Collecting area: Music

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.

Jazz musician and collector George G. Loring, known as Gid, played the cornet with a number of bands including his own (Gid’s Giddy Gang), especially after retiring from a career in the financial industry. Although he never considered himself a professional musician, he kept busy playing professional and semi-professional gigs and casual jam sessions in the Boston area, occasionally in his own home in Manchester, Mass. In addition to jazz, he played swing and Dixieland. Also dedicated to the environment, he was a founder of the Manchester Conservation Trust in 1963.

This collection contains an assortment of material relating to and describing jazz music and performances mainly from the 1940s through the 1960s, including collections of letters by musicians Jim Wheaton and James Weaver (mostly written in the early 1990s), notes about Boston Jazz Society performances, and ephemera including programs and clippings, with an emphasis on Louis Armstrong.

Born on March 24, 1938, in California, Melvin James Lyman was a writer and musician, playing both the harmonica and banjo. During the 1960s, he joined Jim Kweskin’s jug band and performed as a soloist, becoming a prominent figure in the folk scene. Mel Lyman’s recordings were released by Reprise records, a leading music label, and he was regularly featured in The Broadside, Sing Out, and other magazines of the folk revival. He died in 1978.

The Lyman collection consists of an extensive collection of sound recordings of folk, country, and popular music, maintained by musician Mel Lyman (1938-1978). Among the hundreds of disks are rare 78 rpm records of blues and country performers.

The Massachusetts State College Glee Club recorded ten songs onto 78 r.p.m. disk in the mid-1930s. One of the few early recordings of the group, the recording includes the Massachusetts State College alma mater, fight songs, and other typical collegiate fare.

Listen to the Glee Club

Miscellaneous Manuscripts is an artificial collection that brings together single items and small groups of related materials. Although the collection reflects the general collecting emphases in SCUA, particularly the history of New England, the content ranges widely in theme and format.

Bob Morey photographed the folk scene in New England during the late 1960s and early 1970s, concentrating especially on Club 47 and other venues in Cambridge and Boston.

Consisting primarily of images of musicians in performance, the Morey collection contains prints of Eric Anderson, Chuck Berry, Donovan, Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, and Frank Zappa, among others, along with a few contact sheets. Also included are an issue of Broadside and a run of monthly calendars from Club 47 dating between September 1966 and the summer 1967.

A fixture of the Boston Jazz scene, Bernie Moss began taking photographs in the early 1960s, capturing musicians on stage and after hours in the clubs he frequented. Musicians that Moss would meet at Connelly’s, the Savoy Cafe, Lennie’s on the Turnpike, and later the Jazz Workshop, would often come to Moss’s apartment at 11 Queensberry Street where he would give them a place to stay and a meal. His generosity and love of the music and musicians was renown among the top artists of the era; inspiring Dexter Gordon to compose the song “Boston” Bernie Moss in his honor. Moss was born on Christmas day in 1908 and grew up in a Jewish household. He played trombone as a member of the Massachusetts National Guard 241st Coast Artillery Regiment from 1929 to approximately 1939 but spent the remainder of his life looking after the Boston apartment buildings he inherited from his father, known as the Moss Realty Co. According to Nat Hentoff in his memoir Boston Boy, “he took care that none of his tenants ever knew him as a landlord. His brother collected the rent, and the janitor received all the complaints about services. Bernie just showed up to talk about jazz.” Moss died on February 13th, 1988.

The Bernie Moss Photograph Collection primarily consists of Moss’s color photographs taken at Boston Jazz clubs in the 1960s and early 1970s. The photographs include musicians Alan Dawson, Roy Haynes, John Coltrane, Ben Webster, Dizzy Gillespie, Yusef Lateef, Herbie Hancock, Art Blakey, and many more. Moss’s amateur style brings life to some of the most important years of modern Jazz, showing Jazz greats at the height of their powers, often in informal settings. Many photographs were mounted and catalogued as part of a traveling exhibit curated by the Boston Jazz Society.

Undated photograph of Bobby Naughton playing the vibraphone in a recording studio

Robert Joseph “Bobby” Naughton was an American vibraphonist, pianist, and composer in the avant-garde/21st Century modern/improv tradition of jazz that evolved in the 1960s and early 1970s. Originally a pianist, Naughton became known as a vibraphonist. Besides writing and recording his own compositions, he collaborated with other artists including trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith and his New Dalta Ahkri Ensemble, Sheila Jordan, Perry Robinson, Anthony Braxton and the Creative Music Orchestra. Naughton was an integral member of the Connecticut creative music network of the 1970’s.

Born in Boston on June 25, 1944 to William and Rose Mary Naughton, Bobby studied piano from the age of seven through his teens and played in several rock, blues, and lounge bands. He served in the U.S. Army and studied painting in art school. In the late 1960s, he began playing vibraphone, accompanying Sheila Jordan and clarinetist Perry Robinson where he participated in New York’s legendary loft jazz scene. In 1969, Naughton recorded for the first time. His debut album, Nature’s Consort, was released on his own Otic record label, where he continued to release music throughout his career. In 1976, along with Wadada Leo Smith, he became involved with the non-profit Creative Musicians’ Improviser’s Forum (CMIF), a collective that supported musicians, presented concerts, and was loosely based on Chicago’s Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM). Some of Naughton’s other credits include composing music for the silent film Everyday by German artist Hans Richter, playing in the Jazz Composers Orchestra in 1972, and touring Europe with Anthony Braxton and the Creative Music Orchestra in 1978 and 1982.

In the 1980s, seeking a steady income and health insurance, Naughton moved to Providence, RI and began working as a locksmith. He recorded again in 2008, with drummer Laurence Cook and bassist Joe Fonda, leading to the album Pawtucket. Naughton died at the age of 78 in 2022.

The centerpiece of Naughton’s collection is a trove of live recordings recorded on 7″ and 5″ reel to reel tapes, cassettes, and CDs made between 1967-2018. These recordings document every period of Naughton’s career and his various collaborations. The recordings are supplemented with sheet music, posters, clippings, administrative paperwork, some photos, 1/4″ and 1/2″ reel masters of Naughton’s albums, and copies of his released albums on vinyl and CD.

New Song Library letterhead

Founded by Johanna Halbeisen in 1974, the New Song Library was a collaborative resource for sharing music with performers, teachers and community activists, who in turn shared with a wide variety of audiences. Based initially in Boston, the Library was devoted to the music of social change and particularly music that reflected the lives and aspirations of workers, women and men, elders and young people, gays and lesbians, other minorities, and Third World people.

This collection contains over forty years of organizational and operational records of the New Song Library along with hundreds of sound recordings, primarily audiocassettes made at concerts, music festivals, song swaps, and gatherings of the People’s Music Network. The Library also collected newsletters and magazines on folk music, and most importantly dozens of privately produced songbooks and song indexes.