ARSC Awards for Lifetime Achievement & Distinguished Service to Historical Recordings

[ Lifetime Achievement Award - Alan Kelly ]

Alan Kelly is recognized as one of the world’s foremost discographers. He has dedicated the best part of fifty years to creating detailed discographies of the recordings produced by The Gramophone Company (whose main labels were His Master’s Voice and Zonophone), from its foundation in the United Kingdom in 1898 to its merger with the Columbia Graphophone Company to form Electric and Musical Industries (EMI) in 1931. Kelly worked for many years within the EMI Archives, copying out and then arranging material from the company ledgers to form discographies based on the language or geographical area, and on the technical origin of each record. To date he has completed the Russian, French, Italian and Dutch catalogues of The Gramophone Company, together with ten volumes of the HMV Matrix series. The sheer scale both of the Company’s activities and therefore of Kelly’s task only becomes clear when one surveys the vast amount of information in this colossal discography, preserved and disseminated by Kelly on CD-ROM.

[ Award for Distinguished Service to Historical Recordings - Gerald D. Gibson ]

Gerald D. Gibson is recognized for his many curatorial, preservation, and research-related contributions to recorded sound. In successive positions at the Library of Congress as sound recording cataloger, Assistant Head of the Music Division Recorded Sound Section, Head of the Curatorial Section of the Motion Picture, Broadcasting and Recorded Sound Division, and Preservation Specialist, Gibson made lasting contributions to recorded sound scholarship and preservation. He compiled bibliographies which remain essential reference works, devised housings and shelving for sound recordings which are still serve as models for the field, developed the sound recording and moving image collections of the Library of Congress to a quality appropriate to a national library, and worked to lay the foundations for digital preservation of sound recordings. Curatorial practices introduced under his tenures have become recognized as best practices in recorded sound conservation.

Gibson served as editor of the ARSC Journal, president of ARSC, president of the International Association of Sound and Audiovisual Archives (IASA), and was a founding member of the ARSC Associated Audio Archives Committee, which created the Rigler and Deutsch Record Index, Rules for Cataloging of Sound Recordings, and Audio Preservation: A Planning Study.

[ Lifetime Achievement Award - Allen Koenigsberg ]

The Lifetime Achievement Award is presented annually to an individual in recognition of his or her life’s work in published recorded sound research. The 2006 Lifetime Achievement Award was presented to Allen Koenigsberg for his pioneering work in documenting the first 50 years of recorded music. Koenigsberg was the founder, editor and publisher of The Antique Phonograph Monthly (1973-1993) and is the author of two books: Edison Cylinder Records, 1889-1912, which catalogs and dates over 10,000 songs and artists from the period; and The Patent History of the Phonograph, 1877-1912, which contains listings of 2,118 U.S. sound recording patents issued to 1,013 inventors and a detailed commentary on 101 of the most significant patents and designs. His articles for the The Antique Phonograph Monthly and other publications have been on subjects as varied as the 1889 introduction of the phonograph into Russia, Lambert cylinders (discography), the origin of the telephone greeting "hello," and debunking the phony "Walt Whitman cylinder.” He has also contributed generously to the works of many other authors, and has issued numerous reprints of early literature on phonograph machines and recordings.

[ Award for Distinguished Service to Historical Recordings - Franz Lechleitner ]

The Award for Distinguished Service to Historic Recordings is presented annually to an individual who has made contributions of outstanding significance to the field of historic recordings in forms other than published works or discographic research. The 2006 ARSC Distinguished Service Award was presented to Franz Lechleitner who, until his retirement in 2004, served as Chief Audio Engineer of the Vienna Phonogrammarchiv. During his 31 year tenure at the Phonogrammarchiv, he concentrated on the replay of the historical recordings of the Archive, amongst them the "Archiv-Phonogramme", a special Viennese development employing the vertical cylinder modulation on discs. The transfer routines devised by him form the basis of one of the major projects of the Vienna Phonogrammarchiv: the edition of the Complete Historical Collections 1899-1950 on CDs, begun on the 100th anniversary of the Archive in 1999.

Lechleitner has made a number of significant contributions to historic recordings, including: the development of playback techniques for the reproduction of historical sound carriers; the design and development of an archival cylinder playback machine; and the transfer of many important historical collections located in archives throughout Europe and Asia, including over 2000 instantaneously recorded cylinders. Lechleitner also served as a member of the Audio Engineering Society (AES) and its SC-03-02 standards subcommittee (preservation and restoration of audio recording/transfer technologies), has been a member of the IASA Technical Committee since 1977, and has published numerous technical documents and discographies. He remains active in the transfer of the historical holdings, and as a consultant to the Vienna Archive and beyond.

[ Lifetime Achievement Award - Chris Strachwitz ]

Chris Strachwitz achieved recognition this year for his pioneering work in researching traditional musics in the Americas. Strachwitz founded Arhoolie Records in 1960 and over the decades amassed a catalog containing hundreds of great sets, most of them produced by Chris himself. In 1995 he established the not-for-profit Arhoolie Foundation to preserve the rarest portions of his collection of commercial recordings, including the Frontera Collection of 30,000 plus Mexican and Mexican-American recordings, which is currently being cataloged and digitized for on-line display through the UCLA library system with financial assistance provided by the Los Tigres Del Norte Foundation.

[ Award for Distinguished Service to Historical Recordings - John R. T. Davies ]

The 2005 Distinguished Service Award was presented posthumously to John R. T. Davies (1927-2004) for his meticulous transfers of classic recordings of jazz and blues. Davies’ transfers of King Oliver, Jelly Roll Morton, Louis Armstrong, Bix Beiderbecke, the great big bands of the 1920s and 1930s, and blues singers were universally applauded for presenting the music in the best possible sound. He worked for Doug Dobell’s 77 Records label, formed his own Ristic label, and was the driving force behind Retrieval records. His work also appeared on other small jazz labels including Frog, Hep, JSP, Timeless, Cygnet, and Jazz Oracle.

[ Lifetime Achievement Award - Tim Brooks ]

The winner of the 2004 Lifetime Achievement Award is Tim Brooks. Mr. Brooks currently serves as the Executive Vice President of Research at Lifetime Television. He is the author of the recently published Lost Sounds: Blacks and the Birth of the Recording Industry, 1890-1919 and co-author of the Columbia Master Book Discography, Volumes I-IV. Mr. Brooks has written many articles for the ARSC Journal, the New Amberola Graphic and other scholarly publications.

[ Award for Distinguished Service to Historical Recordings - Jack Towers ]

The winner of the 2004 Distinguished Service Award is Jack Towers. Mr. Towers recorded the now-famous Duke [Ellington] at Fargo 1940 concert, which was released in 2000, in a special 60th anniversary CD edition. In 1941, Mr. Towers handled radio broadcasting at the U.S. Department of Agriculture. He retired from federal service in 1974. Since then, he has used his skill in disc and tape recording, to restore historical recordings for many record producers including the Smithsonian Institution, Columbia Records, the Book of the Month, Musicraft and Delmark.

[ Lifetime Achievement Award - Dick Spottswood ]

The Lifetime Achievement Award, recognizing excellence in discographical research, was awarded to Dick
Spottswood. Spottswood describes himself as “an unreconstructed, unreformed collector who loves to learn
about music, and then write about it, if I think I can get away with it.” He holds degrees from the University of
Maryland (BA, 1960) and Catholic University (MS, Library Science, 1962), and is a founding member of ARSC. Dick has been writing about music and producing archival sets of foreign-language, country, folk, and blues recordings since 1963. He is the author of Ethnic Music on Records (7 vols., 1990), and co-author of Charlie Patton: Screamin’ and Hollerin’ the Blues (notes to Revenant CD set, 2001) and Country Music Sources: A Biblio-Discography of Commercially Recorded Traditional Music (2003), all of which received ARSC Awards for Excellence. Dick was also the founder of the journal Bluegrass Unlimited and since 1985 has been the producer/host of the Dick Spottswood
Show on WAMU radio. He continues to work on various CD and writing projects, including a forthcoming ten-CD set on the Bear Family label, Extraordinary Calypso: The Decca Trinidad Sessions, 1938-1940.

[ Award for Distinguished Service to Historical Recordings - David Hall ]

The new Distinguished Service to Historic Recordings Award, recognizing contributions of outstanding significance
to the field of historic recordings in forms other than publication or research, was presented to David Hall. David has been active in the area of sound recordings since 1940, in virtually every capacity the field offers aside from musical performance. Author of The Record Book (1st ed., 1940, with several successor publications), his subsequent career included positions as classical music program annotator for NBC, director of classical recordings for Mercury Records (1948-56, including producer of the “Olympian Series”), director of the music center of the Scandinavian-American Foundation, music editor of (and frequent contributor to) Stereo Review magazine, and president of Composers Recordings Inc. His services to historic recordings became most prominent beginning in 1967, when he became the first head of the Rodgers and Hammerstein Archives of Recorded Sound at the New York Public Library; there, he directed the long-term project leading to the 1985 publication of the complete edition of the Mapleson Cylinders. A founding member of ARSC, he was the first editor of its Journal, later President of the Association, and also a member of the Associated Audio Archives Committee. After his retirement from NYPL in 1983, he continued to serve as consultant to the R&H Archives, and also acted as chairman of NARAS committees concerned with the classical Grammy Awards.

[ Lifetime Achievement Award - Pekka Gronow ]

Pekka Gronow, the manager of the radio archives of the Finnish Broadcasting Company and an Adjunct Professor of Ethnomusicology at the University of Helsinki, has been researching records and writing about them for almost 40 years. Dr. Gronow has published several books on music and recordings in Finnish, English, and other languages, including An International History of the Recording Industry (with Ilpo Saunio, 1998); produced numerous reissues of historical Finnish recordings; and has contributed to the ARSC Journal, IASA Journal, Ethnomusicology, JEMF Quarterly, and The New Grove Dictionary of Jazz, among others. One of the founders of Suomen Äänitearkisto, the Finnish Institute of Recorded Sound, he has also supervised the publication of the 25-volume Catalogue of Finnish Recordings. Overall, Dr. Gronow's publications have been instrumental in documenting the history of Scandinavian recordings.

[ Lifetime Achievement Award - Leonard Kunstadt ]

Leonard Kunstadt was the founder and editor of Record Research magazine from 1955-1995. Many of his own articles and discographies on jazz and popular music were published in Record Research in the 1950s and 1960s, some co-authored with Bob Colton. He was also cited on a number of other articles as "coordinating" or "assisting" with the research. Though many of these are short, they include pioneering discographies or rollographies of early jazz and blues artists. Probably the most substantial of Kunstadt's publications are his discographies of the Black Swan label (Record Research, 1955-58) and Wilbur Sweatman (with Colton, The Discophile, 1955-57). He is also credited as co-author (with Sam Charters) of the notable book Jazz: A History of the New York Scene (1962), for which he did the research.

[ Lifetime Achievement Award - Charles Wolfe ]

A member of the English faculty of Middle Tennessee State University, Charles Wolfe has been writing about country music and artists and records for over twenty-five years. The author of more than 100 articles and liner notes and over fifteen books, Dr. Wolfe serves as editor of the Tennessee Folklore Society Quarterly and co-editor of Studies in Country Music. Among his liner notes, the following have been ARSC Award finalists: "Bill Monroe Blue Grass: 1959-1969" (1991, with Neil V. Rosenberg), "Lefty Fizzell: Life's Like Poetry" (1992), and "The Louvin Brothers" (1992). "I have piled up something over 1,000 interviews . . . the core of many of my books and liner notes and articles. It's not the most efficient way to do discographical research, but it is fascinating and I've gotten over the years to meet some wonderful people, and hear some great stories."