|Grant to preserve rare American music recordings and photos|
|Monday, May 07, 2012| Dolly Parton’s first recording is among
the items that the Southern Folklife Collection at the
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill will preserve,
thanks to a new grant from the National Endowment from the
Humanities. The $131,765, three-year grant is called “From the
Piedmont to the Swamplands: Preserving Southern Traditional
Music.” It will help digitize and make available more than 1,650
hours of rare sound recordings and 4,500 photographs of musical
figures from the 1920s to the 1980s. The Parton recording dates
from 1960, when the 13-year-old Dolly traveled by bus from
Tennessee to Lake Charles, La., to record “Puppy Love” for the
Goldband Recording Corporation. The collection holds the
original master tape. Other rarities to be preserved include:
“This grant allows us to preserve national treasures and provide
online access to our collections for the first time,” says Steve
Weiss, curator of the Southern Folklife