Print Materials ・゚✧
- Booklets - songbooks, pamphlets, and programs: This is a way cool page, guys, like, cooler than it sounds. Songbook/picture albums were a common souvenir item at concerts and are unique, up-close contemporary artifacts that provide glimpses into performers' direct experiences. Though glammed up for publicity, they show stuff you wouldn't encounter in more distant sources like press releases.
- Posters: And fliers and advertisements.
- Signatures! Scribblies from the hands of the dudes! THEIR HANDS THEIR HANDS THEIR HANDS! They touched these papers. They were here. They marked them up. They imprinted themselves and their personality on the papers forevermore. [fans self fervently] And there's something interestingly more personal about ink pen signatures instead of sharpie.
- Periodicals: Vintage magazines for country music and bluegrass. Bluegrass has become real good about reinterpreting its beginnings. But what did the contemporaries say about it?
Recordings ・゚✧
- Shellac 78 rpm records: Vintage noise discs from the first half of the Twentieth Century, dated 1900s-1950s. Say it with me: these are not vinyl. Vinyl is a different material than shellac. Say it with me: these are not albums. This is the era where 10" records could hold little more than 3 minutes per side. This is the collection I pursue the most fervently. There's real history captured here. And there's nothing more ghostly than listening to a dead human's voice coming out of a rawly-captured physical artifact.
- 45 singles
- Vinyl (LPs)