Collecting area: Folk music

Ron and Rick Shaw performing on stage, ca. 1970.

Folk singer-songwriter twins Rick and Ron Shaw were born on February 1, 1941 in West Stewartstown, New Hampshire. Both learned to sing and play music from a young age, and many of the songs that they learned became hits with the folk revival of the 1960s. While undergraduates at the University of New Hampshire Rick and Ron, along with friends, put together a group called the Windjammers, then the Tradewinds, before finally becoming The Brandywine Singers. As The Brandywine Singers, they signed with the William Morris Agency and recorded and released two albums. At the height of their popularity in 1966, The Brandywine Singers were forced to disband when Rick was drafted to serve in Vietnam. While Rick was in Vietnam, Ron continued to perform as part of the Pozo Seco Singers with Don Williams and Susan “Pie” Taylor. When Rick returned from service in 1968, both brothers were working as teachers before coming together again to perform as The Shaw Brothers. In 1972, Rick and Ron became members of The Hillside Singers, who recorded and performed the hit song “I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing.” The Shaw Brothers signed to RCA Records and released several albums and performed with the likes of Bob Hope, John Denver, and others. The Shaw Brothers retained a strong connection to their home state of New Hampshire and their annual summer concert series at Prescott Park in Portsmouth, New Hampshire drew large crowds. Ron passed away in 2018, and Rick in 2021.

Spanning fifty years of recording and performing, The Shaw Brothers Collection documents the bulk of Rick and Ron’s musical career as well as the greater New England folk music scene through promotional material such as posters and contracts, clippings, recordings and sheet music. There is also artwork by Rick created for a children’s book as well as personal journals.

A key figure in the New England folk revival of the 1960s, Betsy Siggins (nee Minot) entered Boston University in the fall 1958 just at the music was taking off. Along with her college friend Joan Baez, she soon left school for the lure of the bohemian musical scene in Cambridge. At the age of 20, Betsy married the banjo player for the Charles River Valley Boys, Bob Siggins, who was also a founding member of Club 47, the most important venue for folk music in the region. For musicians from Baez and Bob Dylan to Jim Kweskin, Eric Von Schmidt, and Jim Rooney Club 47 was a career launching pad and despite the segregation of the era, it was a place where white northern audiences first encountered African American and blues musicians. Siggins worked full time at Club 47, filling a variety of jobs from office work to waitress to art gallery manager, eventually becoming program officer, arranging the schedules for musicians booked by Rooney or Byron Linardos. After Club 47 closed in 1968, Siggins went on to work for a succession of not for profit organizations, including the Smithsonian Festival of American Folklife and for programs for the homeless and poor.
The Siggins Collection contains important materials on Club 47 and its successor, Club Passim, including business records, ephemera, clippings, and some remarkable scrapbooks featuring performers such Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, and Richard Farina. The collection contains dozens of photographs (many taken by Charlie Frizzell), showing Siggins, her friends, and musicians at home, at Club 47, and at folk festivals in Newport, Brandeis, and Monterey. Of particular note in the collection is a remarkable series of 27 reel to reel tapes of performances at Club 47 featuring John Hammond, Doc Watson, Bill Monroe, Eric Von Schmidt, Jim Rooney, Jeff and Maria Muldaur, Jackie Washington, the Charles River Valley Boys, Joan Baez, and others. Additional material on Siggins and the Minot family was retained by the Cambridge Historical Society.

Peter Simon’s life and work as a photojournalist follows the quintessential arc of the counterculture, baby boom generation. The son of Richard Simon, founder of Simon and Schuster, Peter grew up in the New York City suburb of Riverdale and attended Boston University, graduating in 1969. While a student at BU, he began documenting the political turmoil in the US when he became photo editor for the radical student newspaper, the BU News, and later as a press photographer for the Cambridge Phoenix. In 1970, Simon left Boston to form Tree Frog Farm, a back-to-the-land commune in Guilford, Vermont, and after leaving there in 1972, he immersed himself in the New Age, forming a close relationship with spiritual leader Ram Dass. Among the most constant threads connecting his work throughout these changes was music. Simon’s sisters, Carly, Lucy, and Joanna have all been involved in music, and through a partnership with longtime friend Stephen Davis and his association with Rolling Stone magazine, Simon enjoyed unique access to many of the most important musicians of his generation. He spent time on the road with the Grateful Dead; went backstage and at home with Led Zeppelin, Bob Dylan, Paul Simon, and many others. His early forays into the world of reggae with Bob Marley and other Jamaican recording artists resulted in one of his nine books, Reggae Bloodlines. Simon’s other photographic interests are as wide-ranging as his background. A visitor to Martha’s Vineyard since the 1950s and a resident since 1974, his work reflects the changes and cultural richness of that island; his family’s friendship with Jackie Robinson has driven his lifelong documentation of baseball, and he is in high demand for portraits, weddings, and other work for hire.

The Peter Simon Collection houses the original negatives for Simon’s complete body of work as a photo journalist and also includes many photographs taken by his father Richard, an avid amateur photographer, which documents the Simon family and life in Riverdale and Stamford, Connecticut, where the family had a summer home.

Rick Sullo was born on February 16, 1943, in East Boston, son of Marco and Caroline Cianfrocca Sullo. His father was a printer and wedding photographer, and at an early age Sullo often held a flash as his father took photographs. His passion for photography began then and continued all his life. Following in the footsteps of his father, Sullo learned the trade of printing. Early in his career, he was employed as a journeyman printer, working first at Colonial Printing in Malden, then at the Home News in New Brunswick, New Jersey, and the Boston Globe. In the 1960s, Sullo was a staff photographer for Broadside of Boston magazine, a key resource in New England for folk musicians and their fans. He covered performances in the Cambridge and Boston areas as well as events such as the Newport and Pennsylvania Folk Festivals, photographing Mississippi John Hurt, Bob Dylan, Janice Joplin, Maria Muldaur, Taj Mahal, and other well-known musicians. By the 1970s, Sullo returned to printing, joining the sales department of Acme Printing Company of Wilmington, where he collaborated with publisher Little Brown to produce books by well-known photographers such as Ansel Adams and Elliott Porter, and with author/ illustrator Chris Van Allsburg on Houghton Mifflin’s The Polar Express, Just A Dream, Two Bad Ants, and many other titles. After working 18 years in the printing business, retired and spent his remaining years focusing on his family and maintaining and improving their home on Martha’s Vineyard. Sullo met his wife Alice “Ali” Keefe of Cambridge, on May 1, 1966; the couple married on May 1, 1971. During the intervening years, they joined Volunteers in Service to America. They served as VISTA volunteers in Somerville, New Jersey, working in conjunction with the Somerset County Community Action Program. Rick Sullo died on April 3, 2024, at his summer home in Oak Bluffs, Martha’s Vineyard.

The Rick Sullo Photograph Collection features negatives and contact sheets capturing musical events and performers, including Newport Folk Festival (19641964-1966, 1968-1969), Winter Fest (1966-1967), Pennsylvania Folk Festival (1965), Taj Mahal, Nancy Michaels, Chris Smither, and Siegel-Schwall.

UVC logo

Founded in 1976, originally under the name of the Student Video Project, UMass’ Union Video Center was planned as early as 1972 and quickly gained popularity alongside the general rise of public access television in the late 70s. The UVC’s mission has been consistent throughout its existence, emphasizing their ability to offer students the opportunity to work in/with video production in a structured and organized manner that, at the time, was not generally accessible. Through the UVC’s workshops, students are taught the various aspects of the video production process, surrounding areas such as cinematography, lighting, editing, screenwriting and more. Through these UVC workshops the organization created a community through media made by UMass students. The variety of programs created through UVC are extremely diverse and include original programs like UMass This Week, the UMass Sports Weekly Show, a comedy sketch show known as Yak Back, dating shows and others, as well as documenting hundreds of events on campus. The organization was shepherded in its early years by early founders/directors such as Mark Chesak, David Skillicorn, Irene Starr, Mark Gunning, and Dennis Martin, in addition to many student staff and volunteers.

UVC began with an investment of $30-$40,000 of half inch reel to reel EIAJ video equipment. They were, and still are, one of the few student agencies that receives funding from the Student Government Association, as opposed to other student run organizations that have a budget allocated for them. This difference in funding is specifically garnered for student agencies that are seen as integral to strengthening the student experience at UMass.

Throughout the UVC’s extensive history, they have covered an array of important UMass and community events such as concerts/festivals, distinguished lectures, campus protests, independent student films, sporting events and much more. This collection contains over 3,000 recordings and are on an array of different video formats such as Betamax, VHS, SVHS, EIAJ, CDs, DVDs, VHSC, miniDV, and eventually to digital files and a YouTube channel.  Some highlights from the collection include substantial coverage of artists who have performed at UMass including the Sun Ra Orchestra, Archie Shepp, Jonathan Richman, Black Flag, The Wailers, Dinosaur Jr., Max Roach, Sweet Honey in the Rock and countless others. Other highlights include sizable coverage of UMass’ diverse community events such as the Asian American Student Association’s Asian night celebrations. Furthermore, UVC’s vast coverage of activism and political speakers on campus is documented through lectures by Noam Chomsky and James Baldwin as well as student protests against the invasion of Grenada, the US presence in El Salvador, and Iraq invasion teach-ins. Beyond the events that UVC documented, the collection also sheds light on the inner workings of the organization through correspondence, financial documents , and training material. The collection also includes extensive budget planning, yearly reports of the organization’s goals and accomplishments, video workshop teaching materials, guidelines/manuals, UVC alumni networks, and fliers.

Unidentified DJ in the WMUA master control room, ca. 1985

WMUA is UMass’ student/community run non-commercial FM radio station. In continuous operation since 1948, initially as an AM station, it serves the campus and surrounding communities in the Pioneer Valley and can be heard from the Connecticut to the Vermont border. Beginning in 1948, as students were first establishing the station, WMUA has been a constant presence on campus, weathering budget cuts, leadership upheavals and the rise and fall of radio as a dominant medium.

The records of WMUA document the history of a particularly long-lived organization at the
University of Massachusetts Amherst and reflect the changing culture of the campus. In addition to some administrative and financial records, the collection includes a number of promotional materials, newsclippings, photographs and recordings that reflect the history of the organization. Also noteworthy is a history of WMUA written in 1963 to commemorate its 15th anniversary as well as several oral histories with station alum from different eras. There are also press clippings, ephemera, press releases and recordings from the acclaimed Magic Triangle Jazz Series.

Additionally, there are hundreds of analog and digital recordings of shows that span three decades of the station’s history, with the bulk from 1987-2012. A separate, growing, inventory of the recordings is also available which includes descriptions, dates, and formats of the recordings.

A documentary about WMUA in the 1960s was produced by Stuart Goldman, an alumnus of the station, in 2021.