Collecting area: Performing arts

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.

The Sleeveless Theatre Company was an innovative political theater company with a strong feminist slant. Founded in 1989 by UMass Amherst alumnae Lisa Channer, Maureen Futtner, K. D. Halpin, and Kate Nugent, and Smith alumna, Terianne Falcone, Sleeveless was an actor-centered, highly collaborative ensemble company that wielded humor in staging original, socially- and politically-charged theater. Based in Northampton, Mass., the company toured nationally and internationally, presenting sometimes controversial works on themes ranging from reproductive rights to the Gulf War. As they evolved, they refined their mission to focus on telling stories about the lives and perspectives of women, but under the strains of growing within their collaborative model, they made the decision to disband in 1997.

In addition to minutes for the company’s formative years (1989-1992), the records of Sleeveless Theater Company include a small selection of production notes, background research, fliers, reviews and newsclippings, and a handful of publicity photos. Among the plays represtened are Womb for Rent (1989), War: The Comedy (1991), The F Word (1992), Emily Unplugged (1995), and Mill America (1996).

A theater company of older adults based in Oakland, Calif., Stagebridge is recognized as a pioneer in the field of creative aging. Founded by Stuart Kandell in 1978, the organization sponsors workshops, performances, and other opportunities for lifelong learning that provide a creative means to transform the lives of older adults and their communities through the performing arts. Organized “for and of” older adults, Stagebridge is testimony to the ways in which elders enrich our culture and communities.

The Stagebridge collection contains scrapbooks, photograph albums, news clippings, and some scripts beginning in the earliest years of the organization. Digital materials in the collection are even richer, ranging from videos of performances to promotional materials and organizational records.

A native of New Jersey, Ronald Steele was devoted to both music and photography from an early age. After a tour of duty with the US Air Force Symphony Orchestra and graduate study in violin performance at the University of Michigan, Steele joined the faculty at the University of Massachusetts in 1963. Active as a conductor as well as a performer throughout his career, he was widely known on campus for his popular course, an introduction to music, which was transformed into an award-winning, nationally-syndicated radio show in the mid-1970s. A founder of the UMass Symphony Orchestra (1963) and the Five College Chamber Soloists, Steele resumed his passion for photography in the late 1970s, opening the Ron Steele Photography Studio, which became an increasing creative outlet after his retirement from the university in 1997.

The Steele collection consists of roughly three linear feet of records documenting his career, including corresponce, programs, notes, teaching materials, and photographs. Reflecting his dual creative interests in music and photography, Steele took dozens of photographs of performers and colleagues.

The composer Robert Stern was Professor of Theory and Composition in the Department of Music at UMass Amherst from 1964 until his retirement in 2006. A native of Paterson, N.J., Stern studied at the University of Rochester and the Eastman School of Music before arriving in Amherst. Noted for his use of Jewish themes and subjects, he has been the recipient of numerous awards and honors, including fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, and the Millay Colony for the Arts.

The Stern collection includes six reel to reel audiotapes of performances of Stern’s work at UMass Amherst. These include music of Blood and Milk Songs (1975), music of Burrill Phillips (1975), the New Music Ensemble (1976), and the Pro Musica Moderna concerts (1979, 1980, and 1981).

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.

A composer, performer, poet, educator, and arts administrator, Fred Tillis was one of the major influences on the cultural life at UMass Amherst for forty years. Born in Galveston, Texas, in 1930, Tillis began playing jazz trumpet and saxophone even before his teens. A product of segregated schools, he graduated from Wiley College at the age of 19, and received his MA and PhD in music at the University of Iowa. As a performer and composer of unusual breadth, his work spans both the jazz and European traditions, and he has written for piano and voice, orchestra, choral pieces, chamber music, and in the African American spiritual tradition, drawing upon a wide range of cultural references. After teaching at Wiley, Grambling, and Kentucky State in the 1960s, Tillis was recruited to UMass in 1970 by his former adviser at Iowa, Philip Bezanson, to teach music composition and theory. Earning promotion to Professor in 1973, Tillis was appointed Director of the Fine Arts Center in 1978, helping to jump start some of the most successful arts initiatives the university has seen, including the the Afro American Music and Jazz program, the New World Theater, Augusta Savage Gallery, Asian Arts and Culture Program, and Jazz in July. Upon retirement from UMass in 1997, he was appointed Emeritus Director of the Fine Arts and continued to focus on music and poetry.

The Tillis papers document an extraordinary career in the arts, focused on Fred Tillis’s work as a composer. Consisting primarily of musical scores along with an assortment of professional correspondence relating to his publishing and miscellaneous notes, the collection offers insight into the evolution of Tillis’s musical vision from the 1970s into the new millennium.

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.