ARSC Awards for Lifetime Achievement & Distinguished Service to Historical Recordings

[ Lifetime Achievement Award - Ronald Delthefson ]

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 2012 Lifetime Achievement Award was presented to Ronald Dethlefson. Ron is Professor Emeritus of Communication at Bakersfield College in California. He has collected early records and phonographs since 1953 and has written about Edison records and phonographs since 1980. Since 1999 he has collaborated with George Copeland, a scholarly collector of popular and operatic recordings living in St. Louis. Ron Dethlefson also writes a monthly column for In the Groove, a publication of the Michigan Antique Phonograph Society. Since 1980, he has been a consultant and volunteer at The Henry Ford in Dearborn Michigan. Dethlefson's major publications include Edison Blue Amberol Recordings (APM Press, 1980); Edison Blue Amberol Recordings: 1912-1914: American popular series, "live" recordings and selected recordings 1915-1928 (APM Press, 1980); Edison Blue Amberol Recordings 1912-1914: Companion edition, with Michael Buchak (Stationery X-Press, 1997); Edison Blue Amberol Recordings Volume 2(1915-1929) (APM Press, 1981); Pathe Records and Phonographs in America, 1914-1922 (Mulholland Press, 1999), with George A. Copeland and Peter J. Fraser, as well as Edison, Lambert Concert Records & Columbia Grand Records and related phonographs (Mulholland Press, 2004), also with George Copeland, and co-authored with Ray Wile; Edison Disc Artists & Records, 1910-1929 (APM Press, 1985).

[ Award for Distinguished Service to Historical Recordings - Richard Weize ]

The 2012 ARSC Distinguished Service Award was presented to Richard Weize. founder and CEO of Bear Family Records, probably the most important reissue label in the world for roots-oriented music. Richard began collecting records in 1956, with the purchase of Bill Haley's "Rock Around the Clock." In the fifties he was fascinated by rock 'n' roll, but from 1960 on his interest shifted to country music. In the early 1970s, he started the Folk Variety label and started booking folk acts into German clubs.

Bear Family Records was launched in 1975. This first venture into leasing vintage masters and repackaging came in 1978 when he licensed "The Unissued Johnny Cash." As a parallel venture, Bear Family mail order was started. Richard never looked to make money from Bear Family Records. As a result of this non-commercial orientation, Bear Family was in a position to postpone a release until Richard was completely satisfied with the quality. The emphasis for Richard has always been on quality. Bear Family licenses the masters from the copyright holders and doesn't take advantage of the current copyright laws that enable old masters to be issued without payment after a certain number of years. Bear Family takes special pride in its boxed sets. Some are complete career retrospectives, while others are complete within certain time periods.

Richard calls his work a passion, an obsession. He works sixteen hours a day, seven days a week. Love of music is his primary motivation. He wants to make sure that the old music is not forgotten.

[ Lifetime Achievement Award - Michael Gray ]

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 2011 Lifetime Achievement Award was presented to Michael Gray. Gray has worked at the Voice of America in Washington since 1976 where he directs the VOA’s Research Library and Digital Audio Archive projects. He has served as a consultant and resource for countless historical reissues, and is the author of numerous articles and reviews, including several published in the ARSC Journal: “The Birth of Decca stereo” (1986); “The Hollywood String Quartet: A Discography” (1982); “A Solomon Discography” (1979); “The ‘World's Greatest Music’ and ‘The World's Greatest Opera’ Records: A Discography” (1976). Books include: Classical music, 1925-1975 (1977) and Bibliography of discographies (co-authored with Gerald Gibson- annual cumulations published in the ARSC Journal); Bibliography of discographies vol. 3: Popular Music (1983); Beecham: a centenary discography (1979); Full frequency stereophonic sound : a discography and history of early London/Decca stereo classical instrumental and chamber music recordings (1956-1963) on records and compact discs (1990- with Robert Moon); Otto Klemperer: His Life and Times, by Peter Heyworth, with discography by Michael Gray (2 volumes: Cambridge University Press, 1996) He is also one of the earliest members of ARSC and remains one of its most indefatigable servants and advocates.

[ Award for Distinguished Service to Historical Recordings - Judith McCulloh ]

The 2011 ARSC Distinguished Service Award was presented to Judith McCulloh. After an instructor at her junior college introduced her to American folk music, Judith McCulloh went on to complete a Ph.D in folklore at Indiana University. She spent over thirty five years at the University of Illinois Press where her most recent positions included Executive Editor, Assistant Director, and Director of Development. Judith was largely responsible for developing the influential series Music in American Life, which now contains well over a hundred titles and has garnered more than a dozen ASCAP awards. Focusing on figures from Jimmie Rodgers to Duke Ellington to Tito Puente, and on genres from classical to klezmer to country, the books shed light on myriad facets of American music. McCulloh was founding member of the University of Illinois Campus Folksong Club, and played a central role in working with performers and producing albums of local and visiting performers. She is also a former president of the American Folklore Society and served on the Board of Trustees of the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress. Her publications include Stars of country music: Uncle Dave Macon to Johnny Rodriguez (1975) and Folklore, folklife (1984).

[ Lifetime Achievement Award - John Bolig ]

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 2010 Lifetime Achievement Award was presented to John Bolig. John is the author of two discographies of Enrico Caruso and a series of discographies (six to date) outlining releases by the Victor Talking Machine Company. His books are the result of collecting, research conducted in Victor's archives for more than fifty years, consultation of Victor catalogs, and correspondence with fellow collectors and discographers. They provide comprehensive documentation of Victor's early output, including recordings dates, dates when recordings were first released and then deleted from catalogs, and uses of masters on subsequent Victor 78s and HMV releases. John's publications are of consistently high quality. He is renowned for his thorough research, strict adherence to that which can be documented in print and archival sources, and his generosity to other researchers and discographers.  His bibliography includes:The Recordings of Enrico Caruso: A discography (1973), Caruso Records: A History and Discography (2002), The Victor Red Seal Discography (2004), The Victor discography: green, blue, and purple labels (1910-1926) (2006), Gems : the Victor Light Opera Company discography (1909-1930) (2005), The Victor Black Label Discography : 16000-17000 Series (2007), The Victor Black Label Discography : 18000-19000 series (2008).

[ Award for Distinguished Service to Historical Recordings - Steve Smolian ]

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 2010 ARSC Distinguished Service Award was presented to Steve Smolian.  Steve has been a leading expert on audio preservation, restoration, and consulting for over 40 years, serving major institutions, smaller archives, and the public at large.   He has successfully completed substantial restoration projects for major musical aggregations- the New York Philharmonic and the Chicago Symphony Orchestras- and organizations emphasizing the spoken word- the George Meany Memorial Archives, the Maryknoll Mission Archives and the American Jewish Archives. Recently he has performed preservation-related services for the Library of Congress, the National Archives Advisory Committee on Preservation (including consultation on the Nixon White House tapes), the Department of Justice and the Smithsonian Institution, as well as two of the Presidential Libraries.  He has done appraisal work for the Library of Congress, Harvard University, and Columbia University.  Steve is also involved with NPR’s Lost and Found Sound, restoring materials submitted by Quest for Sound callers.  Steve is a long time member of ARSC, and serves on AAA committee and the Copyright and Fair Use committee, among other activities.

[ Lifetime Achievement Award - Cristóbal Díaz-Ayala ]

Cristóbal Díaz-Ayala was born and educated in Havana, where he received degrees in journalism, the social sciences, and law. He joined the flood of émigrés from there, in 1961.

His lifelong love of the music of his birthplace led him to study and publish works on the history of Cuban music styles, their presentation on stage, radio, and other media, and their appearance on historical sound recordings from 1905 (the earliest known) to the present day. He has written several books, including San Juan – New York: Discografía de la música puertorriqueña 1900 – 1942, published this year.

In 1994, Díaz-Ayala received the ARSC Award for Best Research in Recorded Folk or Ethnic Music, for his book-length Discografía de la Música Cubana.

Díaz-Ayala was producer and host for CUBANACÁN, a long-running syndicated radio series.

He became well known for assembling a major collection of sound recordings, sheet music, and other ephemera that now resides at Florida International University in Miami.

[ Award for Distinguished Service to Historical Recordings - Ward Marston ]

In 1979, Ward Marston put himself on the map as one of the world’s leading transfer engineers with his restoration of the experimental Bell Laboratories Wide Range and Stereophonic recordings of Leopold Stokowski and the Philadelphia Orchestra, made in 1931 and 1932. Audiophiles and music lovers alike were stunned by the remarkable recorded sound Marston was able to extract from the Bell recordings. The painstaking manual synchronization of the dual-band stereophonic recordings would be typical of the care and attention to detail that Marston would bring to so many future projects.

Since that time, Marston’s work has appeared on the labels of many major record companies. His 11-CD collection devoted to the Victor recordings of Fritz Kreisler, released in 1995, received a Grammy nomination for Best Historical Album. Marston’s other significant historical projects were: the Franklin Mint Toscanini Collection, BMG’s 10-CD Complete Rachmaninoff, the 12-CD Philadelphia Orchestra Centennial Collection, the complete recordings of Josef Hofmann, and the complete recordings of Caruso for the Pearl and Naxos labels.

In 1997, he formed his own record label, Marston, concentrating on the reissue of recordings by performers neglected by the major record companies, including an ongoing series devoted to the acoustically recorded, complete operas on Pathé. His most recent achievements on his own label include the Julius Block collection, a three-CD collection of rare, privately-made cylinder recordings featuring some of the most important musical personalities of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

The success of Marston’s work over the past 30 years is a result of a rare combination of musical knowledge and sensitivity, together with technical skill.

[ Lifetime Achievement Award - Jerry Weber ]

ARSC annually presents a Lifetime Achievement Award to an individual, in recognition of a life's work in recorded sound research and publication.

Jerome F. Weber (better known to his ARSC colleagues as Jerry) is recognized for the depth and breadth of his discographical research. He has spent much of his lifetime surveying many kinds of music.

Weber’s religious vocation gave him a logical entrée for examining a considerable body of recorded Gregorian Chant, culminating in 1990 with the publication of a definitive two-volume discography of this music.

Weber researched, compiled, and published a large series of discographies of music by various composers: Schubert Lieder (1970), Brahms Lieder (1970), Schumann Lieder (1971), Mahler (1971), Hugo Wolf (1975), and Schubert’s Great C Major Symphony, D.944 (2000), to name a few.

In addition to his published discographies, Weber has written articles on medieval music and been a reviewer of recordings for Fanfare, for many years. His pioneering studies on the “science” of discography—a scholarly approach to organizing data about recordings—have appeared in the ARSC Journal.

[ Award for Distinguished Service to Historical Recordings - Sam Brylawski ]

ARSC's Award for Distinguished Service to Historical Recordings honors a person who has made outstanding contributions to the field, outside of published works or discographic research.

Sam Brylawski has worked in nearly every aspect of recorded sound archiving, been involved in many significant library developments over the past thirty years, and served as a national leader in the field.

In the early 1970s, Brylawski began his career at the Library of Congress, as a transfer engineer. He became a reference librarian for recorded sound in 1980, and was promoted to Curator of Recorded Sound in the early 1990s. In 1996, he was chosen to head the re-formed Recorded Sound Section of the Motion Picture, Broadcasting, and Recorded Sound Division—a position he held until his retirement in 2004.

Under Brylawski’s leadership, the Library acquired many important collections of commercial, non-commercial, and broadcast recordings, and—for the first time in the Recorded Sound Section—major manuscript collections. He devised efficient inventory and cataloging procedures, which resulted in the online SONIC database that indexes more than 200,000 recordings, including 90,000 radio broadcast recordings of the NBC network.

Brylawski worked on the passage of the National Recording Preservation Act of 2000 that established the National Recording Preservation Board, where he serves as advisor to the Library. In addition, he was on the executive team that planned the National Audio-Visual Conservation Center in Culpeper, Virginia.

After retiring from the Library, Brylawski was appointed Editor and Project Manager of the Encyclopedic Discography of Victor Recordings, by the University of California, Santa Barbara. As editor, he has brought this long-awaited project to fruition as a Web database. His goal for the future is a comprehensive database of all standard-groove discs.

Brylawski has served as ARSC Program Chair and ARSC President, and is a member of the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences. He has authored articles and liner notes, and produced CDs and websites. He continues to work on national policy initiatives and lead the profession through his vast experience, wisdom, and humor.

[ 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."