Library of Congress's Blog, page 78
March 22, 2019
National Recording Registry: Stories Behind Some of the Greatest Hits
This is a guest post by Cary O’Dell, an assistant at the National Recording Registry.
Since its inauguration in 2002, the National Recording Registry of the Library of Congress has been documenting and celebrating some of the greatest recordings in American history, with more than 500 pieces selected. This year’s class was announced earlier this week.
This makes it a good time to remember that the Library and the Registry have been working for years with Ben Manilla Productions to produce short audio documentaries about some of the recordings. The 52 documentaries — none longer than 15 minutes — frequently include interviews with artists to convey the richness of the material. Consider: Conan O’Brien talking about Bob Newhart; Emmylou Harris discussing Kitty Wells; Renee Fleming chiming in on Leontyne Price; Lewis Black on Will Rogers; George Clinton on Sly Stone; Marc Maron on George Carlin; and the Queen of Soul herself, Aretha Franklin, on Sam Cooke.
In 2012, the series was awarded a Peabody Award for broadcast excellence.
To hear some of these recordings — “I Will Survive,” “Bob Newhart” “American Pie” and “A Change is Gonna Come”— click on the link labeled “Radio Feature.”
Here are some of the greatest hits from previous classes — but remember, this gets addictive fast.
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Sam Cooke. New York World-Telegram & Sun Collection. LIbrary of Congress, Prints & Photographs. Call Number: NYWTS – BIOG–Cooke, Sam–Dead–Singer P&P
“A Change Is Gonna Come.” Sam Cooke. (1964)
Sam Cooke — born in Mississippi, raised in Chicago — became a central figure in the creation of soul music in the 1950s and 1960s. He composed “A Change Is Gonna Come” to express his impatience with the progress of civil equality in the United States. The song would go on to become an anthem of the civil rights movement in the United States. Selected for the 2006 registry.
Learn more (PDF, 88KB)
Radio Feature (MP3)
“I Will Survive.” (single). Gloria Gaynor. (1978)
According to its co-writer, Dino Fekaris, “I Will Survive” was initially inspired by his being fired from his job but then realizing that he was going to be okay. For performer Gloria Gaynor, it took on added meaning as she was, at the time, recovering from a serious spinal injury. Originally released as a “B” side, so many deejays began playing “Survive” that the record company reissued it as a single. It was immediately embraced as an emblem of women’s empowerment and soon became anthem among the LGBT community. Over time, it has also been adopted as an anthem by survivors of all kinds. Selected for the 2015 registry.
Learn more (PDF, 88KB)
Interview with Gloria Gaynor (PDF, 146KB)
Radio Feature (MP3)
“The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart” (album). Bob Newhart. (1960)
Bob Newhart introduced his fresh, new style of deceptively satiric comedy to audiences with this recording in 1960. “The Button-Down Mind” is the first collection of Newhart’s subtle, archly understated, humorous monologues that often represent a one-sided dialog with an unheard partner delivered in his characteristically deadpan style. His humor focuses on an average guy trying to hold on to his composure under some of the most unusual predicaments imaginable. Like Jack Benny, Newhart uses significant pauses to achieve heightened humorous effects. This recording contains his comedy classic, “The Driving Instructor,” where he shines in a one-sided monologue as the instructor of the most dangerous and inept driving student ever to get behind the wheel. Selected for the 2006 registry.
Learn more (PDF, 74KB)
Interview with Bob Newhart (PDF, 56KB)
Radio Feature (MP3)
“American Pie” (single). Don McLean. (1971)
Don McLean had been singing “American Pie” in concert for several months when his album and single of the same name began to reach a wider audience in the fall of 1971. After a decade of social and musical tumult, new affection for ’50s rock and roll was growing not only among its original fans but with new generations. “American Pie” seemed to reach all of them with its cascade of images from 1959 to 1969 and a chorus that was both playful and ominous. At the time, McLean mostly declined to confirm the many interpretations and analyses of his lyrics. However, the album was dedicated to Buddy Holly and McLean acknowledged that his description of reading of Holly’s death in a plane crash in the newspaper he delivered as a boy was from personal experience. Selected for the 2016 registry.
Learn more (PDF, 259KB)
Interview with Don McLean (PDF, 55KB)
Studio 360 Feature External
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Ornette Coleman, publicity photo, Oct. 24, 1960, Shaw Artists Corp. 1960. NYWTS – BIOG–Coleman, Ornette–Musician [item]. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division
“The Shape of Jazz to Come” (album). Ornette Coleman. (1959)
On his debut for Atlantic Records, Ornette Coleman pushed the boundaries of jazz even further into the unknown than he had before. Critic Ralph J. Gleason observed that “the musical and critical world [was] split neatly in two,” by Coleman’s willingness to abandon bebop’s harmonic structure and timing when his music required it.
What Coleman never abandoned was the centrality of improvisation to jazz. In this effort he is ably assisted by Don Cherry on cornet, Charlie Haden on bass and Billy Higgins on drums – all musicians with whom he had played for years. For all the record’s iconoclasm, it swings, and even Coleman’s more outrageous timbral experimentation can be understood as rooted in the expressiveness of the blues. Selected for the 2012 registry.
Learn more (PDF, 197KB)
To access all Manilla-NRR programs produced to date, see the following link and search for “Radio Feature.”
March 21, 2019
Long-lost Georgia O’Keeffe, Alfred Stieglitz Letters Now at the Library
This is a guest blog by Barbara Bair, a historian in the Manuscript Division.
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“I wish that I could look out over the desert with you for a moment – Georgia.” From New Mexico, December 1, 1939, Georgia O’Keeffe to Henwar Rodakiewicz. From the Georgia O’Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz Collection, Manuscript Division. Box 1, Folder 13.
The Library’s Manuscript Division has acquired a collection of long-lost letters written by Georgia O’Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz that offer insight into the couple’s art, marriage and ambitions during an eighteen-year span in which they were primary shapers of American Modernism.
The letters — never available to the public until now – were written, independently of one another, to their mutual friend and artistic colleague, the filmmaker Henwar Rodakiewicz, between 1929 and 1947. After being in private hands for decades in Santa Fe, New Mexico, they are now available to the public in the Manuscript Reading Room. (They are not digitized.)
Stieglitz’s letters, written mainly from New York City and Lake George, reveal behind-the-scenes details of his management of his third and last gallery in Manhattan, An American Place, as he showcased O’Keeffe’s art work there along with that of Marsden Hartley, Arthur Dove and John Marin.
But it is the letters from O’Keeffe that compose the bulk of the newly revealed find.
Georgia O’Keeffe. Photograph by Alfred Stieglitz, 1919. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, The Alfred Stieglitz Collection, Gift of Georgia O’Keeffe, [reproduction number, e.g., LC-USZ62-123456].
Written from both New York and New Mexico, they are sensitive, sensual and personally revealing. She pens them in her distinctively expressive calligraphy, with dashes and innovative spellings that make the letters read like a cross between Emily Dickinson and Gertrude Stein. She writes of her well-being and artistic hopes, and shares descriptions of the world around her, written through her unique vision as a painter.Going to the Southwest invigorated her and stirred her to take new directions in her art work. “Here it is color again,” she writes in October, 1938. “I am painting an old horses head that I picked out of some red earth,” she says in another.
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“I am painting an old horses head that I picked out of some red earth…” Georgia O’Keeffe to Henwar Rodakiewicz, from New Mexico, Summer 1936. From the Georgia O’Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz Collection, Manuscript Division. Box 1, Folder 8.
“I’ve been a long time resting myself since you went off into the sunset that afternoon — Now that I begin to feel good – really rested – I wish that I could see you,” she writes in December, 1939. “– wish that I could look out over the desert with you for a moment.”
There’s a long, kite-tail line of black ink that sighs down into her sign-off: “Georgia.”
In Sept. 1937, she wrote that she had clambered onto the roof of her adobe house at Ghost Ranch in New Mexico in the darkness: “But tonight the whole cliff is white and full of color in the moonlight. I went up the ladder alone with my coat on – pretty chilly and cheerless on the roof but the whole cliff is white And it seems some thing to tell you.”
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“but tonight the whole cliff is white….” Georgia O’Keeffe to Henwar Rodakiewicz, from New Mexico, Sept. 1937. On Ghost Ranch letterhead. From the Georgia O’Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz Collection, Manuscript Division. Box 1, Folder 10.
And on the last day of January 1939, she dashed off a few lines to him on stationery from The Streamliner, the Union Pacific train that ran from Chicago to Los Angeles. “Wyoming with thin sun and blowing snow is beautiful — cold drifting snow, as if there are no people — as we come to pine trees they look black in the whiteness — white in the air and white on the ground.”
O’Keeffe and Rodakiewicz first met in New Mexico in 1929, when she and fellow artist Rebecca Salsbury Strand [James], spent months together in Taos and became part of Mabel Dodge Luhan’s artistic network. O’Keeffe stayed and painted in subsequent years as a guest at the H&M Ranch in Alcalde, New Mexico, owned by Rodakiewicz and his wife, the writer Marie Tudor Garland. From there she explored the area that would become her eventual permanent home, near Abiquiu.
Both O’Keeffe and Rodakiewicz were married during most of the time period of these exchanges. O’Keeffe, famously to Stieglitz until his death in 1946; Rodakiewicz, first to Garland, and later, to Peggy Bok—both of whom were good friends of O’Keeffe’s.
It is not known if their relationship went beyond platonic friendship, but these letters document that O’Keeffe felt emotionally close to him. She writes to him as a trusted confidante, revealing her feelings, her vision, and her work as an artist.
Georgia O’Keeffe. Photograph by Carl Van Vechten, 1950. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, Carl Van Vechten Collection, [reproduction number, e.g., LC-USZ62-54231]
At the same time, Stieglitz’s letters also reveal a close bond of affection for Rodakiewicz, and mutual ties in the New York art world.The new trove of correspondence came to the Library as a purchase/gift from Susan Todd and Michael Kramm of Santa Fe, New Mexico, through the auspices of art and manuscript dealer William Channing.
The materials complement letters in other archives, most notably at Yale’s Beinecke Library. Taken together, these letters add fuller dimension to the complexities of O’Keeffe as person, wife, friend and artist.
In them, she writes notes from trains; on the same paper or stationery that Stieglitz uses from their apartment at the Shelton Hotel in New York; from the Stieglitz family property, The Hill, at Lake George; and on letterhead from Ghost Ranch, which used her design of a cow-skull emblem.
She mentions her travels to Canada, Bermuda and Hawaii, as well as the complexities of her life split between residences in New Mexico and New York. She writes of periods of inner turmoil and longing, of anxieties suffered, and joys in new works and artistic triumphs. She reports conundrums as she makes professional and personal commitments outside Stieglitz’s orbit, in her effort to strike out more on her own, and around the responsibilities that fell to her to settle Stieglitz’s estate after his death in 1946.
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“I wish you were here – So much of this is so beautiful that it seems unreal to me.” Georgia O’Keeffe to Henwar Rodakiewicz, writing from Hawaii, ca. Feb.-April 1939. From the Georgia O’Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz Collection, Manuscript Division.Box 1, Folder 13
During their correspondence, Rodakiewicz worked on a series of films. Stieglitz showed Rodakiewicz’s short film, “Portrait of a Young Man in Three Movements” at An American Place in 1933. Rodakiewicz collaborated with Paul Strand on the artistically acclaimed “Redes” in Mexico. Released in that country in 1936, the film was distributed in the United States as “The Wave” in 1937. His “One Tenth of Our Nation,” about discrimination in African American education in the South, briefly landed him in jail for violating local Jim Crow mores.
The letters between O’Keeffe and Rodakiewicz came to an end in 1947, after Rodakiewicz featured O’Keeffe as a southwestern artist in “The Land of Enchantment.”
“The wind blows every afternoon,” O’Keeffe wrote to him at the end of one June 1945 missive from New Mexico, with a long line running to form the end of the sentence, “and it blows.”
As calligraphy, as an expression that seems to carry a tantalizing meaning beyond the words on the page, it’s beautiful. It is O’Keeffe in her element and at her philosophical best, and one of many revelatory passages in this new group of letters.
[image error]
Georgia O’Keeffe to Henwar Rodakiewicz. From the Georgia O’Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz Collection, Manuscript Division.Box 1, Folder 13.
Long-lost Georgia O’Keeffe, Alfred Stieglitz Letters now at the Library
This is a guest blog by Barbara Bair, a historian in the Manuscript Division.
[image error]
“I wish that I could look out over the desert with you for a moment – Georgia.” From New Mexico, December 1, 1939, Georgia O’Keeffe to Henwar Rodakiewicz. From the Georgia O’Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz Collection, Manuscript Division. Box 1, Folder 13.
The Library’s Manuscript Division has acquired a collection of long-lost letters written by Georgia O’Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz that offer insight into the couple’s art, marriage and ambitions during an eighteen-year span in which they were primary shapers of American Modernism.
The letters — never available to the public until now – were written, independently of one another, to their mutual friend and artistic colleague, the filmmaker Henwar Rodakiewicz, between 1929 and 1947. After being in private hands for decades in Santa Fe, New Mexico, they are now available to the public in the Manuscript Reading Room. (They are not digitized.)
Stieglitz’s letters, written mainly from New York City and Lake George, reveal behind-the-scenes details of his management of his third and last gallery in Manhattan, An American Place, as he showcased O’Keeffe’s art work there along with that of Marsden Hartley, Arthur Dove and John Marin.
But it is the letters from O’Keeffe that compose the bulk of the newly revealed find.
Georgia O’Keeffe. Photograph by Alfred Stieglitz, 1919. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, The Alfred Stieglitz Collection, Gift of Georgia O’Keeffe, [reproduction number, e.g., LC-USZ62-123456].
Written from both New York and New Mexico, they are sensitive, sensual and personally revealing. She pens them in her distinctively expressive calligraphy, with dashes and innovative spellings that make the letters read like a cross between Emily Dickinson and Gertrude Stein. She writes of her well-being and artistic hopes, and shares descriptions of the world around her, written through her unique vision as a painter.Going to the Southwest invigorated her and stirred her to take new directions in her art work. “Here it is color again,” she writes in October, 1938. “I am painting an old horses head that I picked out of some red earth,” she says in another.
[image error]
“I am painting an old horses head that I picked out of some red earth…” Georgia O’Keeffe to Henwar Rodakiewicz, from New Mexico, Summer 1936. From the Georgia O’Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz Collection, Manuscript Division. Box 1, Folder 8.
“I’ve been a long time resting myself since you went off into the sunset that afternoon — Now that I begin to feel good – really rested – I wish that I could see you,” she writes in December, 1939. “– wish that I could look out over the desert with you for a moment.”
There’s a long, kite-tail line of black ink that sighs down into her sign-off: “Georgia.”
In Sept. 1937, she wrote that she had clambered onto the roof of her adobe house at Ghost Ranch in New Mexico in the darkness: “But tonight the whole cliff is white and full of color in the moonlight. I went up the ladder alone with my coat on – pretty chilly and cheerless on the roof but the whole cliff is white And it seems some thing to tell you.”
[image error]
“but tonight the whole cliff is white….” Georgia O’Keeffe to Henwar Rodakiewicz, from New Mexico, Sept. 1937. On Ghost Ranch letterhead. From the Georgia O’Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz Collection, Manuscript Division. Box 1, Folder 10.
And on the last day of January 1939, she dashed off a few lines to him on stationery from The Streamliner, the Union Pacific train that ran from Chicago to Los Angeles. “Wyoming with thin sun and blowing snow is beautiful — cold drifting snow, as if there are no people — as we come to pine trees they look black in the whiteness — white in the air and white on the ground.”
O’Keeffe and Rodakiewicz first met in New Mexico in 1929, when she and fellow artist Rebecca Salsbury Strand [James], spent months together in Taos and became part of Mabel Dodge Luhan’s artistic network. O’Keeffe stayed and painted in subsequent years as a guest at the H&M Ranch in Alcalde, New Mexico, owned by Rodakiewicz and his wife, the writer Marie Tudor Garland. From there she explored the area that would become her eventual permanent home, near Abiquiu.
Both O’Keeffe and Rodakiewicz were married during most of the time period of these exchanges. O’Keeffe, famously to Stieglitz until his death in 1946; Rodakiewicz, first to Garland, and later, to Peggy Bok—both of whom were good friends of O’Keeffe’s.
It is not known if their relationship went beyond platonic friendship, but these letters document that O’Keeffe felt emotionally close to him. She writes to him as a trusted confidante, revealing her feelings, her vision, and her work as an artist.
Georgia O’Keeffe. Photograph by Carl Van Vechten, 1950. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, Carl Van Vechten Collection, [reproduction number, e.g., LC-USZ62-54231]
At the same time, Stieglitz’s letters also reveal a close bond of affection for Rodakiewicz, and mutual ties in the New York art world.The new trove of correspondence came to the Library as a purchase/gift from Susan Todd and Michael Kramm of Santa Fe, New Mexico, through the auspices of art and manuscript dealer William Channing.
The materials complement letters in other archives, most notably at Yale’s Beinecke Library. Taken together, these letters add fuller dimension to the complexities of O’Keeffe as person, wife, friend and artist.
In them, she writes notes from trains; on the same paper or stationery that Stieglitz uses from their apartment at the Shelton Hotel in New York; from the Stieglitz family property, The Hill, at Lake George; and on letterhead from Ghost Ranch, which used her design of a cow-skull emblem.
She mentions her travels to Canada, Bermuda and Hawaii, as well as the complexities of her life split between residences in New Mexico and New York. She writes of periods of inner turmoil and longing, of anxieties suffered, and joys in new works and artistic triumphs. She reports conundrums as she makes professional and personal commitments outside Stieglitz’s orbit, in her effort to strike out more on her own, and around the responsibilities that fell to her to settle Stieglitz’s estate after his death in 1946.
[image error]
“I wish you were here – So much of this is so beautiful that it seems unreal to me.” Georgia O’Keeffe to Henwar Rodakiewicz, writing from Hawaii, ca. Feb.-April 1939. From the Georgia O’Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz Collection, Manuscript Division.Box 1, Folder 13
During their correspondence, Rodakiewicz worked on a series of films. Stieglitz showed Rodakiewicz’s short film, “Portrait of a Young Man in Three Movements” at An American Place in 1933. Rodakiewicz collaborated with Paul Strand on the artistically acclaimed “Redes” in Mexico. Released in that country in 1936, the film was distributed in the United States as “The Wave” in 1937. His “One Tenth of Our Nation,” about discrimination in African American education in the South, briefly landed him in jail for violating local Jim Crow mores.
The letters between O’Keeffe and Rodakiewicz came to an end in 1947, after Rodakiewicz featured O’Keeffe as a southwestern artist in “The Land of Enchantment.”
“The wind blows every afternoon,” O’Keeffe wrote to him at the end of one June 1945 missive from New Mexico, with a long line running to form the end of the sentence, “and it blows.”
As calligraphy, as an expression that seems to carry a tantalizing meaning beyond the words on the page, it’s beautiful. It is O’Keeffe in her element and at her philosophical best, and one of many revelatory passages in this new group of letters.
[image error]
Georgia O’Keeffe to Henwar Rodakiewicz. From the Georgia O’Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz Collection, Manuscript Division.Box 1, Folder 13.
March 20, 2019
This Year’s National Recording Registry
Cyndi Lauper’s “She’s So Unusual” album is one of the 25 inductees into the 2018 class of the National Recording Registry. Image credit: Portrait Records/Epic/Sony.
“Super Fly”! “September”! “Sweet Caroline”! “Soul Man”! And those are just the ones that start with “S”!
Ladies and gentlemen, this year’s selections for the National Recording Registry are now official, as per the announcement of the Librarian of Congress, Carla Hayden. The inductees span a century, from 1901 to 2001, focuses primarily on the 1960s (eight of the 25 selections), and preserves everything from the “Attractive Hebrews” of the Standard Phonograph Company’s Yiddish Cylinders, to the no-nonsense marshal of Dodge City, Matt Dillon, of “Gunsmoke.”
The moments are poignant as Robert F. Kennedy’s speech after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., as sweet as Neil Diamond’s stadium standard, and as hip as Curtis Mayfield’s ode to ’70s cool, “Super Fly.”
“I’ve learned that when I first sang ‘Soul Man,’ it was the first time that those words had ever been used together in the English language,” said Sam Moore, who, along with Dave Prater, formed the Sam & Dave duo, “to which I can only say ‘wow’!”
Here’s the best eight minutes of your day:
{mediaObjectId:'84272A376BE600AEE0538C93F11600AE',playerSize:'mediumStandard'}
And here’s the best ninety seconds:
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The new additions pushes the Registry to 525 titles. The songs are preserved in the Library’s Packard Campus. This state-of-the art facility is where the nation’s library acquires, preserves and provides access to the world’s largest (7 million and counting) collection of films, television programs, radio broadcasts and sound recordings.
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Jay-Z’s “The Blueprint” was released on Sept. 11, 2001 — the same day as the terrorist attacks on the U.S. — and is the most recent inductee into the Registry. Image credit: Island/Def Jam/UMG.
March 19, 2019
National Recording Registry: Countdown to This Year’s Inductees
This is a guest post by Amanda Jenkins, a librarian in residence in the Library’s Motion Picture, Broadcasting, and Recorded Sound Division. It was first published on the Now See Hear! blog last week. We’re republishing a slightly edited version, as we’re counting down until the newest 25 additions to the Library’s National Recording Registry are announced tomorrow, March 20.
The National Recording Registry is well-known for its selections of music of all genres, but many historic radio and spoken word recordings also have been inducted. The Registry ensures that “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant” recordings are preserved for future generations, and that includes speeches, field recordings, comedy albums, early attempts at recording sound, oral histories, literary readings and…whales.
In this post, we’re celebrating some of the fascinating non-musical titles in the Registry.
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A NASA portrait of Neil Armstrong from the Library’s Prints & Photographs Division.
Apollo 11 Astronaut Neil Armstrong Broadcast from the Moon (July 21, 1969) – inducted in 2004.
Neil Armstrong’s 1969 moonwalk, in which he was joined by fellow astronaut Buzz Aldrin, lasted two hours and 13 minutes. They collected soil samples, took photos and hoisted an American flag. Throughout their excursion, the astronauts maintained a steady radio conversation between themselves and Mission Control in Houston, Texas. From that conversation comes some of the most famous words in human history— “One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.”
Read an essay by Cary O’Dell of the National Recording Preservation Board (and regular Now See Hear! blogger) about the broadcast.
A transcript of the transmission, with audio and video clips, can be found on NASA’s website.
“2000 Years with Carl Reiner & Mel Brooks” (1961) – inducted in 2008
The secret to living 2000 years? “Never touch fried foods!” In their party routine first performed for friends, Mel Brooks played a 2000-year-old man, while Carl Reiner interviewed him. After much convincing, the two writers for Sid Caesar’s “Your Show of Shows,” recorded their ad-libbed dialogue for a 1961 album. Interview subjects ranged from marriage (“I was married over 200 times!”) to children (“I have over 1500 children and not one of them ever comes to visit!”) and to transportation (“What was the means of transportation? Fear!”).
Listen to a Studio 360 feature on this comedy recording.
Phonautograms, Edouard-Leon Scott de Martinville (ca. 1853-1861) – inducted in 2010
In late 1853 or early 1854, Edouard-Leon Scott de Martinville captured the first recorded sounds by etching onto blackened glass plates the movements of a boar’s-bristle stylus, vibrating in sympathy with a guitar and a human voice. Later, Scott made recordings on paper wrapped around a drum. The resulting “phonautograms” proved crucial to the development of recorded sound. Scott was interested solely in the visible tracings of sound waves in order to study acoustics and did not record with the intention of playing back or listening to his recordings. Nevertheless, in 2008, researchers from the First Sounds group, using contemporary audio technology (developed with the support of several institutions, including the Library of Congress and the National Recording Preservation Board) were able to play back Scott’s recordings for the very first time.
Listen to the phonautograms on the First Sounds website.
Cylinder Recordings of Ishi (1911–14) – inducted in 2010
Recorded on 148 wax cylinders between September 1911 and April 1914, these recordings represent the largest audio collection of the extinct Yahi language. Ishi, the last surviving member of the Northern California Yahi tribe and the last speaker of its language, sings traditional Yahi songs and tells stories, including the story of “Wood Duck” recorded on 51 cylinders. The complete recordings, totaling 5 hours and 41 minutes, were made by anthropologists Alfred Kroeber and T.T. Waterman during Ishi’s five-year residency at the University of California Museum of Anthropology in San Francisco (now the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology, UC Berkeley). The cylinders are held at the Hearst Museum in Berkeley.
Read an essay by Cary O’Dell for a more detailed account of these recordings.
“All Things Considered,” first broadcast (May 3, 1971) – inducted in 2016
The National Public Radio flagship news program “All Things Considered” launched on May 3, 1971, one month after the network itself began broadcasting. With an emphasis on “interpretation, investigative reporting on public affairs, the world of ideas and the arts,” in the words of programming head Bill Siemering, “All Things Considered” aimed to give voice to diverse segments of American society in a relaxed, conversational mode. The first broadcast, however, featuring recorded excerpts from a huge antiwar protest in the nation’s capital that took place the same day, was “raw, visceral, and took listeners to the heart of America’s agonies over the war in Vietnam,” remembered Susan Stamberg, an NPR staffer at the time, who became a co-host of the show the following year. While the inaugural program was broadcast to approximately 90 stations across the nation, reaching only a few hundred thousand listeners, “All Things Considered” has since become, according to NPR, “the most listened-to afternoon drive-time news radio program in the country.”
“The Eagle Stirreth Her Nest,” Reverend C. L. Franklin (1953) – inducted in 2010
Long before his daughter Aretha attained stardom in the 1960s, Rev. C.L. Franklin (1915-1984) was a recording star in his own right, with dozens of his riveting sermons reaching an audience well beyond his New Bethel Baptist Church in Detroit, Michigan. African-American entrepreneur Joe Von Battle, whose record shop was only a few blocks from Franklin’s church, recorded Franklin’s sermon “The Eagle Stirreth Her Nest” and released it on three 78-rpm discs on his JVB label in 1953. In the sermon, Franklin draws his text from the Book of Deuteronomy and expounds on the parallels between “God and the eagle.” He builds to a thunderously emotional climax before his very enthusiastic and vocal congregation. Franklin’s many vocal devices inspired not only other preachers, but also gospel and rhythm-and-blues artists who appropriated many of his techniques. Franklin was a national figure in the African-American community from the 1950s on and a close friend and ally of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
“Songs of the Humpback Whale” (1970) – inducted in 2010
The use of underwater microphones, called hydrophones, showed that not only can whales communicate, but they do so with beauty and complexity. Frank Watlington and Roger Payne, among others, made these unique recordings. The haunting sounds on “Songs of the Humpback Whale,” along with Payne’s liner notes for CRM Records, helped turn the tide of U.S. public opinion against whaling. In addition to the album’s aesthetic and political significance, it can also be considered historically valuable: whales change their songs over time so these recordings document a cetacean performance practice of a time gone by.
“Murmurs of the Earth,” disc prepared for the Voyager spacecraft (1977) – inducted in 2007
This disc was prepared to introduce our planet aurally to any alien intelligence that might encounter the Voyager spacecraft many millions of years in the future. The disc contains encoded photographs, spoken messages, music and sounds as well as greetings delivered in 55 languages. The sound essay includes life sounds (EEGs and EKGs of the human brain and heart), birds, elephants, whales, volcanoes, rain and a baby. The 90 minutes of music features selections ranging from ragas to Navajo Indian chants, Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No. 2, a Peruvian Woman’s Wedding song, and Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode.”
Learn more about the “Golden Record” and listen to excerpts on NASA’s website.
Due to copyrights, many Registry titles are not available for listening online. Early musical recordings are available in the National Jukebox, including a few Registry titles; interviews conducted in the 1980s by recording industry giant Joe Smith for his 1988 book, Off the Record: An Oral History of Popular Music, feature dozens of the musicians behind Registry titles; and many musical titles are discussed in an NPR series as well as a Studio 360 series on the Registry. Many of the non-music Registry titles can be listened to in the Recorded Sound Research Center.
A full list of the recordings in the Registry with descriptions and links to essays, podcasts, and ways to listen is available here. Have suggestions for further additions to the Registry? Take a look at the list of titles already in the Registry, and nominate a recording here.
National Recording Registry: Countdown to this year’s inductees
This is a guest post by Amanda Jenkins, a librarian in residence in the Library’s Motion Picture, Broadcasting, and Recorded Sound Division. It was first published on the Now See Hear! blog last week. We’re republishing a slightly edited version, as we’re counting down until the newest 25 additions to the Library’s National Recording Registry are announced tomorrow, March 20.
The National Recording Registry is well-known for its selections of music of all genres, but many historic radio and spoken word recordings also have been inducted. The Registry ensures that “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant” recordings are preserved for future generations, and that includes speeches, field recordings, comedy albums, early attempts at recording sound, oral histories, literary readings and…whales.
In this post, we’re celebrating some of the fascinating non-musical titles in the Registry.
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A NASA portrait of Neil Armstrong from the Library’s Prints & Photographs Division.
Apollo 11 Astronaut Neil Armstrong Broadcast from the Moon (July 21, 1969) – inducted in 2004.
Neil Armstrong’s 1969 moonwalk, in which he was joined by fellow astronaut Buzz Aldrin, lasted two hours and 13 minutes. They collected soil samples, took photos and hoisted an American flag. Throughout their excursion, the astronauts maintained a steady radio conversation between themselves and Mission Control in Houston, Texas. From that conversation comes some of the most famous words in human history— “One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.”
Read an essay by Cary O’Dell of the National Recording Preservation Board (and regular Now See Hear! blogger) about the broadcast.
A transcript of the transmission, with audio and video clips, can be found on NASA’s website.
“2000 Years with Carl Reiner & Mel Brooks” (1961) – inducted in 2008
The secret to living 2000 years? “Never touch fried foods!” In their party routine first performed for friends, Mel Brooks played a 2000-year-old man, while Carl Reiner interviewed him. After much convincing, the two writers for Sid Caesar’s “Your Show of Shows,” recorded their ad-libbed dialogue for a 1961 album. Interview subjects ranged from marriage (“I was married over 200 times!”) to children (“I have over 1500 children and not one of them ever comes to visit!”) and to transportation (“What was the means of transportation? Fear!”).
Listen to a Studio 360 feature on this comedy recording.
Phonautograms, Edouard-Leon Scott de Martinville (ca. 1853-1861) – inducted in 2010
In late 1853 or early 1854, Edouard-Leon Scott de Martinville captured the first recorded sounds by etching onto blackened glass plates the movements of a boar’s-bristle stylus, vibrating in sympathy with a guitar and a human voice. Later, Scott made recordings on paper wrapped around a drum. The resulting “phonautograms” proved crucial to the development of recorded sound. Scott was interested solely in the visible tracings of sound waves in order to study acoustics and did not record with the intention of playing back or listening to his recordings. Nevertheless, in 2008, researchers from the First Sounds group, using contemporary audio technology (developed with the support of several institutions, including the Library of Congress and the National Recording Preservation Board) were able to play back Scott’s recordings for the very first time.
Listen to the phonautograms on the First Sounds website.
Cylinder Recordings of Ishi (1911–14) – inducted in 2010
Recorded on 148 wax cylinders between September 1911 and April 1914, these recordings represent the largest audio collection of the extinct Yahi language. Ishi, the last surviving member of the Northern California Yahi tribe and the last speaker of its language, sings traditional Yahi songs and tells stories, including the story of “Wood Duck” recorded on 51 cylinders. The complete recordings, totaling 5 hours and 41 minutes, were made by anthropologists Alfred Kroeber and T.T. Waterman during Ishi’s five-year residency at the University of California Museum of Anthropology in San Francisco (now the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology, UC Berkeley). The cylinders are held at the Hearst Museum in Berkeley.
Read an essay by Cary O’Dell for a more detailed account of these recordings.
“All Things Considered,” first broadcast (May 3, 1971) – inducted in 2016
The National Public Radio flagship news program “All Things Considered” launched on May 3, 1971, one month after the network itself began broadcasting. With an emphasis on “interpretation, investigative reporting on public affairs, the world of ideas and the arts,” in the words of programming head Bill Siemering, “All Things Considered” aimed to give voice to diverse segments of American society in a relaxed, conversational mode. The first broadcast, however, featuring recorded excerpts from a huge antiwar protest in the nation’s capital that took place the same day, was “raw, visceral, and took listeners to the heart of America’s agonies over the war in Vietnam,” remembered Susan Stamberg, an NPR staffer at the time, who became a co-host of the show the following year. While the inaugural program was broadcast to approximately 90 stations across the nation, reaching only a few hundred thousand listeners, “All Things Considered” has since become, according to NPR, “the most listened-to afternoon drive-time news radio program in the country.”
“The Eagle Stirreth Her Nest,” Reverend C. L. Franklin (1953) – inducted in 2010
Long before his daughter Aretha attained stardom in the 1960s, Rev. C.L. Franklin (1915-1984) was a recording star in his own right, with dozens of his riveting sermons reaching an audience well beyond his New Bethel Baptist Church in Detroit, Michigan. African-American entrepreneur Joe Von Battle, whose record shop was only a few blocks from Franklin’s church, recorded Franklin’s sermon “The Eagle Stirreth Her Nest” and released it on three 78-rpm discs on his JVB label in 1953. In the sermon, Franklin draws his text from the Book of Deuteronomy and expounds on the parallels between “God and the eagle.” He builds to a thunderously emotional climax before his very enthusiastic and vocal congregation. Franklin’s many vocal devices inspired not only other preachers, but also gospel and rhythm-and-blues artists who appropriated many of his techniques. Franklin was a national figure in the African-American community from the 1950s on and a close friend and ally of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
“Songs of the Humpback Whale” (1970) – inducted in 2010
The use of underwater microphones, called hydrophones, showed that not only can whales communicate, but they do so with beauty and complexity. Frank Watlington and Roger Payne, among others, made these unique recordings. The haunting sounds on “Songs of the Humpback Whale,” along with Payne’s liner notes for CRM Records, helped turn the tide of U.S. public opinion against whaling. In addition to the album’s aesthetic and political significance, it can also be considered historically valuable: whales change their songs over time so these recordings document a cetacean performance practice of a time gone by.
“Murmurs of the Earth,” disc prepared for the Voyager spacecraft (1977) – inducted in 2007
This disc was prepared to introduce our planet aurally to any alien intelligence that might encounter the Voyager spacecraft many millions of years in the future. The disc contains encoded photographs, spoken messages, music and sounds as well as greetings delivered in 55 languages. The sound essay includes life sounds (EEGs and EKGs of the human brain and heart), birds, elephants, whales, volcanoes, rain and a baby. The 90 minutes of music features selections ranging from ragas to Navajo Indian chants, Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No. 2, a Peruvian Woman’s Wedding song, and Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode.”
Learn more about the “Golden Record” and listen to excerpts on NASA’s website.
Due to copyrights, many Registry titles are not available for listening online. Early musical recordings are available in the National Jukebox, including a few Registry titles; interviews conducted in the 1980s by recording industry giant Joe Smith for his 1988 book, Off the Record: An Oral History of Popular Music, feature dozens of the musicians behind Registry titles; and many musical titles are discussed in an NPR series as well as a Studio 360 series on the Registry. Many of the non-music Registry titles can be listened to in the Recorded Sound Research Center.
A full list of the recordings in the Registry with descriptions and links to essays, podcasts, and ways to listen is available here. Have suggestions for further additions to the Registry? Take a look at the list of titles already in the Registry, and nominate a recording here.
March 18, 2019
National Recording Registry Countdown: Who Makes the Selections?
The National Recording Registry’s list of the 25 inductees for 2019 drops on Wednesday (March 20), so let’s answer the annual question, “Who gets to vote on this, anyhow?”
Short answer: You and anyone else can make nominations; the 22 members of the National Recording Preservation Board culls the nominees to the top few; and, ultimately, the Librarian of Congress, in consultation with Library curators, makes the final choices.
Slightly longer answer: The Registry began in 2000 with the passage of the National Recording Preservation Act. This created the Preservation Board. Under the direction of the Librarian of Congress, the Preservation Board is to “implement a comprehensive national sound recording preservation program,” that is to be populated by songs, speeches, radio broadcasts and so on that are “culturally, historically or aesthetically significant.” It’s the companion idea to the National Film Preservation Act of 1988, which established the National Film Registry.
The Registry isn’t intended to be a collection of monster hits, nor is it to be an assemblage of obscure history — like, say, some never-heard-before solo track Miles Davis laid down in the studio one time when nobody was looking. It’s not even supposed to be the “best.” Instead, the recording is to be “significant” in American life.
“Significant” is a debatable standard, of course, and that’s why anyone can make a nomination. There are only two requirements: There has to be an actual recording (no “lost” records); and it has to be at least 10 years old. Thousands of people make nominations every year — musicians, historians, casual listeners, industry experts, recording engineers. The Preservation Board, which takes those nominations and adds its own, is a wide-ranging group. The American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) has a seat, as do the American Federation of Musicians, the American Folklore Society, the Country Music Association, the Audio Engineering Society, the Songwriters Hall of Fame, the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences, and so on. There are five at-large members.
The resulting Registry now has more than 500 recordings, a lineup with which you may, or may not, agree. (That’s the fun thing about lists.)
Last year’s selections ranged from 1911’s “Dream Melody Intermezzo: Naughty Marietta,” by Victor Herbert and His Orchestra, to 1996’s, “Yo-Yo Ma Premieres Concertos for Violoncello and Orchestra.” That sounds highbrow. But in between were spots for the Mississippi Sheiks’s ”Sitting on Top of the World” (1930), Tony Bennett’s “I Left My Heart in San Francisco” (1962), and the “Raising Hell” album by Run-DMC, in 1986. That’s the one with the “Walk This Way” mashup with Aerosmith, and it’s okay for you to play air guitar anytime you hear it. (“Freebird” isn’t in the Registry, but you can still hold up your lighter and scream for the band to play it.)
One important note: The Library’s selection doesn’t mean the Library owns the recording, or has acquired the rights to it. It only means Library recognizes its significance and preseves a recording. Some older recordings are in the public domain, but many others are not.
Stay tuned for this year’s picks!
National Recording Registry Countdown: Who makes the selections?
The National Recording Registry’s list of the 25 inductees for 2019 drops on Wednesday (March 20), so let’s answer the annual question, “Who gets to vote on this, anyhow?”
Short answer: You and anyone else can make nominations; the 22 members of the National Recording Preservation Board culls the nominees to the top few; and, ultimately, the Librarian of Congress, in consultation with Library curators, makes the final choices.
Slightly longer answer: The Registry began in 2000 with the passage of the National Recording Preservation Act. This created the Preservation Board. Under the direction of the Librarian of Congress, the Preservation Board is to “implement a comprehensive national sound recording preservation program,” that is to be populated by songs, speeches, radio broadcasts and so on that are “culturally, historically or aesthetiscally significant.” It’s the companion idea to the National Film Preservation Act of 1988, which established the National Film Registry.
The Registry isn’t intended to be a collection of monster hits, nor is it to be an assemblage of obscure history — like, say, some never-heard-before solo track Miles Davis laid down in the studio one time when nobody was looking. It’s not even supposed to be the “best.” Instead, the recording is to be “significant” in American life.
“Significant” is a debatable standard, of course, and that’s why anyone can make a nomination. There are only two requirements: There has to be an actual recording (no “lost” records); and it has to be at least 10 years old. Thousands of people make nominations every year — musicians, historians, casual listeners, industry experts, recording engineers. The Preservation Board, which takes those nominations and adds its own, is a wide-ranging group. The American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) has a seat, as do the American Federation of Musicians, the American Folklore Society, the Country Music Association, the Audio Engineering Society, the Songwriters Hall of Fame, the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences, and so on. There are five at-large members.
The resulting Registry now has more than 500 recordings, a lineup with which you may, or may not, agree. (That’s the fun thing about lists.)
Last year’s selections ranged from 1911’s “Dream Melody Intermezzo: Naughty Marietta,” by Victor Herbert and His Orchestra, to 1996’s, “Yo-Yo Ma Premieres Concertos for Violoncello and Orchestra.” That sounds highbrow. But in between were spots for the Mississippi Sheiks’s ”Sitting on Top of the World” (1930), Tony Bennett’s “I Left My Heart in San Francisco” (1962), and the “Raising Hell” album by Run-DMC, in 1986. That’s the one with the “Walk This Way” mashup with Aerosmith, and it’s okay for you to play air guitar anytime you hear it. (“Freebird” isn’t in the Registry, but you can still hold up your lighter and scream for the band to play it.)
One important note: The Library’s selection doesn’t mean the Library owns the recording, or has acquired the rights to it. It only means Library recognizes its significance and preseves a recording. Some older recordings are in the public domain, but many others are not.
Stay tuned for this year’s picks!
March 15, 2019
Pic of the Week
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Gloria and Emily Estefan sing “Embraceable You” during the Gershwin Prize concert, March 13, 2019. Photo: Shawn Miller.
Taking to the Constitution Hall stage during the Gershwin Prize concert the evening of March 13, co-honoree Gloria Estefan and her daughter, Emily, sang a duet of “Embraceable You,” one of the Gershwin brothers’ standards, near the show’s end. The concert was taped for broadcast on PBS on May 3, 2019.
March 13, 2019
Inquiring Minds: Teaching American Culture Through Movies
Thomas Doherty. Photo by Mike Lovett.
For the past three decades or so, Thomas Doherty has taught and written about films, television and Hollywood — a lot. An American studies professor at Brandeis University with a special interest in classical Hollywood, he has written seven books touching on topics including teen movies, censorship, Hitler and McCarthyism. His latest book, “Show Trial: Hollywood, HUAC, and the Birth of the Blacklist,” was published in April 2018. Doherty also writes about film for the Hollywood Reporter, Cineaste magazine and other publications, and he advocates for film, television and radio preservation.
For years now, Doherty’s work has brought him into close contact with the Library of Congress and its staff. He testified in the 1990s about the state of American television and video preservation for a major Library report on the subject; more recently, as a member of the Library’s Radio Preservation Task Force, he has articulated the value of Golden Age radio for teaching cultural history.
For his research and writing, Doherty has also drawn extensively on the Library’s vast film, television and video archives, most recently for “Show Trial.” Here he answers a few questions about his scholarship and his connections to the Library.
Tell us a little about your background and how you became a film enthusiast.
I was an Air Force brat, and the base movie theaters (back in the day) were real centers of community for the kids in remote postings — not to mention permissible sites for budding adolescent romance. The programming was along the lines of the old classical Hollywood model, with frequent changeovers in the offerings. So I got into the habit of going two or three times a week — it wasn’t like you could play around outside at Eielson Air Force Base near Fairbanks, Alaska, in the dead of a long winter. That’s where I first got the movie bug.
How did you come to teach film and television as a scholar?
I weaseled my way into it as an American studies scholar. Film remains, I think, a perfect way to teach American cultural history — to select a likely film from the past and view it through the lens of its time. In my teaching, I try to keep an eye on both the aesthetic qualities of a film and its historical resonance — the way, say, the accelerating cross-cutting in “The Birth of a Nation” (1915) seduces the viewer into identifying with the KKK.
What is “Show Trial” about, and why did you want to write it now?
“Show Trial” covers the first great media-political spectacle of the postwar era, the investigation by the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) into alleged communist subversion in Hollywood — a courtroom-like, high-stakes drama starring glamorous actors, colorful moguls, on-the-make congressmen, high-priced lawyers, single-minded investigators and recalcitrant screenwriters, all recorded under the lights of the newsreel cameras and broadcast over radio. I wanted to explain the political backstory to the hearings and detail the ideological agenda and theatrical elements of a proceeding that bridged the realms of entertainment and politics. The book chronicles the story of the Hollywood Ten — motion picture artists who were held in contempt of Congress and went to prison for refusing to say whether they were members of the Communist Party — and the other witnesses, friendly and unfriendly, who testified. It also covers the Committee for the First Amendment, the delegation from Hollywood that flew to Washington to protest the hearings, and the implementation of the postwar blacklist. In an age in which constraints on public discourse can seem positively Cold War-ish, and where past behavior deemed retrospectively awful can derail a career, I thought a reminder of another made-for-media political frenzy might be timely.
Which collections from the Library did you draw on for the book?
I became a fixture on the third floor of the Madison Building, where the Moving Image Section is located. The staff was characteristically helpful in dredging up the extant newsreel footage from the 1947 HUAC hearings and the other relevant materials in the archives — not just films but also trade press publications. The five newsreel companies covered the 1947 hearings like a blanket — you can see the lineup of the vintage 35mm Mitchell cameras behind the dais. One interesting fact movie-picture-wise is that the hearings from 1947 were the only HUAC hearings in D.C. covered by the newsreels. Responding to charges that the presence of the cameras created a “circus atmosphere,” the House banned the newsreels from subsequent HUAC hearings — which explains why every time you see a documentary on the Hollywood blacklist, the filmmaker has to unspool footage from the 1947 hearings as cinematic shorthand for all of the hearings. Oh, one more thing: the Moving Image Section librarians no longer let you cue up the film reels yourself: scholars from, shall we say, a younger generation have no experience in threading a projector, so for safety’s sake, the policy is to have the professionals do it.
What other collections have you used over the years?
The Motion Picture, Broadcasting and Recorded Sound Division and its infinitely patient and knowledgeable staff has been a go-to source for virtually everything I’ve written over the years. Of course, the main library has virtually every book and periodical known to man. Walking into that glorious rotunda, I always feel 20 IQ points more intelligent.
How did you end up on the Library’s Radio Preservation Task Force?
I am an all-around media geek, and the history of radio is so fascinating. Unlike theatrical cinema, which is an entertainment option we have now, radio as it existed in its golden age is a lost gestalt. Also lost are so many of the shows and news stories, so anytime you find a radio show from the 1930s, it’s like stumbling upon a treasure. That’s one of the reasons the Radio Preservation Task Force is so important — to help find the lost broadcasts and make them available. Funny, though, radio is so durable and persistent, changing but keeping on as a central media presence — like today, with the explosion in podcasts. There’s still an almost genetic need to listen to the human voice — whether around a campfire or driving to work.
What has your experience been like working with Library staff?
To paraphrase Blanche Dubois from “A Streetcar Named Desire”: I have always depended on the kindness of archivists. Not only do they find the stuff you’re looking for, but they point you to places you might not have thought of. Even in the age of digital search engines, there’s no substitute for a knowledgeable human who knows where the archival bodies are buried deep in the bowels of the Library. In short, my experience has been nothing like the priggish treatment given to the reporter who visits the Thatcher Library in “Citizen Kane.”
How would you describe the research value of the Library’s film collections?
Irreplaceable? Indispensable? I am always shocked that so much of the great work in film, radio and TV is lost, that the networks and the studios weren’t better custodians of their legacy. Fortunately, the Library has been there to fill in so many of the gaps.
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