Historicity of music | Archival Music: Preserving the Most Precious Sounds | Music

It’s often a forgettable melody or lyrics you wish you’d never heard in the first place, like Parry Gripp’s “It’s Raining Tacos.”

This tune, along with “Baby Shark”, was so annoying that the city of West Palm Beach reportedly played it loud over loudspeakers to deter homeless people from congregating in certain areas.

Another, apparently sung from the perspective of an evil clown wanting to get rid of his girlfriend, is “No More Hot Dogs,” by Hasil Adkins.

Stop! Don’t look for this song, you will regret it.

Instead, let’s focus on memorable songs, the ones that a listener finds enjoyable enough to save for the future – the ones that you’re happy swirling around in your head all day.

Sometimes a piece of music is compelling enough that a listener feels the need to share it with others. For example, it may perfectly illustrate a musical genre or style and should therefore be preserved.

Archiving means that the item must be carefully preserved and stored for posterity by any appropriate means necessary. Whether audio tape recordings, paintings, sculptures, photographs or digital media, archiving takes into account factors such as temperature, light and humidity that can influence deterioration .

Sticking to music – which, like all art, is in the eye or ear of the beholder – questions arise, such as which particular pieces of music should be archived, who chooses which songs are archived, and where should archives be stored?

Dr. Carl Sagan made an interesting choice of archival recordings for NASA in 1977. Along with a team of associates, Sagan chose what audio would be pressed onto a “Golden Record” that was attached to the exterior of the spaceships. Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft.

Titled “The Sounds of Earth”, the 12-inch gold-plated copper disc contained the audio of surf, wind, thunder and animals to show the life and culture of our planet. The disc also contained music and spoken greetings in 55 different languages.

There are at least 39 different audio archive projects around the world. In the United States, the National Archives is a government resource that does its best to catalog all kinds of sounds.

It also has archives relating to history, military records, ancestry and much more. The National Archives, located in Washington, DC, is open to the public and can be viewed at archives.gov.

Another institution, created by the US government in 1846, is the Smithsonian Institution, a network of 19 museums, 21 libraries, nine research centers and even a zoo.

As you might guess, the Smithsonian contains many audio archives, one of which is the Hirshhorn Museum Library Audio Archive. In addition to lectures and broadcast programs, it also has 306 reformatted digital audio files from audio cassettes on various topics ranging from 1969 to 2004.

Smithsonian Folkways is a division founded in 1948 with the stated purpose “to record and document the entire world of sound”. One of its archivists is Grateful Dead drummer Mickey Hart, known for his deep appreciation of “world beat” and other indigenous music.

Thanks to Robbie Stokes’ connection with Hart – Robbie played on Mickey’s “Rolling Thunder” album – I was backstage at two different Grateful Dead music gigs and met the legendary drummer.

Some of Mickey’s Folkways efforts include recordings made in remote locations around the world.

“The Music of Upper and Lower Egypt” was recorded when the Grateful Dead performed there; “Sarangi: The Music of India” documents melodies played on the traditional Indian string instrument, the sarangi; “Music to Be Born By” is Mickey’s sound for the otherwise aseptic environment of a hospital; “Freedom Chants from the Roof of the World” captures the sounds of Tibetan Buddhist Gyuto monks.

Hart has also recorded two albums of rainforest sounds, a 67-voice female choir from Latvia, a disc of songs from six different Native American tribes, field recordings from the Philippines, tribal folk music from East Africa, West and many others.

You might be surprised to learn that Mickey and fellow Grateful Dead drummer Bill Kreutzmann provided percussion background music for Francis Ford Coppola’s 1979 epic “Apocalypse Now.”

One of my favorite music archives is at archive.org. With a mission of “universal access to all knowledge”, it has free public access to cataloging websites, software applications, games, books, movies, videos and music.

Archive.org contains what is probably the largest collection of Grateful Dead recordings available in one place. It also contains the audio of many band concerts in which your humble narrator has performed.

Don’t forget that there is also a wonderful archival resource located right here in Carbondale at the Morris Library on the SIU campus. Many audio recordings can be found in its Special Collections Department, also accessible on the Internet.

Several archive sources have been mentioned above, as well as the storage location – on servers and accessible via “the cloud”. Now consider who chooses what is archived.

While music appreciation is up to the listener and everyone’s opinion is equally valid, we should take note of the lists created by Rolling Stone magazine. Although they didn’t ask the general public, the publication polled more than 250 musicians, producers, journalists and industry professionals to produce a list of their top 500 songs – or albums, or guitarists, or drummers, etc

The results were compiled by a third party and resulted in a fair approximation and consensus on what is best. The “500 Greatest Albums of All Time” and “500 Greatest Songs of All Time” lists were first created in 2003 and then updated in 2010 and 2021.

We could argue all day about the definition of “greatest” as well as whether the 2003 list is more valid than the most recent updated rankings. Nevertheless, here are the latest results for the top five of Rolling Stone’s 500 Greatest Albums of All Time.

#5, “Abbey Road”, The Beatles, 1969. #4, “Songs in the Key of Life”, Stevie Wonder, 1976. #3, “Blue”, Joni Mitchell, 1971. #2, “Pet Sounds”, The Beach Boys, 1966. And #1, “What’s Going On”, Marvin Gaye, 1971.

And here’s the latest top five of the magazine’s 500 Greatest Songs of All Time.

#5, “Smells Like Teen Spirit”, Nirvana, 1991, written by Kurt Cobain. #4, “Like a Rolling Stone”, Bob Dylan, 1965. #3, “A Change Is Gonna Come”, Sam Cooke, 1964. #2, “Fight the Power”, Public Enemy, 1989, written by Carlton Ridenhour, Eric Sadler, Hank Shocklee and Keith Shocklee. And song #1, “Respect”, Aretha Franklin, 1967, written by Otis Redding.