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Texas Music Oral History Project

Lecturer in Musicology Kevin Mooney will lead a team of faculty, staff, and students to preserve recordings of and interviews with Texas music and musicians by digitizing archival materials and publishing them on the web.

The Texas Music Oral History Project centers on three themes: preservation, increased public access, and education. Rare taped interviews and field recordings are in the process of disintegrating more every day. Converting these archives to digital formats will help preserve these rare materials. Transferring the digital text and audio files to a web site will create a searchable database accessible to everyone. The monthly-featured oral histories can be used in the classroom to supplement topical class lectures. Two of the first collections to be digitized in this project will be the Allan Turner Oral History Collection, 1972-1982, at the Center for American History and the UT Folklore Center Archives, 1934-1980, at the Ethnomusicology Lab of the School of Music. The Allan Turner Oral History Collection includes 57 audiocassettes of oral interviews with performers of traditional Texas music, including conjunto, country and western, Czech and German, and blues. Interviewees include Mance Lipscomb, Santiago Jiménez, Lydia Mendoza, Ray Baca, Adolph Hofner, Cliff Bruner, Ted Daffan, and others. This collection was selected due to the popular appeal of the interviewees as well as the diversity of the styles of Texas music represented. Most, but not all, of the interviewees in this collection would be of interest to the general public. The UT Folklore Center Archives include 375 reel-to-reel taped field recordings and interviews dating from 1934-1970s that need to be preserved and made available. The recordings include but are not limited to Mexican corridos, African-American songs, Anglo-American songs, fiddle tunes, bawdy songs, religious songs, folktales, and reminiscences. The interviewers include John Henry Faulk, Américo Paredes, William A. Owens, Stan Alexander, Roger Abrahams, Mody Boatright, and Tary Owens.

Digitizing these collections will not only preserve these recordings of oral histories and rare musical performances, but also -- via the UTOPIA web site -- provide access to these collections from any online computer in the world. Available to educators, students K-12 and higher, and the interested public, this web site will include monthly-featured oral histories related to historical persons and/or events of each month. These featured oral histories will be drawn from the above as well as from other collections. The University of Texas at Austin’s Texas Music Oral History Project would be the only site in existence to offer online access to oral histories of Texas music and musicians.

The University of Texas at Austin recently launched UTOPIA, an ambitious new initiative designed to open the University’s doors of knowledge, research, and information to the public.

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