Frank Clyde Brown (left) recording an unidentified singer on an Ediphone wax cylinder phonograph. Date and location unknown.
“All Day Singing,.” Woodcut by Clare Leighton from the Frank C. Brown Collection of North Carolina Folklore, Vol. 2, Duke University Press, 1952.
From October 2016 to December 2018, I worked on a team of librarians and archivists at Duke University Libraries committed to bringing the field recordings of Frank Clyde Brown into the digital age. The collection included over 1,300 songs recorded from the late 1910s to the early 1940s and contain ballads, sea chanteys, gospel quartets, blues, and even ghost stories. The recordings represent all the regions of North Carolina by Folklorist and Duke Professor Frank Clyde Brown (1870-1943). Frank C. Brown Collection of North Carolina Folklore, a seven-volume set, was published posthumously by Duke University Press between 1952 and 1964.
The libraries received a $74,595 grant from the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) to finally digitize the recordings. The fragile medium of the recordings meant they needed a contactless method to digitize the sound. The Northeast Document Conservation Center’s (NEDCC) IRENE technology made this digitization possible. By taking “ultra-high resolution visual scans of the grooves imprinted on the cylinders and discs and mathematically translates those into digital sound files that are remarkably faithful to the original recordings.“ (That Old Refrain).
In my position, as the Frank Clyde Brown Audio Preservation Intern, I worked with audio files created by IRENE and prepared them for Duke Libraries Digital Repository.
Personal Favorites from the Frank Clyde Brown Recordings Collection
“Barbara Allen,” performed by Otis Kuykendall, Asheville (N.C.), July 18, 1939
Brown often used a car battery to power the recording devices he used in the field. Date and location unknown.
Sources:
That Old Refrain: Library Receives Grant to Digitize Twentieth-Century Folk Music. (2016, Spring). Duke University Libraries, 29(2), 24-27. https://blogs.library.duke.edu/magazine/2016/07/11/that-old-refrain-library-receives-grant-to-digitize-twentieth-century-folk-music/