Highlights of the Collections
Gennett Records was established by the Starr piano factory in Richmond Indiana. By the early 1920s Gennett Records had begun recording one of the most diverse catalogs of American vernacular musics in the country. Until the Great Depression effectively ended the output of the label, Gennett released thousands of recordings by performers some of whom later became musical icons, such as Louis Armstrong, Hoagy Carmichael, and Jelly Roll Morton. Many more never became famous, but their recordings represent some pocket of popular or traditional music in America. The Archives of Traditional Music has partnered with the Starr Gennett Foundation to preserve and provide access to several thousand Gennett recordings that are in the ATM’s holdings.
The Hoagy Carmichael Collection includes music manuscripts, lyric sheets, sound recordings, films and videos, photographs, correspondence, scrapbooks, typescripts, and other memorabilia, totaling more than 3,500 items. In 1999, much of the collection was digitized, thanks to a grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Sciences (IMLS). Many of these digitized items can be accessed through a website created at that time, as well as a finding aid to the collection available on Archives Online. In addition to the Hoagy Carmichael Collection materials, the ATM manages the Hoagy Carmichael Room as part of the collection, which serves as an exhibit space for objects in the collection and a meeting space for Indiana University. A virtual reality scan of the Hoagy Carmichael Room is also available. In 2004, one of Hoagy Carmichael's most famous pieces "Stardust," was added to the National Recording Registry. The archives holds the original manuscript for "Stardust."
Alan Lomax was 23 years old and newly appointed as “First Assistant in Charge” of the Archive of Folk Song at the Library of Congress when he and his wife, Elizabeth, made a 2-week trip in April of 1938 through Indiana recording singers of traditional songs. Their trip represents the first known field recordings of traditional music in Indiana. Recording on lacquer discs, they visited more than 40 singers and documented ballads, folksongs, play party songs, as well as French and German songs and hymns. During their brief trip in Indiana, they met the pre-eminent folklorist Stith Thompson at the Hoosier Folklore Society meeting. Shortly afterwards, Thompson requested copies of their recordings for the Folklore Collection. These discs made their way to the Archives of Traditional Music when it was established in 1954.
Indiana has a historically close connection to the father of bluegrass music, Bill Monroe. He purchased property in Brown County Indiana where he hosted the Brown County Jamboree with his band and musical guests from the Grand Ole Opry for many years. In 1967, Bill Monroe started the Bean Blossom Bluegrass Festival which is one of the most popular and best known of the bluegrass festivals world-wide.
The Archives of Traditional Music holds field recordings of bluegrass music across the state, including field recordings made by Neil Rosenberg, one of the most important scholars of bluegrass music.
Broadcast collections, or recordings that were recorded from or intended to be played over live radio or TV, are interesting snapshots of popular culture and media consumption, and those recorded in Indiana are no different. Our Indiana Broadcast collections include shows and genres such as the Hoosier Hop show, fiddle music, folk music, church services, and even radio from the Indiana penitentiary.
In the 1970s, Folklore Institute department chair Richard Dorson led a series of documentation and collecting trips with his graduate students to northwestern Indiana, an area known as the Calumet region, part of the vast industrial region near Chicago, which had drawn millions of migrants from the American South and immigrants from around the world. Dorson and his students recorded Croatian, Greek, Italian, Lithuanian, Macedonian, Mexican, Polish, Puerto Rican, Romanian, Serbian, and Yugoslavian immigrant families as well as African Americans, who had been drawn to economic opportunity in northern Indiana and settled there. Later, Paul Tyler also traveled to "the Region" to record various immigrant musics, some of which were released as part of a commercial recording titled: Ethnic dance music in northern Indiana.
The largest immigrant group to settle in Indiana are German Americans, who arrived in the state in several major waves beginning in 1848. Enclaves that retained the use of the German language and Germanic traditions formed in both rural and urban areas. Though two world wars fought against Germany caused many in the twentieth century to distance themselves from their Germanic heritage, some elements of that heritage remain or were documented by ethnomusicologists and folklorists working in the state of Indiana. Alan and Elizabeth Lomax recorded Plattdeutsch-speaking Amish in Goshen in 1938, Paul Tyler recorded accordion players and polka bands near Ft. Wayne in the 1980s, and Alan Burdette recorded polka bands and a German American Singing Society in Evansville in the 1990s.
Indiana Commercial Musical Artists and Groups
The ATM holds over 1,000 commercial recordings published in Indiana covering various genres such as Folk and Traditional music, Country and Bluegrass, Jazz and Dixieland, Rock and Alternative, and more! While we collect commercial recordings from across the state of Indiana, current holdings of commercial recordings by Indiana artists are predominantly Bloomington-based from the surrounding area. Bloomington’s Lotus World Music and Arts Festival also brings a large variety of performers to our small town, and we have both Lotus Festival recordings and recordings from musical acts who have come to perform at Lotus over the years.
The Folklore Institute and the Folklore Collections
IU's Folklore Institute has worked closely with the Archives of Traditional Music to develop sets of collections documenting Indiana music and culture. Of the 138 collections in ATM's student folklore collections, 63 were recorded in Indiana. These collections document early field work from prominent names in various fields, such as Bruno Nettl, Jan Brunvand, Guthrie Mead, Judith McCulloh, Hasan El-Shamy, and Herbert Halpert. Many of the student folklore collections are uncataloged, but if you would like to learn more about those holdings, you can contact the ATM using atmusic @ iu.edu