DAHR Receives 6th NEH Grant
The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) has awarded the UCSB Library its 6th grant in support of its ongoing editorial and digitizing work for the Discography of American Historical Recordings (DAHR), which authoritatively documents and digitizes historical sound recordings.
The $350,000 grant for the “American Record Corporation (ARC) Access Initiative” will allow DAHR editors to publish discographic data for 12,000 recordings made by the American Record Corporation during the 1920s and 1930s, prior to its purchase by CBS in 1938. Additionally, the Library will digitize 8,500 recordings made by ARC and its subsidiaries for free online access under an agreement with Sony Music Entertainment.
The American Record Corporation and its predecessor Plaza Music Co. owned many significant labels of the 1920s and 1930s, including Columbia, Brunswick, OKeh, and Vocalion. ARC was the third-largest record company in the United States behind Victor and Decca in the 1930s and made some of the most important prewar recordings, often by artists other companies overlooked. Among others, ARC recorded jazz greats Fletcher Henderson and Duke Ellington; country artists Fiddlin’ Doc Roberts and the Carter Family; and blues and gospel artists such as Mitchell’s Christian Singers and Robert Johnson. The company also had a large Spanish language division.
“ARC is the missing link between the original Columbia Records that pioneered sound recording in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and the Columbia Records that still exists today,” says David Seubert, curator for UCSB Library’s Performing Arts Collection and PI for the new grant. “The recordings made by ARC are of intense interest to scholars and collectors, but there has not been a systematic project to document ARC, until now.”
Documentation for the Plaza Music Co. labels was originally compiled by the Record Research Associates, a group of collectors who documented pre-war recordings through examination of tens of thousands of original discs and company files. The data was provided by Mainspring Press. Data on the recordings made by the ARC labels comes from the archives of Sony Music Entertainment, which has maintained the historical documentation of its labels for more than a century.
The grant will run from July 2024 through June 2026.
View the NEH grant announcement: https://www.neh.gov/news/neh-announces-262-million-238-humanities-projects-nationwide