Hi, friends,

Back in 2022 I started the nonprofit Southern Music Research Center with the mission of documenting, preserving, and making broadly accessible a diverse range of musical history, tradition, expression, and experience. With the support of an initial cohort of monthly Patreon donors, mostly Lost Child radio listeners, we launched our online archive — the real center of our Center — in April 2023.

Since then, the SMRC’s work — including that archive, the radio show, our community preservation services, live events, and more — has grown exponentially.

Today I’m seeking to expand that work still further, and I hope you’ll pitch in. The SMRC is seeking 20 new Patreon donors by the end of the day today.

We don’t make these direct appeals often. But to help us meet today’s goal, I’d like to ask you to consider a monthly donation of $20. If that’s too steep for you right now, no worries — please know that every donation at every level goes a long way to sustaining our work. You can pitch in here at whatever rate works best for you. 

So far this year, thanks to donor contributions, we’ve launched multiple online archival collections, including: 

• The Old-Time Herald magazine collection, our most-visited archival collection to date, presented in collaboration with the nonprofit Whole South Heritage Works
  
  
•  The Mt. Willing Quilters collection, featuring songs from the Sew Their Names Quilting Project, presented in collaboration with the Hear in Alabama podcast and members of this extraordinary quilting (and singing) community
  
  
•  The Fiddling Tom Freeman collection, an online archival supplement to author Joyce Cauthen’s great, brand-new book, The Ballad of Fiddling Tom Freeman: Music, Moonshine, and Murder in Bug Tussle, Alabama

This year we’ve also hosted live events, including:

• community archiving days, inviting the public to share musical artifacts from their personal collections, to be digitized and preserved for posterity. (Check out these acetate discs preserved at our most recent event at the North Birmingham Library, or this wealth of material digitized at our archiving event on Sand Mountain, AL.)
  
  
• an intimate homecoming concert with songwriting legend Willis Alan Ramsey, presented in collaboration with the Birmingham Folk Festival
  
  
• a series of inspiring community discussions with author Phyllis Biffle Elmore, presented with assistance from the Alabama Humanities Alliance and a host of community partners 
  
  
• DJ events, including the first live, in-person (and packed-out) radio broadcast of our signature radio show, The Lost Child

We’ve also continued to work with individuals, families, and organizations to preserve their own music artifacts. This summer we unveiled the Patricia Weaver Byrd gospel music collection with a powerful live event, including gospel music performances, presentations, and archiving activities. And just last week we began processing a collection of more than 120 reel-to-reel tapes — most of them live, small-town radio broadcasts, 1950s-1990s — from the collection of bluegrass bandleader Jimmy Daugherty. 

You can help fuel just this sort of work — and help us meet today’s fundraising goal — by pledging monthly support here, right now. 

Your contributions also sustain us for the future as we continue to grow. At this moment we’re at work on several exciting archival collections we’ll be sharing online over the next few months. Major projects on our immediate horizons include: 

• Sweet Wreath Flyers — a vivid visual panorama from the southern avant-garde underground, 2000 – present
  
  
•  The Peanut Conn Collection — archival radio broadcasts, home recordings, and historic photos from Louisiana swing jazz violinist Vertis Roy “Peanut” Conn (1919-1964)
  
  
•  The Stanton Littlejohn & McNairy County Music Collections — 150+ acetate disc recordings created in the 1940s & ’50s by Stanton Littlejohn of Eastview, TN, documenting the rich musical life of his community — along with a trove of historic music photos from Littlejohn’s McNairy County. Presented in collaboration with the nonprofit Arts in McNairy, these collections offer a deep dive into a single Tennessee county’s historic musical landscape, revealing an astonishing universe of old-time string bands, homegrown rockabillies, boogie-woogie pianists, gospel quartets, and more.
   
•  The Chitlin Circuit Interviews — previously unreleased audio interviews and transcripts from the making of author Preston Lauterbach’s acclaimed 2011 book, The Chitlin’ Circuit and the Road to Rock and Roll

We are also about to start production on Season Two of our original video series, Alabama Hip Hop 101, coming your way in 2027. And our weekly roots music radio hour, The Lost Child, the project that started this whole thing, is now available for distribution via the Public Radio Exchange (PRX); if we’re not already broadcasting on your local public radio station, let them know you’d like to hear us!

As always, I can’t thank you enough for your support of this work. I hope the (partial) list above, outlining some of what we’ve achieved just this year alone, goes to show how far we’re able to take your donor dollars. By becoming a supporter, or by continuing your support, you become a key collaborator in this work, helping unearth, preserve, and share vital music history for many years to come.  Please consider a $20 monthly donation, or whatever other amount works best for you. 

Pitch in, here, now, with a thousand thanks. 

Sincerely,

Burgin

P. S. Not into Patreon but still want to support?  Check out our other donation options at southernmusicresearch.org/support.

P. P. S. If you’re not already subscribed to the SMRC’s email list, please do so today (sign up here)! You may notice I never use this personal blog site anymore to send out messages (today is the rare exception); the SMRC mailing list is the best place to keep in the loop.

P. P. P. S. Here’s that Patreon link one more time, for good measure — http://patreon.com/southernmusicresearch — or hit the button below. Thanks.