Future Plans

Calypso Interviews Collection

During the fall and winter of 2017/2018, as part of a Fulbright U.S. Scholars grant, scholar Hunter Moore conducted a series of interviews with prominent calypso musicians in Trinidad and Tobago. The goal of these interviews was to investigate and document the composition methods of these composers. These recordings have been added to the collection along with full transcripts of their contents.

Blues Archive

The Blues Archive includes a large sound recording archive of blues music collected by the Peter Redvers-Lee, the co-founder of the Fat Possum record label, a label that specialized in discovering blues players from the North Mississippi region, many of whom had never been recorded. Redvers-Lee was also the former editor of Living Blues magazine, America’s oldest and most authoritative blues magazine. This archive also includes the sound recordings captured by Vanderbilt musicologist Robbie Fry whose research is focused on Mississippi and Arkansas blues musicians.

AIDS Songs of Northern Malawi

Recorded by then-graduate student Jonah Eller-Isaacs in Northern Malawi in the 2000s, this collection consists of a series of songs in traditional style dedicated to topics surrounding the AIDS epidemic. Originally in the native chiChewa and chiTumbuka Bantu languages of the region, full recordings and translations will be made available online.