MURFREESBORO
— MTSU’s Center for Popular Music is the recipient of another national
grant from the Grammy Foundation, this time to digitize an extensive, “historically
and culturally significant” live bluegrass audio collection from Indiana music
lover Marvin Hedrick.
The $19,537 grant will make the center an even
greater research resource for MTSU students and faculty as well as scholars
from across the world, director Greg Reish said.
“Mr. Hedrick was, among other things, a fixture at
the Bean Blossom Bluegrass Festival,” Reish explained. “He lived in Brown
County, where the festival’s held, and befriended Bill Monroe and all the other
pioneers of bluegrass. He also was very helpful to younger folklorists who took
a serious interest in bluegrass.”
Hedrick, a Nashville, Indiana, radio and TV
repairman as well as a musician, recorded priceless festival performances and
backstage jam sessions as well as impromptu sessions at his shop. He died in
1973.
His sons, Gary and David, donated 167 open-reel
tapes, a variety of other sound recordings and photographs to the Center for
Popular Music last year for preservation and archiving.
The Grammy Foundation grant, which is one of 20
nationwide announced April 6, will allow the center to “catalog, preserve,
digitize and disseminate the tapes and their contents via a dedicated website
and the center's documentary label, Spring Fed Records,” foundation officials
said.
“The Marvin Hedrick Audio Collection is one of the
most historically and culturally significant collections of live bluegrass
recordings in existence,” the Grammy Foundation report concludes.
The Center for Popular Music received a similar
Grammy Foundation grant in 2013 to organize and archive 3,850 cassette and
open-reel tapes of music, oral histories and field recordings of Dr. Charles
Wolfe, an MTSU English professor who captured musical and interview audio from
hundreds of country, blues and bluegrass music practitioners over four decades.
Wolfe, who died in 2006, also donated his work to
the center, which has since made the collection accessible on its website.
“Gary and David Hedrick didn’t want their father’s
collection to go somewhere and just languish,” said Reish, an old-time musician
who’s attended the Bean Blossom event for the last decade. “They want it used,
listened to and disseminated, and that’s what we’ll do.”
The Hedrick collection, like the 1 million-plus
other items that comprise the center’s archives, will now be carefully cleaned
and preserved and its contents identified, documented and catalogued. It then
will be made accessible to scholars all over the world via a searchable
database, Reish said, and MTSU faculty and students can use it for discussion
and research.
“As far as disseminating it via Spring Fed Records,
wow, that’s a lot of copyright and licensing work for us,” the director said.
“This grant money couldn’t be used for that, but we’d love to be able to share
the Hedrick collection later on via our built-in channels.”
Along with MTSU’s Center for Popular Music, the Country
Music Hall of Fame and Museum in Nashville received a Grammy Foundation grant
this year to preserve and share almost 45 years’ worth of rare interviews with
country music performers, songwriters and music industry personnel.
The Grammy Foundation awarded more than $300,000 in
its 2016 grants for projects ranging from research with cochlear implants and infants
and toddlers with autism spectrum disorder to recovering and digitizing some of
the earliest cylinder records ever made. Other 2016 Grammy grant recipients include
the Delta Blues Museum in Clarksdale, Mississippi; the New York Philharmonic;
the Ravi Shankar Foundation in Encinitas, California; and the Smithsonian
Institution’s National Museum of American History.
The Center for Popular Music, one of the nation’s
largest and richest repositories of research materials related to American
vernacular music, recently celebrated its 30th anniversary and is part of
MTSU’s College of Media and Entertainment.
For more information on the Center for Popular Music and
its projects and special events, visit http://www.mtsu.edu/popmusic.
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