National registry selects recordings

It's not a far trek to get from the Manuscripts Department on Wilson Library's Fourth Floor to Level Nine. You just need to open the right door.

Through the threshold a flimsy sign confirms the destination. The air chills perceptibly, and the place smells exactly like what it is: old.

Level Nine is part of the library's stacks -- 10 floors in all -- that houses a portion of the Southern Folklife Collection's audio archives. In all, 95,000 sound recordings and 18 million feet of motion picture film call Levels Nine and Ten home.

One group, field recordings from the Highlander Research and Education Center in New Market, Tenn., is among the first 50 sound recordings recently tapped for induction into the National Recording Registry of the Library of Congress. The registry was created to preserve recordings that are culturally, historically or aesthetically significant.

Among the other inductees are recordings of a speech by Booker T. Washington, Scott Joplin's ragtime compositions on piano rolls, FDR's "Fireside Chats" and an emotional, on-the-scene account of the crash of the Hindenburg.

There are 55 instantaneous discs and nine transcription discs in the Highlander collection, including recordings of activists Rosa Parks, Myles Horton, Esau Jenkins and Septima Clark, as well as "We Shall Overcome," sung by Zilphia Horton.

Steve Weiss heads up the Southern Folklife Collection, and he recently spoke about the importance of the holdings and how they came to call Carolina home.

"Highlander is a very important center," he said, "for political activism based in eastern Tennessee. Over the course of its history [it] has played important roles in many major political movements, including the Southern Labor Movements of the 1930s, the Civil Rights Movement of the 1940s-'60s and the Appalachian People's Movement of the 1970s-'80s."

A sound and image librarian and media archivist, Weiss wears many hats in the library. And he was the important man in the middle between the Highlander recordings and the University.

The collection made its way to Carolina through Weiss, chiefly through his connection with two people at the forefront of the Civil Rights Movement and based at the Highlander Center in the 1960s, Guy and Candie Carawan.

Zilphia Horton, Highlander's first musical director, introduced what began as a slave spiritual and field song, "We Shall Overcome," to Pete Seeger and the Carawans. They in turn taught the song to civil rights workers and introduced it on a national level. "Songs and singing play an important role in political movements," Weiss said.

The Carawans are now donors at Highlander and also at the Southern Folklife Collection. Weiss knows them and also has spent time at Highlander consulting about the media holdings there.

When Weiss first worked with Highlander, a prior agreement was in place with the University of Wisconsin at Madison to house the collection. So Weiss gave them advice as needed, "and a year passed," he said. Then his groundwork unexpectedly paid off when the librarian there asked him if Carolina would consider taking the recordings. "The University of Wisconsin couldn't handle archival media," he said, smiling, "so it fell in our lap."

The University acquired the collection in June, 2002.

The recordings that document Highlander's early history are neatly tucked away in nondescript boxes on Level Nine. They're aluminum-based instantaneous disks dating from the 1940s and `50s, intended in their day, Weiss said, "for novelty and vanity use," or, as in this case, for use as field recordings.

"They were only meant to be played a few times," Weiss said. "They have acetate coating, and an instrument would cut grooves in the acetate." The "acetates," as they're also known, can range in size from about the size of a 45 rpm record to as big as a large pizza.

Weiss pulled a few shiny black disks from their album sleeves to show them off. Similar in appearance to LPs, he said they appear to be in good condition, given their age. He said it's common for "the acetate to wear off, and you lose what's there. ... I consider [the collection] to be in very good shape. They were stored in very good condition at Highlander."

Although the recordings are destined to be part of the National Recording Registry, Weiss expects that the Library of Congress will borrow them from Carolina just long enough to make a preservation master. "The material will be coming back to Carolina for repository," he said. "The reason we're letting them borrow it is the registry. And it brings national attention to audio preservation."

 

`We Shall Overcome': How a song becomes an anthem The famous anthem of the Civil Rights Movement dates prior to the Civil War, when it was a slave spiritual and field song beginning with the line, "I'll be all right." In the next hundred years its words would be changed and many verses added, but people would turn to it again and again for strength under duress. At the end of World War II, for example, black women went on strike in Charleston, S.C., against owners of a tobacco plant. Toward the end of the strike, with little hope left, the group added "We" instead of "I" and a new verse: "We will win our rights." After the strike ended successfully for the workers, two of the women visited the Highlander Research and Education Center and taught their song to a new generation of political activists. That's when Highlander musical director Zilphia Horton introduced the song to Pete Seeger and Guy and Candie Carawan, who in turn taught the song to civil rights workers and introduced it on a national level. Seeger and Guy Carawan are both credited with changing the lyrics to "We shall overcome." During the McCarthy era, deputized local men terrorized students at Highlander one night, cut the power, made them lie on the floor and searched for evidence of Communist propaganda. The students began singing, and one made up a new verse: "We are not afraid." The students sang for two hours until the men left. During the 1960s, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. took it up as a song of peaceful protest and sang it in support of striking garbage workers. Folk singer Joan Baez sang it at the March on Washington. When President Lyndon Johnson advocated for passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, he stood before the members of the Supreme Court and Congress and closed his remarks by saying, "And we shall overcome." And in 1997, during President Bill Clinton's second inaugural address, he said, "The divide of race has been America's constant curse. ... We cannot, we will not, succumb to the dark impulses that lurk in the far regions of the soul everywhere." And to sustained applause he said, "We shall overcome them."

To see the list of the first 50 recordings included in the National Recording Registry, to to www.loc.gov/rr/record/nrpb/nrpb-2002reg.html.

To read more about Guy and Candie carawan, see photo.ucr.edu/projects/carawan/.

The Highlander web site is located at www.hrec.org/default.asp.