Grateful Dead drummer and part-time ethnomusicologist Mickey Hart has teamed up with Librarian of Congress James Billington to digitize the LOC\’s vast holdings of sound recordings, creating, according to Hart, \”a digital Alexandria.\” The mission of the Save our Sounds project, part of the American Folklife Center of the LOC, is to digitize, preserve, and make accessible, the LOC\’s wealth of sound recordings. Some of the holdings include slave narratives recorded on wax cylinders and American Indian music.
Hart has just released a book, \”Songcatchers: In Search of the World\’s Music,\” published by National Geographic. It traces the history of recorded music and sounds a call for world-wide preservation. Hart and the rest of the Dead, practice what they preach, offering digitally mastered recordings of their summer tour shows at www.dead.net. The rest of this swell article here at the Washington Times.
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