Nashville: 'Music City'

Sarah is currently soaking up all things country in Nashville, Tennessee. Given her visit to Tamworth, Australia's 'country music capital', at the start of the year, it was fitting to include 'Music City' into the US leg of the international fieldwork. The popular music heritage industry in embedded in the fabric of Nashville, with its 'Honky Tonk Heroes' guitar artwork:

 and its 'Walk of Fame Park'

But the key focus of this trip was the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum, which is perhaps the most impressive of America's music museums.

One of the great things about this museum is that it makes overt the connection between the display material and the archive, with visitors able to see into the Frist Library and Archive as they view the other exhibits. Interactive consoles also give visitors the opportunity to access selected images from the archive's photo portfolio as well as an opportunity to explore some of the "rare record spins" to be found in the collection.

The project visits New York, Cleveland and Atlanta

For the last month or so, Sarah has been in the USA chasing interview leads and visiting popular music archives and museums. She began in New York City where she interviewed the folks who collect, catalogue and preserve the massive vinyl collection that is ARChive.

This was followed by a trip to Cleveland, Ohio, for a tour of The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum, and it's special exhibit 'Women who Rock: Vision, Passion, Power'. This visit coincided with the 16th American Music Masters week, meaning Sarah also had an opportunity to attend a series of events honouring the work of Aretha Franklin.

Next stop was Atlanta, where Sarah met with another of the project's partner investigators, Professor Tim Dowd. Unfortunately, some months earlier had seen the closure of the Georgia Music Hall of Fame in Macon, Georgia, a place Sarah had originally planned to visit. The closure of the GMHF is indicative of the serious funding issues faced by many small popular music museums in the US and elsewhere.

While in Atlanta, Sarah caught the Smithsonian's traveling exhibition 'Ain't Nothing Like the Real Thing: How the Apollo Theater Shaped American Entertainment' at the Atlanta History Center, and also visited the  Georgia State University Library where she was given a detailed tour of the Popular Music and Culture Collection which houses many important artefacts relating to the lyricist/composer/performer Johnny Mercer.

Our project returns to Iceland

Sarah made a brief return trip to Iceland this month to do some follow up interviews at Tonlistarsafn Islands, the Icelandic Music History Museum.

Our project visits The Netherlands Institute of Sound and Vision

Still in the Netherlands, from 30 September to 7 October Sarah was based in Amsterdam where she made a trip to Hilversum to visit  Beeld en Geluid, the Netherlands Institute of Sound and Vision.

Beeld en Geluid houses a massive underground audio-visual archive (reportedly over 70% of the country's audio-visual heritage), and the facilities are rather impressive as the photo below indicates:

In addition to its archival facility, Beeld en Geluid also hosts "The Experience", a range of interactive exhibits including a 'Pop Studio'.

Our project in the Netherlands - Rotterdam, Hoek van Holland and The Hague

For the last couple of weeks Sarah has been in Rotterdam working closely with one of the project's partner investigators, Susanne Janssen and her Dutch HERA team who are involved in the European sister project to 'Popular Music and Cultural Memory', called POPID. While in Rotterdam, Sarah had the opportunity to present a seminar paper at Erasmus University. The paper, 'Memorialisation of country music in an Australian town' was based on research conducted earlier in the year at Tamworth, and was co-written by Alison Huber.

During her time in Rotterdam Sarah made two trips to Hoek van Holland to visit Museum RockArt, a small museum that collects and displays items related to Dutch popular music history, including material related to the key global performers who have influenced the music culture of the Netherlands.

Museum RockArt is an example of what Sarah and Alison term "DIY institutions". They define such institutions as 'places of popular music preservation, archiving and display that exist outside the bounds of "official" or "national" projects of collection and heritage management' and which emerge 'from within communities of music consumption' (Baker & Huber, forthcoming). DIY institutions are staffed primarily by volunteers and Museum RockArt is no exception --- having a core group of volunteers that bring the museum space alive for visitors.

The people at Museum RockArt also had a hand in curating the Golden Earring: Back Home exhibition that Sarah visited  at the Haags Historich Museum in The Hague. The exhibition was a celebration of 50 years of the (arguably) seminal Dutch band Golden Earring.

The "Home of Metal" exhibition in Birmingham, UK

Still in the UK, Sarah traveled to Birmingham last week to view an exhibition at the Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery called Home of Metal. The focus was the last 40 years of metal music and its relationship to the British midlands.

Sarah was lucky enough to be at the museum at the same time as Noddy Holder, the lead singer of Slade, who was there to produce a story about the exhibition for Sky Arts. Noddy showed Sarah what he considered to be one of the best items on display - the letter from Lars Ulrich (Metallica) to Brian Tatler (Diamond Head), written when Metallica had not yet "made-it".

Noddy's highlight: the letter from Lars to Brian

Sarah made sure she purchased a Home of Metal 'family tree' tea towel at the exhibition shop before heading back to London!

Our project in the UK

After a fruitful month of fieldwork in Israel, Sarah is now in London undertaking the UK leg of the research. So far she has visited commercial record label archives, the British Library sound archive and the archive of public broadcaster, the BBC. Interviews have also been conducted with music journalists and documentary makers, and Sarah was lucky to have the opportunity to talk to a member of the production team of the groundbreaking BBC documentary series from the mid-1990s, Dancing in the Street. There are also a number of museums Sarah will be touring during her visit, including The Beatles Story in Liverpool. Yesterday, for example, Sarah went to the British Music Experience, dubbed "Britain's Museum of Popular Music". This museum is part of the O2 Bubble (Millennium Dome) complex in Greenwich and charts the development of British music since 1945 using interactive technologies.

Our project on Brisbane's 4ZZZ

Quentin Ellison, of 4ZZZ's show, Divers-A-Tea & Talk (Fridays, 9am-12pm), interviewed Andy Bennett about our project this morning.  Were you listening?  We hope you were! 

Participate in our project by sharing your music memories with us.  Find out how here or write to us at musicmemories@griffith.edu.au

Australian Country Music Hall of Fame, Tamworth

From 2-4 August, Alison made a return visit to Tamworth, NSW, this time to talk to the small team of dedicated folks who work at the Australian Country Music Hall of Fame.  Like the Victorian Jazz Archive she visited back in May, the Hall of Fame is an institution dedicated to preserving an aspect of Australia's music heritage which runs entirely on donations, grant funding, and the tireless work of its volunteers.  The Hall of Fame building (Tamworth's former Mechanics' Institute) houses a public museum space featuring changing displays about some of the many stars of Australia's country music scene, as well as an extensive closed archive of material artefacts related to country music and its cultural heritage.  Sound and visual recordings, costumes, instruments, photographs, magazines, posters -- and even a piece of historic railway track which is the subject of a country music song -- all have a home in the archive.  Alison was treated to the staff's kind hospitality during her visit, and was able to find out lots of detail about the work being done behind the scenes to preserve and display Australia's country music's past.  The archival collection has been recognised as being one of 'national and international signficance', following a Community Heritage Grant from the National Library of Australia in 2006, which enabled a significance assessment.

The Hall of Fame is located at 93 Brisbane Street, Tamworth.  For more information, visit their website, http://www.countrymusichalloffame.com.au

Our project in Perth

Project Leader Professor Andy Bennett (Griffith Centre for Cultural Research, Griffith University) spent the first three weeks of July in Perth where he conducted interviews with a range of people involved in the Perth music scene. Among those Andy interviewed were personnel from local community radio, the State Library of Western Australia, and a music documentary production company. Andy also spoke to a number of local music fans and musicians and was given a special tour of Fremantle's High Street West End Spray Chalk Star Walk of Fame by organiser Carolyn Bailey. During his visit to Perth, Andy was interviewed about the Popular Music and Cultural Memory project on local radio stations RTR and Curtin FM and gave two seminar presentations at Curtin University (where he was Visiting Fellow for the duration of the trip) and Edith Cowan University.