Eastern Michigan University’s Archives and Center for Oral History Research received a grant from the Library of Michigan. The LSTA grant will be going to an oral history project.
With the $20,000 from the grant and $10,000 from a private donor, the Archives will have $30,000 to invest in the River Street Anthology project.
Matt Jones, the director of the Center for Oral History, started the River Street Anthology in 2015 from his basement on River Street. The project started because music venues in Ypsilanti were closing, and Jones wanted a reason for people to get excited about playing and practicing, he said.
Over the course of four years, Jones recorded over 600 tracks and took over 1,000 photos of musicians all over Michigan. Originally, the project was just going to feature artists in Ypsi, but then friends from Grand Rapids and Kalamazoo reached out, then more musicians came out of the woodwork to be a part of the anthology, he said.
The tracks capture all sorts of music like hip hop, metal, folk music, sitar, fiddle band, Native drum circles and ukelele players. They recorded in homes, libraries, churches, museums and even a vet office, Jones said.
“It’s a snapshot of music in Michigan,” Jones said.
With very little equipment, each player got one song, one microphone and one take. The bigger bands had to figure out how to place themselves to mix their music correctly, Jones said.
“After a while it became a science. I had it down," Jones said.
Jones comes from a musical background, playing guitar in the band Matt Jones & The Reconstruction. The best part of being in the band was having a reason to hang out with friends, Jones said, and to watch those friends light up as they played. It was also the best part of getting all the recordings: watching the musicians light up, Jones said.
Currently the anthology only exists on external hard drives and is not accessible to the public. However, the end goal is for everyone to be able to listen to the recordings, said Brooke Boyst, collections manager of the EMU Archives.
The money is going to go towards hiring student employees to help describe all the recordings and match them up with the photos. At the time Jones was collecting everything, he didn’t have the skills to keep it all organized, he said.
“The students will be putting all of the puzzle pieces together," Boyst said.
The two students the archives will hire will also be processing the photographs, making everything understandable to researchers and finding any missing files. There are quite a few backups, including copies with the Michigan Digital Preservation Network.
Eventually the hope is to put all the recordings up on the Omeka site so that anyone can listen, Boyst said.
“We’ll take something that’s kind of chaotic and organize it into something accessible," Boyst said.
It has been years since the artists were recorded, and Jones said it’s important to him that eventually they will be able to hear themselves. The goal of the project from the start was to capture musicians who would have no other way of getting their music out there, Jones said.
“I loved the feeling of helping people into the records,” Jones said.
The EMU Archives applied for the grant months ago. Along with all the work on the River Street Anthology project, the archives staff will also spend the next year looking for more money to be able to pay students for hands-on experience.
“We always have projects; it’s funding the labor that takes creativity,” Boyst said
