
          Long Journey Home
          By Simpson, BlandBland
	       Simpson and Conway, CeceCece Conway
          Vol. 5, No. 4, 1983, pp. 17-19
          
          One of the world's great collections of Southern and country_music
has come home, and therein lies a ballad.
          Early one morning in late April, a truck from California rolled
into Chapel_Hill, bringing the John Edwards Memorial
Collection--nearly a thousand boxes of old 78-rpm phonograph records,
sheet music and faded letters--to its new and permanent home at the
University of North_Carolina. For this archive, assembled by a young
Australian, shipped at his death in 1960 to a fellow collector in New
Jersey, then back across America to a long residency at the University
of California at Los Angeles, it was journey's end.
          "There's almost no end to the variety of material in 

those boxes,"
said UNC's Dan Patterson, after the dust had settled in late
May. Patterson, the energetic director of the Folklore Curriculum
here, was trail boss in the University's drive to acquire the
archive. "We hope we can find a copy of John Edwards' will in
there."
          Edwards' will directed that the original collection--country_music
from the early period of its commercial history--be maintained in the
United_States for research purposes. When recipient Eugene Earle
arrived with the archive in southern California in 1962, he and
several other scholars and collectors--Archie Green. D.K. Wilgus,
Ed Kahn, and Fred Hoeptner--formed the John Edwards Memorial
Foundation and found housing for the archive at UCLA's Center for
Comparative Folklore and Mythology.
          "We had wanted the collection to be housed in the South
originally," recalls Archie Green, "and we tried several
institutions. But in the early 1960s, no Southern university was
really committed to the serious study of any Southern vernacular
music."
          The founders of the JEMF, like Edwards, understood that the record
companies in the 1920's and 1930's had captured, in living sound, a
host of emerging and evolving musical forms--repertories that did not
interest scholars of that day. As documents of the vast impact of new
technologies and commercialization on the old homemade music, these
recordings in fact constitute a significant contribution to folklife
studies.
          During the two decades it was at UCLA on loan, the Edwards
collection received the combined holdings of all its directors and
other collectors and grew to include: fourteen thousand 78s, ten
thousand 45s; a thousand LPs; correspondence and taped interviews with
performers and other music business figures; six hundred song folios;
sheet music; books; posters; photographs, and much more. And the
Foundation enlarged its conception of the collection and embraced a
wide range of traditional and commercial American music forms: cowboy,
western, country &western, old time, hillbilly, bluegrass, mountain,
Cajun, sacred, gospel, race, blues, rhythm &blues, soul, and folk
rock.
          Even before scholars had become fully aware of the collection's
significance, young musicians of the late 1960s were learning old-time
styles and music from cassette tapes and from records pressed out of
the Foundation's collection. Now, the LP albums released by the JEMF
have been turned over to Californian Chris Strachwitz, owner of
Arhoolie Records and Down Home Music, who intends to keep the JEMF
records in print and the label's name alive and active.
          In a recent edition of its Quarterly, JEMF executive
secretary Norm Cohen wrote: "There is no denying that the creams of
the founders of the JEMF over two decades ago have not been matched by
reality . . . On the other hand, we have much to be proud of. We have
led the way, in both printed and recorded media, toward the acceptance
of country_music and its related folk-derived forms as a subject for
serious study at American educational institutions."
          Dan Patterson agreed. "Their Quarterly made the JEMF known
all over the world." And photographs from JEMF files, as well as
references to materials there, abound in non-fiction works about
country_music. Cohen himself, in LONG STEEL RAIL, and JEMF president
Archie Green, in ONLY A MINER, have used the collection's riches in
writing about railroading and mining songs.
          Still, Patterson said, "The JEMF directors seemed to feel the
collection was under-staffed and under-utilized at UCLA." The JEMF's
reputation was firmly established, but the fate of its archive was
not; the Foundation ran on grants, gifts and benefit concerts, and on
the proceeds from high-quality but slow-selling records and
publications. Patterson said he also believes the board in recent
years began to think the collection belonged in the South, adding: "I
think they decided it was unfair to deprive the South of a resource
for the study of its own history." At the heart of that study is the
influence of the machine and technology on the South and the
expression of Southern values in changing musical forms.
          The first notion Patterson had that the JEMF was considering such a
move came in 1979, when Green lectured in Chapel_Hill. Patterson
recalls: "He remarked, 'Would UNC be interested in housing this
collection?'- something like that. I thought, 'Now, that wouldn't
happen."' But in April, 1981, when Cohen came to Chapel_Hill for a
conference of the Association for Recorded Sound Collections,
Patterson felt, "They were looking us over." Cohen saw the 2500-LP
Folk Music Archive that Patterson and his folklore students had built
at UNC, and heard the plans the University had approved for its
expansion.
          It was Cohen who, in October 1982, suggested to Patterson at the
American Folklore Society's meeting in Minneapolis that, "If UNC is
interested in the collection, it should make an offer now."

          Patterson moved quickly once back in Chapel_Hill. With partner
Donald Shaw--a former student, now a journalism professor and director
of UNC's Media Center--he interested University Library director James
Govan, a former Chattanoogan, in purchasing the l collection. But
Govan told Patterson and Shaw: "The library couldn't staff it
now--could you?"
          In short order, Patterson and Shaw strung together enough baling
wire to fence in the collection: interim storage space from the
Undergraduate Library, money to transport the collection from
California to North_Carolina from the Music and English Departments
(including some discretionary funds offered by professor and novelist
Doris Betts), assistantships and summer staff from the deans of the
graduate and summer schools, and an initial operating budget created
with the help of the provost and the chancellor.
          UNC made its offer in January, 1983. The JEMF board accepted the
bid in February, generously sending the collection back home at a
fraction of its estimated half-million-dollar value. And Patterson,
Shaw, and a crew of students and library staffers were singing the
final chorus to the Ballad of John Edwards as they rounded up the 929
boxes on a Carolina loading dock the sunny morning of April 21st.
          "Negotiations went so fast," Patterson said, "that the collection
came at an awkward time. We can't open it till we have public
facilities. And we have to get staff positions and operating costs
into the University budget. We need to educate ourselves--about
equipment, so as not to damage the original materials when we make
protection copies of the recordings, and about the l copyright laws,
so there is no infringement when we make copies for the public. We
have to inventory and catalog what we've got, and begin efforts to add
to the collection."
          When UNC's main library moves into a new structure, a substantial
part of the basement of L.R. Wilson Library will house the media
collection- that Shaw is building. Here the JEMF Collection will be
the lodestar of the Southern Media Center and Folk Music Archive. But
the move that frees up the space will not occur until at least
December 1983, and Wilson Library will then undergo two years of
renovation. Patterson anticipates the grand opening of the collection
will be in 1985.
          What we in the South now have--with the Edwards Collection here,
and complementary collections at the Library of Congress in Washington
and at the Country Music Foundation in Nashville--is the world of
American country and ethnic music, from early times and in many forms,
in context and within reach of musicians, scholars and listeners. The
region owes a debt to an Australian who never set foot in the land
whose music he loved. His name will now remain tied to the songs of
the American South.
          
            Bland Simpson has co-authored the musicals Diamond
Studs, Hot Grog and Life on the Mississippi. He
has written the recent novel of country_music, Heart of the Country
(Putnam, 1983) and its a lecturer in creative writing at UNC. Cece
Conway its a lecturer in English at UNC, a folklorist and co-director
of the recent film Tommy Jarrell--Sprout Wings and
Fly.
          
        
