Collecting area: Music

2 Holyoke St., Flywheel's original location circa 2000

In the spring of 1998, two western Massachusetts-based musicians/artists, Cindy Bow and Helen Harrison founded the Valley Arts and Music Alliance (VAMA), a grassroots collective of artists who worked collaboratively to produce free, all-ages shows and art happenings that reflected their own creative visions which operated in opposition to those of the established music industry. VAMA attracted like-minded people, most of whom were already doing similar things in their own homes, churches, dorm basements, record stores, VFW halls, and other non-traditional venues. Together, the group produced over two-dozen shows at The Fridge Art Gallery and other spaces in downtown Amherst, MA and elsewhere. In December of 1998, a friend, supporter, artist, and local lawyer, Stevan Bartone, located a space in Easthampton – a long-vacant cabinet store owned by a local Palestinian-born doctor named Shawki Kanazi located at 2 Holyoke St. that would serve as a home for VAMA.

As word of the space spread, several people joined the fledgling group and VAMA morphed into Flywheel. After a flurry of renovations to the space led by local artist and carpenter Bruce Todd and his dog Mashie, Flywheel opened its doors in March of 1999 with a day-long celebration of music, poetry, comedy, and visual art. For the next eight years, a stable of local bookers, volunteers, supporters, musicians, and artists facilitated a wealth of community-building artistic moments in this unassuming storefront in Easthampton, which at the time was a post-industrial city shaping its artistic future. In 2007, at the invitation of local developer and arts supporter, Will Bundy, Flywheel left 2 Holyoke St. for a larger space in Easthampton’s historic Old Town Hall at 43 Main St. Bundy formed a non-profit, City Space, to manage the building in which Flywheel was a tenant. Flywheel reopened in 2010 after three years of major renovations. In December 2020 Flywheel left Old Town Hall and has continued to program events at unconventional spaces around Western Mass.

The Flywheel collection documents its history from its inception as VAMA in 1998, to its transformation into Flywheel in 1999 and through its continued operation in the early to mid 2000s. These records document the construction and operation of Flywheel’s space at 2 Holyoke Street through photographs, correspondence, meeting minutes, digital files, and financial records. In addition, Flywheel and VAMA’s programming is reflected through vast amounts of promotional materials such as show flyers, posters, monthly schedules, correspondence, contracts, signage, artwork, and audiovisual materials. These items illustrate the rise of the do-it-yourself (D.I.Y.) music scene in Easthampton and Western Massachusetts as well as the national/international underground music community of the late 20th/early 21st century. Established, or soon to be established, “indie” artists such as Versus, Kim Gordon, Lightning Bolt, Ted Leo and the Pharmacists, The Gossip, Pernice Brothers, Dresden Dolls, Pansy Division, High Rise, Bright Eyes, and thousands of experimental artists, filmmakers, and musicians in a variety of genres/mediums from noise, electronic and jazz to hardcore, folk, and punk are represented in printed calendars and flyers. As a volunteer-run, consensus-based 501(c)3 non-profit organization with no paid employees, Flywheel’s success depended on small-scale fundraising efforts, volunteers, and community support. This structure is well documented through meeting minutes, fundraising appeals, a website, internal correspondence, signage, and collaboratively-produced guidebooks. In addition to organizational records, there is a large collection of fanzines and underground publications that constituted Flywheel’s “infoshop”. This collection of over 3,500 publications, which makes up the bulk of the collection, was built over the course of 20 years through donations by volunteers and supporters, show goers, zine makers, and by being listed in Slingshot, the Berkeley, CA anarchist newspaper.

Founded by Betsy Siggins in 2009, Folk New England is an organization dedicated to documenting, preserving, and interpreting the cultural legacy of folk music in all its forms, with an emphasis on New England’s contribution.

The Ephemera Collection consists of dozens of posters, fliers, calendars, and other promotional materials for musical acts collected by Folk New England. Concentrated in the years of the folk revival in the late 1950s to late 1960s, many of the posters were sent to Club 47 in Cambridge, Mass.

Founded by Betsy Siggins in 2009, Folk New England’s mission is to document, preserve, interpret and present the ongoing cultural legacy of folk music in all its forms, with emphasis on New England’s contribution to the enrichment of North American life. The organization continues a dialogue between New England’s distinct folk music heritage and its future, through the establishment of a regional folk music archive, robust collections development and access, multi-disciplinary outreach and education, and engaging entertainment programs for the public.

The Folk New England collections document the folk music scene, broadly construed, with an emphasis on the folk revival of the late 1950s and 1960s to the present. Although the performers and music are central, the growing array of collections also documents producers, venues, photographers, and others involved in the scene.

View all FNE collections

Raised in suburban Boston, Charlie Frizzell became a well-known photographer of the music scene during the height of the folk revival of the early 1960s. At the age of 14, Frizzell took up photography after landing his first job at a camera shop, and he developed his talents under the mentorship of a local commerical photographer, Bob O’Shaughnessy. As a regular at Club 47 in Cambridge, Frizzell photographed the most popular performers of the era, from Bob Dylan and Joan Baez to Geoff and Maria Muldaur and Jim Kweskin. He left Massachusetts in the late 1960s for Berkeley, Calif., and according to folklorist Millie Rahn, created a sort of conduit between the music scenes in Berkeley and Cambridge. Frizzell died in Berkeley on May 29, 2004, following complications from a liver transplant.

Dating primarily from the mid-1960s, the collection includes approximately 50 prints and some negatives from Charlie Frizzell, including images of Jim Kweskin, Maria Muldaur, Bob Siggins, and Bonnie Dobson, along with images of performances at Newport Folk Festival.

While in college, Tommy Hadges expected to become a dentist. After graduating with a Biology degree from Tufts University, he attended Harvard Dental School for 18 months, but discovered that his calling wasn’t in dentistry, it was in radio. While at Tufts, Hadges was involved in resurrecting Tufts’ campus station WTUR, & also worked at the MIT student-run broadcast radio station WTBS. Still an undergraduate, Hadges was recruited by Ray Riepen in 1968 to be among the first DJs (along with along with fellow WTUR announcers Joe Rogers & J.J. Jackson) at WBCN, Riepen’s experiment to bring freeform, rock radio to Boston. WBCN was a massive and groundbreaking success, and after 2 years splitting school with part-time announcing at WBCN, Hadges returned to the station in 1970 to be a full time announcer. Hadges was promoted to Program Director at WBCN in 1977 and then left to become Program Director for neighboring WCOZ in 1978. Hadges gathered significant experience in commercial radio at WCOZ and later at Los Angeles’ KLOS, where he doubled the station’s ratings. This experience positioned him to become a consultant with Pollack Media Group, eventually becoming President & spending several decades helping grow the consultancy into a major international business, serving as a radio producer for international broadcasts (including the Live Aid, Live 8 and Live Earth concerts) and helping new stations build technical infrastructure. Hadges retired from Pollack Media Group in 2018.

The Tommy Hadges Papers document his years at WBCN in Boston, and includes photographs — some of the only depicting WBCN’s Stuart Street location, ephemera, and promotional materials.

Advances in color printing technologies combined with decreasing costs of publication led to a flowering of illustrated sheet music between 1890 and the 1920s.

This small collection is comprised of illustrated sheet music dating primarily from the first quarter of the twentieth century. Representing a cross-section of popular music at the time from minstrel tunes to patriotic marches, most of the songs were selected either for their representation of African Americans (usually in stereotypical and racist caricature) or as examples of pro-war propaganda during the First World War.

The author, publisher, and radical bookseller Michael Katanka (1922-1983) was a staunch Socialist and historian of British labor. Beginning with his 1868: Year of Unions in 1968, Katanka wrote or edited a series of books and articles on Fabianism, satirical caricature, and trade unionism.

The Katanka-Fraser Political Music Collection consists of audio recordings, sheet music, and songbooks of politically-inspired music in a variety of languages. The works range from the English and German Socialist press of the 1880s to the antiwar movement of the 1960s and 1970s, touching upon labor agitation, proletarian songs, student protest, the anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist struggles, the Spanish Civil War, and Communism and Socialism. The collection also includes a few books and sound recordings from the extreme right in Nazi Germany.

A stylistic innovator and influential performer on the five string banjo, Bill Keith is credited with transforming the instrument from a largely percussive role into a one where it carried the melody. A native of Boston and 1961 graduate of Amherst College, Keith cut his teeth as a performer in New England clubs during the hey day of the folk revival, often partnering with his college roomate Jim Rooney, and he spent the better part of the decade as a member of two high profile acts: Bill Monroe’s Bluegrass Boys, with whom he played for eight critical months in 1963, and the Jim Kweskin Jug Band. Adding the pedal steel guitar to his repertoire, Keith performed on stage and in studio with a stylistically and generationally diverse range of acts including Ian and Sylvia, Judy Collins, Richie Havens, Loudon Wainwright, and the Bee Gees. Keith continued performing nearly to the time of his death by cancer in October 2015.

This small collection of photographs and ephemera documents the musical career of bluegrass legend Bill Keith, including early images playing in coffee houses and at Newport Folk Festival and images of Keith with musical collaborators throughout the 1970s and 1980s. The collection includes a series of photographs and ephemera taken during the 50th anniversary Jug Band Reunion tour of Japan in 2013.

The Jug Band visionary Jim Kweskin was one of the major lights of the 1960s folk revival, and an influential figure in Americana music since. A native New Englander, Kweskin was born in Stamford, Conn., in 1940. As a student at Boston University, he was drawn into the Boston-Cambridge folk scene and inspired to learn the guitar, developing a ragtime-blues fingerpicking technique that he inflected with jazz and blues that became a bedrock style of the folk revival. Following a sojourn in California, he returned to Boston in 1963 and formed the Jug Band with Fritz Richmond, Geoff Muldaur, Bob Siggins, and Bruno Wolfe, later joined by Maria Muldaur, Mel Lyman, Bill Keith, and Richard Greene. The Jug Band developed a national following performing pre-World War II American music, laced with a sense of humor and 1960s sensibility. At the height of their popularity, the Jug Band dissolved in 1968. For several years in the 1980s and 1990s, Kweskin was relatively removed from recording, but he resumed work as a soloist, as a member of the U & I Band, the Texas Sheiks, the Jug Band; and as fellow performer with a long list of artists.

A rich record of eclectic musical tastes and a passion for American music, the Kweskin collection offers important documentation of a major figure on the folk scene. The collection includes scrapbooks, newsclippings, concert posters and fliers, and ephemera from throughout Kweskin’s career, along with hundreds of personal and professional photographs of Kweskin, the Jug Band, U and I, and later collaborations. As an historian of American music, Kweskin also assembled discographies of major artists and labels and built a library of works on blues, country, and other forms of popular music, along with hundreds of 78 rpm records, 45s, LPs, and compact disc recordings. Finally, there are hundreds of reel to reel, cassette, CD, and DVD recordings of Kweskin from throughout his career.

An accomplished concert pianist and composer, Howard Miles Lebow earned both a BA and MFA at the at the Julliard School of Music. Under the tutelage of Edward Steuermann, a pupil of composer Ferruccio Busoni, Lebow exceled as a pianist, performing throughout Europe and the Americas. Joining the rapidly expanding Music faculty at the University of Massachusetts in September 1965, Lebow mixed lecturing and performing until 1968, when he died in an automobile crash at the age of 32. The Howard M. Lebow Scholarship Fund was established in his name in 1968.

The Lebow Collection contains concert programs of many of Lebow’s performances, copy manuscripts, manuscripts of his own compositions, performance notes, and newspapers clippings about and concert programs of other performers. There are also materials that were interleaved within his extensive sheet music collection, now separated and organized by composition. An extensive collection of sheet music has been added to the Libraries’ general collections.