Notes for Notes

Archivist joins Berklee College of Music staff. The Library and Learning Resources at Berklee College of Music, Boston, are happy to announce that So&fia Becerra-Licha has accepted the newly established position of college archivist. Supported by a two-year grant funded by the U.S. National Archive and Records Administration, Becerra-Licha will be collecting, organizing, processing, and cataloging the thousands of items (photos, audio, video, scores, documents) currently stored in an off-site facility.

Marci Cohen
Berklee College of Music

University of Missouri–Kansas City’s Marr Sound Archives completes KMBC Radio project. The sound recordings from the Arthur B. Church KMBC Radio Collection are now available for use by researchers, students, and the visiting public at the University of Missouri–Kansas City’s Marr Sound Archives. The archive has cataloged nearly 3,000 sound recordings, and digitally preserved over 445 hours of radio programing as part of an eighteen-month Humanities Collections and References Resources grant, under the sponsorship of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Arthur Church Jr. donated the Arthur B. Church KMBC Radio Collection to UMKC in 1996. Focusing on radio pioneer Arthur B. Church’s involvement with the Kansas City, Missouri-based KMBC radio station, the collection includes a timeline, business correspondence, ledgers and contracts, as well as the sound recordings (which date from the 1930s through the 1950s) and disc stampers, the metal plates used to press (or stamp) vinyl discs. Promotional material related to KMBC is included, as well as scripts to the programs Phenomenon and Life on the Red Horse Ranch. The collection includes items related to The Texas Rangers, including songbooks and record labels for numerous pressings produced by Church. Other items found in the collection include internal and external station newsletters, newspaper clippings, music scores, and memorabilia.

The sound recordings include a wide range of Church’s original programing, which gained national prominence as a CBS-af&filiated station. Among the highlights are a number of library transcription service discs from Arthur B. Church Productions featuring the catalogs of the Tune Chasers, Bonnie King, Harry Jenks, Rhythm Riders, Tex Owens, notable western swing group turned Hollywood &film musical sensation The Texas Rangers, along with live performances and rehearsal recordings of the Kansas City Philharmonic. Additionally, the collection includes over twenty hours of The Brush Creek Follies, an immensely popular barn dance show that ran Saturday nights on KMBC for over twenty years, as well as rural programing (Night Time on the Trail, Happy Hollow, Life on Red Horse Ranch), and nationally-syndicated soap operas (Vic and Sade, Bachelor’s Children).

Beyond entertainment, the collection includes many historically significant news and political items, including CBS’s The World Today featuring John Charles Daly, Edward R. Murrow, and William L. Shirer; news coverage of the war including speeches by Adolf Hitler, Winston Churchill, Pope Pius XI, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry S Truman, Dwight D. Eisenhower, General Douglas MacArthur, and Admiral Chester W. Nimitz; and Kansas City 1942 election coverage and political ads. Many radio personalities began their careers at KMBC, including John Cameron Swayze, Ted Malone, Walter Cronkite, and Caroline Ellis, and their early recordings can now be heard.

The Marr Sound Archives was founded in 1986 and is home to over 340,000 sound recordings of jazz, blues, country and western, and popular music; historic voices and authors reading their own works; vintage radio programs; classical and opera. It comprises a wide range of historic formats including LPs, 78s, 45s, cylinders, transcription discs, instantaneous-cut discs, and open-reel tapes. The Marr Sound Archives maintains sound recordings for a number of archival collections shared with LaBudde Special Collections, and the available collections can be accessed at http://library.umkc.edu/marr-collections. For more information and to use the collections, contact Chuck Haddix, Marr Sound Archives (HaddixC@umkc.edu; (816) 235-2798; http://library.umkc.edu/marr).

Sandy Rodriguez, special projects catalog librarian
University of Missouri–Kansas City

The Don Campbell Private Archives were recently bequeathed to the American Music Research Centre of the University of Colorado. Once complete, the Don Campbell Collection will address two fundamental aspects...