1,000
Number of event fliers in the Hip-Hop Collection at Cornell University Library (CUL) in Ithaca, New York. These handmade fliers, made between 1976 and 1984, advertise early live performances by genre trailblazers like Grandmaster Flash and the Cold Crush Brothers. To date, CUL has digitized about half of these fliers.
1,900
Number of items of stagewear housed at the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum’s Frist Library and Archive in Nashville. Among these accessories are costumes, Stetson hats, and cowboy boots worn by the likes of Johnny Cash, Patsy Cline, Charley Pride, and Hank Williams Jr.
1,500
Number of player piano rolls in the Music and Performing Arts Library at University of Illinois Urbana–Champaign (UIUC). A player piano is a self-playing mechanical instrument invented in the late 19th century. UIUC’s collection of perforated paper and metallic rolls is one of the largest of its kind in the country.
21
Pieces of furniture from Leonard Bernstein’s studio on display at Indiana University Bloomington’s Cook Music Library. The items include several desks, a conductor’s stool, a sofa, and a rocking chair from the famed conductor and composer’s former home in Fairfield, Connecticut.
7
Number of handwritten lyric manuscripts for Beatles songs collected by 20th-century composer John Cage. The manuscripts now live at Northwestern University Music Library (NUML) in Evanston, Illinois. NUML and the British Library in London are the only two libraries to hold original lyric sheets from the band.
14,000
Number of printed concert programs in the New York Philharmonic Shelby White and Leon Levy Digital Archives. The collection contains more than 4,000 scores, 51,000 images, and other ephemera from 1842 through 1970.
17
Number of boxes in the Selena Research Collection at Texas State University in San Marcos. The collection focuses on the late Tejana singer Selena Quintanilla Perez and comprise interviews and correspondence with her family and friends, media clippings related to her life and work, and documents covering the legal and cultural fallout of her 1995 murder.
377
Number of episodes of the Riverwalk Jazz: Live at the Landing radio show available online through Stanford (Calif.) University’s Archive of Recorded Sound. The show, which ran on Public Radio International from 1989 to 2012, showcased the jazz and blues of early 20th-century America through historic recordings and rare archival interviews.
1930s–1990s
Period during which ethnomusicologist and folklorist Alan Lomax studied and collected recordings of traditional American music genres, such as blues, folk, and gospel. Lomax is credited with bringing musical artists Woody Guthrie, Muddy Waters, and Jelly Roll Morton to mainstream audiences. His Library of Congress collection contains 6,400 recordings, 500,000 pages of personal papers, and other research.
