting a modified plastic tambourine — they removed all the jingles before the recording session.

“Brian and I came up with the melodies on the piano, sitting side by side, he would start ‘danh danh da danh’ and I’d push him over a bit and I’d play the next bar,” Dozier said. “Eddie would listen and get an idea of what should be said. The music and lyrics would come at the same time. The collaboration was something. The energy was just flying around in the room.”

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How Alicia Keys Got Her “Hit a High Note” Nickname

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Alicia Keys talks about recording her first album in her Harlem apartment.

We caught up with Alicia Keys recently, talking about her electrifying 2001 debut album, “Songs in A Minor,” and its induction into the 2022 class of the National Recording Registry.

She started writing the first songs on it at age 14 and released it to great fanfare at 18. She described her influences on the album as a “fusion of my classical training, meshed with what I grew up listening to,” which included the jazz from her mother’s record collection, along with the classic R&B and hip-hop that was prevalent in her New York City neighborhood.

What is about that set of songs that has resonated with listeners for two decades?

“It was so pure,” she said. “You felt the truth that was coming from me. I think that the New Yorkness in me was definitely a new energy. People hadn’t quite seen a woman in Timberlands and cornrows and really straight 100% off of the streets of New York performing classical music and mixing it with soul music and R&B and these songs that had big choruses and meaning … and people could find themselves in it.”

She was a perfectionist for the sound she wanted, turning her apartment — a sixth-floor walkup on 137th Street in the heart of Harlem — into an improvised studio. Her all-out vocals, belted out night after night, led to neighborhood fame long before the songs found their way to radio stations.

“We took the one bedroom that we had and turned it into a studio,” she said. “The closet was my little booth. I figured if we hung blankets on it, it would like create the sound we needed. The bed was still in the room. There was a bunch of equipment all around… I remember people on the street when I would come home, they would be calling me ‘Hit a High Note” because all night they heard me singing at the top of my lungs in this little Harlem apartment with the windows open because it was burning hot. So that became my little nickname on the block, ‘Hit a High Note.’ ”

The album would create a sensation due to her songwriting, vocals and piano playing. “Fallin’” was a No. 1 smash, with “A Woman’s Worth,” “Rock Wit U” and her take on Prince’s “How Come You Don’t Call Me Anymore” getting significant airplay. It’s an album that became part of the national soundtrack that year, a postcard from the era, that is now preserved in the national library.

Alicia Keys National Recording Registry badge. Graphics: Ashley Jones.

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That Night in Detroit: Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin’ “

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Steve Perry talks about the Detroit inspiration for “Don’t Stop Believin'”

Steve Perry grew up in Hanford, California, a little town about 30 miles south of Fresno, the son of Portuguese immigrants. It was a small farm town with not much happening. Even though he was singing as a 3-year-old, his childhood fantasies of life in the music business seemed oceans away.

But the small-town kid with the big-city dreams not only grew up to be a world-class rock star as the lead singer for Journey, but his unforgettable lead vocals on “Don’t Stop Believin’” helped put the song into the National Recording Registry this year, enshrined as one of the nation’s signature recordings.

“I’m stunned for my parents and my grandparents, who are no longer here, and came to this country as immigrants,” said Perry, 73, in a streaming interview recently. He left Journey and the spotlight more than three decades ago, resides comfortably in California, doesn’t look back on his arena-rock days and rarely gives interviews. But he called the song’s induction into the Registry “the greatest honor of my life.”

“It’s one of those ‘only in America’ kind of things,” he says of his family’s sojourn into the heart of the nation’s culture.

Steve Perry. Photo: Myriam Santos.

Since the song’s 1981 debut, it has become a worldwide hit record, a stadium anthem embraced by multiple sports teams and a key part of the final episode of “The Sopranos,” widely regarded as one of television’s finest dramas.

“That song, over the years, has become something that has a life of its own,” he said. “It’s about the people who’ve embraced it and found the lyrics to be something they can relate to and hold onto and sing.”

Stardom didn’t come easily for Perry, no matter how early his talent showed up.

He followed a high school friend to the Bay Area in the ’60s, sending demo tapes to record labels, but for years nothing worked out. He was in his late 20s, living in a tiny apartment and had all but given up on the business when an executive asked him if he might want to sing with a band called Journey.

They had not had much success and were looking for a new musical direction.  He crushed the subsequent audition, then showed up with a flair for songwriting and piercing vocals. Rock fans know the rest. During its heyday in the late ’70s through the ’80s, Journey filled stadiums and sold millions of records with hits such as ” Who’s Crying Now,” “Separate Ways,“Faithfully,” “Lovin’, Touchin’, Squeezin,’ ” “Any Way You Want It” and “Open Arms.”

But nothing shined brighter than “ Don’t Stop Believin’ ” a piece written by Perry and fellow group members Neal Schon and Jonathan Cain. As he recalls it, some of the lyrics came from a concert stop in Detroit, while the finished product was worked out in a warehouse in which the band rehearsed in Oakland, California.

Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin.'” Graphic: Ashley Jones.

Perry is sometimes teased for one of the opening lines in the song, about a character being raised in “south Detroit,” as there is no such district (Detroit rests on a curve in the Detroit River, with Windsor, Canada, being directly south of downtown). He good-naturedly points out that back in the day there was a southbound exit sign on I-75 north of the city that read “South” on one line and “Detroit” beneath it, giving rise to the misunderstanding. Besides, he says, no other direction (east, west or north) sounded right vocally.

The band had finished an enthusiastic show in Cobo Arena in downtown Detroit on tour one night and were staying the night on the top floor of a nearby hotel. Perry, sleepless after the high-energy show, found himself looking out the window, gazing down at people on the sidewalk, milling about.

“The streetlights in Detroit at the time were this kind of orange color…it’s like three in the morning and these people were still standing around, and I thought, ‘Wow, look at these streetlight people, they’re just out in the night.’ ”

Later, it worked into the song this way:

Strangers waiting
Up and down the boulevard
Their shadows searching in the night
Streetlight People
Living just to find emotion
Hiding somewhere in the night

It’s a real-life rock-and-roll story that’s now part of American music history, preserved in the National Recording Registry. Steve Perry, the man who belted it out into late 20th century pop culture, is just glad it resonated with so many people for so long.

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Alicia Keys, Journey, “Livin’ La Vida Loca” and the 2022 National Recording Registry

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Brett Zongker, chief of the Library’s public relations team, contributed to this article.

The 2022 Class of the National Recording Registry includes albums such as Alicia Keys’ “Songs in A Minor” and singles such as Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin’” and Ricky Martin’s “Livin’ La Vida Loca,” along with with important inductions of hip-hop and Latin music, including recordings by Linda Ronstadt, A Tribe Called Quest, Wu-Tang Clan and the Buena Vista Social Club.

Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden today named 25 recordings  ̶̶  from a list of nominees by the public and by the National Recording Preservation Board  ̶̶  as audio treasures worthy of formal preservation, based on their cultural, historical or aesthetic importance in the nation’s recorded sound heritage.

“The National Recording Registry reflects the diverse music and voices that have shaped our nation’s history and culture,” Hayden said. “The national library is proud to help preserve these recordings, and we welcome the public’s input. We received about 1,000 public nominations this year.”

There are now 600 recordings on the registry, a miniscule portion of the Library’s collection of nearly 4 million recorded items.

Steve Perry, former lead singer of Journey. Photo: Myriam Santos.

“This is the greatest honor of my life,” said Steve Perry, former lead singer for Journey, citing his family’s history as Portuguese immigrants to a small town in California. “I’ve gotten platinum albums and gold albums and I’ve gotten inducted into the Hall of Fame. But for my mother, my father, my grandmother and grandfather, I am truly beside myself that this is happening…it’s an ‘only in America’ kind of thing.”

Alicia Keys, who burst onto the national music scene as a teen prodigy with her 2001 debut album, “Songs in A Minor,” credited her youthful sincerity and original appearance for the album’s lasting resonance.

Alicia Keys’ debut album, “Songs in A Minor,” was inducted into the 2022 class of the National Recording Registry. Graphic: Ashley Jones.

“It was so pure,” she said with a smile during in a recent interview.  “You felt the truth that was coming from me. I think that the New York-ness in me was definitely a new energy. People hadn’t quite seen a woman in Timberlands and cornrows and really straight 100% off of the streets of New York performing classical music and mixing it with soul music and R&B and these songs that had big choruses and meaning … and people could find themselves in it.”

The latest selections named to the registry span from 1921 to 2010. They range from rock, pop, R&B, hip-hop and country to Latin, Motown, jazz and news broadcasts. The new class includes speeches by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, WNYC’s broadcasts on 9/11 and Mark Maron’s podcast interview with comedian Robin Williams.

Interviews with several of this year’s artists  ̶  including Keys, Perry, Maron and songwriter Desmond Child  ̶  are featured on the Library’s website and across social media channels. There will be radio interviews on NPR’s “1A” with several artists in the series, “The Sounds of America. Here on the blog, we’ll feature stories with many of the artists starting tomorrow.

Several recordings joining the registry were influential in helping to deepen the genres of Latin, rap, hip-hop and R&B in American culture. A Tribe Called Quest’s 1991 album, “The Low End Theory” was the group’s second studio release and came to be seen as a definitive fusion of jazz and rap.

Wu-Tang Clan’s 1993 album “Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers)” would shape the sound of hardcore rap and reasserted the creative capacity of the East Coast rap scene. The group’s individual artists would go on to produce affiliated projects that deepened the group’s influence for decades.

While Linda Ronstadt is best known for her work in pop music, in 1987 she paid tribute to her Mexican heritage with her album, “Canciones de Mi Padre,” recorded with four distinguished mariachi bands. The album went double platinum, won a Grammy and is the biggest-selling non-English recording in American recording history.

“I always thought they were world-class songs,” Ronstadt said in an interview with the Library. “And I thought they were songs that the music could transcend the language barrier.”

While she was learning the music and lyrics, Ronstadt said she never worked so hard in her life. By the time she opened a show for the album in San Antonio, it all paid off.

“I looked out to the faces of the audience; it was packed,” Ronstadt said. “There were three generations of families there. They all sang along with the songs. They knew them all. It was really fun.”

When guitarist Ry Cooder and producer Nick Gold assembled an all-star ensemble of 20 Cuban musicians in 1996, the island’s Buena Vista Social Club was reborn to record some of the key Cuban musical styles of son, danzón and bolero. The album’s surprising popularity helped fuel a resurgence of Cuban and Latin music, propelled the band to concert dates in Amsterdam and New York City’s Carnegie Hall and led to a popular film by director Wim Wenders.

Ricky Martin’s self-titled 1999 album cover.

Soon after, a young Puerto Rican singer named Ricky Martin shook things up with “Livin’ La Vida Loca,” a worldwide smash hit in 1999. Written by Draco Rosa and Desmond Child, the song went to No. 1 in 20 countries and was certified platinum in the U.S., the UK and Australia. It remained at No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 for five consecutive weeks. It was named the ASCAP Song of the Year, the BMI Latin Awards Song of the Year and won four Grammys.

“I believe that the energy of a movement is what dominates in that song about Latinos, the empowerment of Latinos,” said Rosa in Spanish. “Life is full of great suffering, and ‘La Vida Loca’ is the total opposite. Let’s live it up, right?!”

Here’s this year’s complete list in chronological order:

“Harlem Strut” — James P. Johnson (1921)Franklin D. Roosevelt: Complete Presidential Speeches (1933-1945)“Walking the Floor Over You” — Ernest Tubb (1941) (single)“On a Note of Triumph” (May 8, 1945)“Jesus Gave Me Water” — The Soul Stirrers (1950) (single)“Ellington at Newport” — Duke Ellington (1956) (album)“We Insist! Max Roach’s Freedom Now Suite” — Max Roach (1960) (album)“The Christmas Song” — Nat King Cole (1961) (single)“Tonight’s the Night” — The Shirelles (1961) (album)“Moon River” — Andy Williams (1962) (single)“In C” — Terry Riley (1968) (album)“It’s a Small World” — The Disneyland Boys Choir (1964) (single)“Reach Out, I’ll Be There” — The Four Tops (1966) (single)Hank Aaron’s 715th Career Home Run (April 8, 1974)“Bohemian Rhapsody” — Queen (1975) (single)“Don’t Stop Believin’” — Journey (1981) (single)“Canciones de Mi Padre” — Linda Ronstadt (1987) (album)“Nick of Time” — Bonnie Raitt (1989) (album)“The Low End Theory” — A Tribe Called Quest (1991) (album)“Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers)” — Wu-Tang Clan (1993) (album)“Buena Vista Social Club” (1997) (album)“Livin’ La Vida Loca” — Ricky Martin (1999) (single)“Songs in A Minor” — Alicia Keys (2001) (album)WNYC broadcasts for the day of 9/11 (Sept. 11, 2001)“WTF with Marc Maron” (Guest: Robin Williams) (April 26, 2010)

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Jason Reynolds: April Newsletter

You know what I’ve been thinking about lately? Awards. Maybe that’s because we’re in the midst of awards season in the entertainment industry, the Oscars and Grammys having just recently taken place. And every year, during this time, I’m glued to the television, watching people get nominated for their talent. And every year, I watch about 90 percent of them lose. The handful that win, they usually get on stage and thank their fellow nominees, their families and their teams, but most of them also make it a point to take a moment to shine light on something a bit more serious than a movie, or a song.

This is usually the part of the speech that brings me to tears. The reason being, it’s the part of the speech that actually matters to me. Because though I am happy for the winner (usually), I don’t know their families, or their agents and managers, or the directors of their movies, or the producers of their albums. I don’t know any of the people who have helped to get them where they are, on that big stage with the bright lights, dressed in gorgeous garb, glammed up from head to toe. That feels far away. But to bring light to an injustice, to some of the loose threads in our world, some of our jaggedness, I am suddenly transported from my living room into the theater. Or maybe they are transported from the theater into my living room, and we are now crying together. On my couch. Crying for our lives, or loves, or world.

And sometimes, I wonder if some of the artists who didn’t win had something even more poignant to say. What if one of the nominees who stayed seated had the key to some part of my emotional prison and could’ve set a sliver of me free? Or could’ve said the thing to spark a global movement? Or could’ve honored a quieted human who deserves more light than any of our entertainers? How would we ever know? What if? What if?

What’s the point of all this, you ask? Well … I don’t know. I guess, as someone who has received awards, I’m just thinking about how we want to win them for our work, to be praised for our efforts and abilities, but I’m not always sure our work is worth anything if the people we make it for can’t be free. It doesn’t mean we can’t provide a smile or a moment of respite, but a broken world can’t be healed by a Band-Aid, no matter how creative it might be. So maybe we — or at least I — will start thinking of awards as just opportunities to shine light on someone other than myself. And if we all were to think of awards that way, no one, or at least the people who actually matter, could ever lose. We’d be fighting, yearning, hoping for the victory of us all.

Or at least the opportunity to say that victory, as it pertains to free life, should stretch beyond any red carpet or ballroom.

Thinking of Ukraine. And you.

As ever,

Jason

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Jelly Roll Morton at the Library

Jelly Roll Morton. Photo: Unknown. American Folklife Center.

This is a guest post by Stephen Winick, folklore specialist at the American Folklife Center. It first appeared in the Library of Congress Magazine. He has also discussed Jelly Roll Morton’s work at a Library seminar. 

In the early history of jazz, no figure looms as large as Ferdinand LaMothe, better known as Jelly Roll Morton.

The New Orleans native, who claimed to have invented jazz itself in 1902, was a bandleader and pianist on numerous recordings in the 1920s but fell into relative obscurity in the 1930s.

Then, in the spring and summer of 1938, Alan Lomax, the assistant in charge of the Library’s Archive of American Folk Song, recorded over nine hours of Morton’s singing, playing and boasting — the first extensive oral history of a musician recorded in audio form.

The sessions were born when BBC radio journalist Alistair Cooke advised Lomax to seek out Morton at the Music Box, a small Washington, D.C., nightclub where he played piano, regaled the audience with tales of his glory days and expressed his strong views on jazz history.

Lomax visited the Music Box and chatted with Morton, who suggested the recording sessions as a way to cement his place in history as the inventor of jazz. This suited Lomax, who had his own agenda for the sessions: in his words, “to see how much folklore Jelly Roll had in him” and capture it for posterity.

Seated at a grand piano on the Coolidge Auditorium stage, Morton filled disc after disc with blues, ragtime, hymns, stomps and his own compositions. He embedded the music in a series of swinging lectures on New Orleans music history and its influence on his style — everything from 19th-century opera to formal French dance music to the chants he sang as a “spyboy,” or scout, for a Mardi Gras Indian krewe.

Morton, posing in formal wear for a publicity shot. Photo: Unknown. American Folklife Center.

The recordings not only documented Morton’s playing and his stories, they were the first — and last — significant documentation of Morton as a singer.

Shortly after the Lomax interviews, Morton was stabbed by a Music Box patron and never fully recovered. He left for New York and then Los Angeles, intending to restart his career, but died in 1941. Lomax used the interviews to write a 1950 biography, “Mister Jelly Roll,” which still is considered a classic of jazz literature.

The Library’s Morton recordings were released as a piano-shaped box set by Rounder Records in 2005 and won Grammy awards for best historical album and best liner notes. Today, the recordings are a priceless document of American musical history, rightly enshrined by the Library in the National Recording Registry.

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New from Library’s Crime Classics: “The Conjure-Man Dies”

“The Conjure-Man Dies,” by Rudolph Fisher. Cover art is adapted from a photograph by Camilo José Vergara. Prints and Photographs Division.

This is a guest post by Zach Klitzman, the editorial assistant in the Library’s Publishing Office .

The latest entry in the Library’s acclaimed Crime Classics series is a new edition of “The Conjure-Man Dies,” a product of the Harlem Renaissance and the most important work of long-overlooked writer Rudolph Fisher. First published in 1932, the book was the first full-length mystery novel to feature an all-Black cast of characters, including detectives, suspects and victims.

In the 1920s and the 1930s, African Americans in New York and other cities produced a major outpouring of arts, music and literature. This explosion of culture—nicknamed the Harlem Renaissance after the New York neighborhood where many of these artists lived—was the result of several factors, most notably the Great Migration, when millions of African Americans sought job opportunities in northern cities like New York, Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia and Washington, D.C. Many luminaries from this period, such as poet Langston Hughes, musician Duke Ellington, actor Paul Robeson, writer Zora Neale Hurston and singer Bessie Smith remain among the most celebrated figures in American arts and letters.

Fisher, though, faded from view as the years passed.

A writer, orator, musician, physician and radiologist, he was a renaissance man. Hughes, a close friend, noted in his autobiography that Fisher “frightened me a little, because he could think of the most incisively clever things to say—and I could never think of anything to answer.” Fisher passed away from cancer at the age of 37 in 1934, cutting short a promising career.

“Conjure-Man” is a fitting title for the Crime Classics series. Launched in 2020, the series features some of the finest American crime writing from the 1860s to the 1960s. Drawn from the Library’s collections, each volume includes the original text, an introduction, author bio, notes, recommendations for further reading and suggested discussion questions from mystery expert Leslie S. Klinger. This special edition also features exclusive reminiscences from Fisher’s granddaughter, Laurel Fisher.

The book’s plot: N’Gana Frimbo, the titular “conjure-man” from Africa, is discovered bludgeoned in his consultation room. Perry Dart, one of Harlem’s few Black police detectives, arrives to investigate. Together with Dr. Archer, a physician from across the street, Dart is determined to solve the mystery, while Bubber Brown and Jinx Jenkins, local hustlers keen to clear themselves of suspicion of murder, undertake their own investigations. The book is full of local slang, what Fisher called “Harlemese,” adding a distinct authenticity to this groundbreaking novel.

Fisher received bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Brown University (he graduated Phi Beta Kappa) before graduating from Howard University’s medical school with more honors in 1924. He soon moved to Long Island with his family, where he began a medical practice specializing in X-rays. The same year he graduated medical school, he published his first piece of fiction, a short story entitled “The City of Refuge” in the Atlantic Monthly. He published 15 more short stories, which were highly regarded.

A Federal Theater Project photograph from the 1936 production of “The Conjure-Man Dies.” Music Division.

His first novel, “The Walls of Jericho,” appeared in 1928. The novel centers on a Black lawyer who buys a house in a white neighborhood bordering Harlem, and the ensuing antagonism of his new neighbors. The tone is more satirical than menacing, with Bubber and Jinx also making appearances, prefacing their comic turns in “Conjure-Man.”

When Fisher died in 1934, he was in the middle of adapting “Conjure-Man” as a stage play. Two years later, the play debuted at the Lafayette Theatre in Harlem, produced by the Negro Unit of the Federal Theatre Project. The FTP was a New Deal program that provided grants to actors, directors, and other theater professionals from 1935 to 1939. Two dozen photos of the play can be seen as part of the Federal Theater Project’s online collections.

Detail from the playbill of “The Conjure-Man Dies.” Music Division.

The Library is home to a wealth of resources related to the Harlem Renaissance. Jazz enthusiasts will dig William P. Gottlieb’s photographs of musicians like Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong. Ten of Zora Neale Hurston’s original plays are held in the Manuscript Division. And the Federal Writer’s Project contains many first-hand narratives of life in Harlem during this time period. For more Harlem Renaissance material, check out this research guide.

Crime Classics are published by Poisoned Pen Press, an imprint of Sourcebooks, in association with the Library of Congress. The Conjure-Man Dies, published on April 5, is available in softcover ($14.99) from booksellers worldwide, including the Library of Congress shop.

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