Sarah Baker - Community Custodians of Popular Music’s Past: A DIY Approach to Heritage

This book examines do-it-yourself (DIY) approaches to the collection, preservation and display of popular music heritage being undertaken by volunteers in community archives, museums and halls of fame globally. DIY institutions of popular music heritage are much more than unofficial versions of official institutions; rather, they invoke a complex network of affect and sociality, and are sites where interested people often enthusiasts are able to assemble around shared goals related to the preservation of and ownership over the material histories of popular music culture. Drawing on interviews and observations with founders, volunteers and heritage workers in 23 DIY institutions in Australasia, Europe and North America, the book highlights the potentialities of bottom-up, community-based interventions into the archiving and preservation of popular musics material history. It reveals the kinds of collections being housed in these archives, how they are managed and maintained, and explores their relationship to mainstream heritage institutions. The study also considers the cultural labor of volunteers in the DIY institution, arguing that while these are places concerned with heritage management and the preservation of artifacts, they are also extensions of musical communities in the present in which activities around popular music preservation have personal, cultural, community and heritage benefits. By looking at volunteers everyday interventions in the archiving and curating of popular musics material past, the book highlights how DIY institutions build upon national heritage strategies at the community level and have the capacity to contribute to the democratization of popular music heritage. This book will have a broad appeal to a range of scholars in the fields of popular music studies, musicology, ethnomusicology, archive studies and archival science, museum studies, critical heritage studies, cultural studies, cultural sociology and media studies.

Sarah Baker is an Associate Professor of Cultural Sociology at Griffith University, Queensland, Australia.

This series is our home for cutting-edge, upper-level scholarly studies and edited collections. Considering music performance, theory, and culture alongside topics such as gender, race, ecology, film, religion, politics, and science, titles are characterized by dynamic interventions into established subjects and innovative studies on emerging topics.

For a full list of titles in this series, please visit https://www.routledge.com/Routledge-Research-in-Music/book-series/RRM

Masculinity in Opera

Gender, History, and New Musicology

Edited by Philip Purvis

Music in Films on the Middle Ages

Authenticity vs. Fantasy

John Haines

Popular Music in a Digital Music Economy

Problems and Practices for a Service Industry

Tim J. Anderson

Music, Performance, and the Realities of Film

Shared Concert Experiences in Screen Fiction

Ben Winters

The Modern Percussion Revolution

Journeys of the Progressive Artist

Edited by Kevin Lewis and Gustavo Aguilar

Community Custodians of Popular Musics Past

A DIY Approach to Heritage

Edited by Sarah Baker

Opera in a Multicultural World

Coloniality, Culture, Performance

Edited by Mary I. Ingraham, Joseph K. So, and Roy Moodley

Current Directions in Ecomusicology

Music, Culture, Nature

Edited by Aaron S. Allen and Kevin Dawe

Burma, Kipling and Western Music

The Riff from Mandalay

Andrew Selth

A DIY Approach to Heritage

Sarah Baker

First published 2018

by Routledge

2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN

and by Routledge

711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

2018 Sarah Baker

The right of Sarah Baker to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data

A catalog record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Baker, Sarah, 1977- author.

Title: Community custodians of popular musics past: a DIY

approach to heritage / Sarah Baker.

Description: Abingdon, Oxon; New York, NY: Routledge, 2018. |

Series: Routledge research in music | Includes bibliographical

references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017016971 | ISBN 9781138961203 (hardback) |

ISBN 9781317335504 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Popular music archives. | Music museums. |

Popular musicHistoriography.

Classification: LCC ML3470. B355 2018 | DDC 781.64075dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017016971

ISBN: 978-1-138-96120-3 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-1-315-65992-3 (ebk)

Typeset in Times New Roman

by codeMantra

Every effort has been made to contact copyright holders. Please advise the publisher of any errors or omissions, and these will be corrected in subsequent editions.

For Alison Huber, whose presence can be felt across the pages of this book

Many people have contributed to the making of this book. First and foremost, my thanks go to Alison Huber, who I worked so closely with on the Australian Research Council (ARC)-funded project Popular music and cultural memory (201012, DP1092910). It was during this collaboration that my interest in community archives, museums and halls of fame emerged. Together we looked at a small number of community-based popular music archives and museums. This research with Alison produced a typology of the DIY institution, a case study of the Victorian Jazz Archive, and a consideration of the role of the DIY institution in saving rubbish. Some material from these co-authored works appears in this book:

• Baker, Sarah and Alison Huber. 2015. Saving rubbish: preserving popular musics material culture in amateur archives and museums. In Sites of Popular Music Heritage: Memories, Histories, Places, edited by Sara Cohen, Rob Knifton, Marion Leonard and Les Roberts, 112124. New York: Routledge.

• Baker, Sarah and Alison Huber. 2013. Notes towards a typology of the DIY institution: identifying do-it-yourself places of popular music preservation.