From a shoebox of forgotten tapes, a folk music collection emerges

By THOMAS CONNER Pop Music Critic/tconner@suntimes.com December 12, 2011 8:20PM

In the music world, there are few bad stories that begin with the discovery of a shoebox packed with mystery tapes.

“They’ve been here since I arrived in 1999,” says Colby Maddox, archivist at Chicago’s Old Town School of Folk Music, describing the two boxes he found in the school’s basement. “We had just moved to this building [on Lincoln Avenue], and I finally got into it one day. They were DAT tapes, obviously transfers of a lot of old reel-to-reel recordings. A lot of it proved to be just junk, but” — he chuckles — “some of it was pretty great.”

After 10 years, three grants and countless man-hours deciphering the tapes, editing down the good stuff, transferring it all to digital files and getting legal clearances, these long-neglected recordings of Old Town School concerts are out as a four-volume, digital-only “box set” plainly titled “Live From the Old Town School,” available Tuesday on Amazon, CD Baby and iTunes. The 127 selections span the decades, from Mahalia Jackson in the 1950s and Win Stracke, the school’s co-founder, in the 1960s to Jon Langford in the ’90s and Andrew Bird in this century.

The designation “from the Old Town School” is fluid. Many of the performances were captured in the listening room at the school’s current Lincoln Square locale, but others spotlight songs and hootenannies from the school’s earlier Armitage Avenue base, as well as Frank Hamilton singing “Motherless Child” at the Immigrant State Bank Building on North Avenue in 1962, Pete Seeger and Big Bill Broonzy running through “Midnight Special” at Northwestern University in 1956, or a medley by Guy & Candie Carawan during an intimate show at George and Gerry Armstrong’s home in 1978.

The shoeboxes are at the core of this set, but other cassettes and reel-to-reel tapes in a basement cabinet provided more material, each the legacy of a soundman who had the foresight to press the record button as the concerts began. Maddox’s predecessor, Paul Tyler, also managed to copy many tapes from the library at WFMT-FM (98.7), a previous partner of the school; some Old Town School recordings still fuel the station’s continuing “Folkstage” program.

“They had accumulated hundreds of tapes of performances and interviews” in conjunction with the school, Tyler said in a statement.

Ads Maddox, “There was a window where they let Paul do that, and boy, he worked at it. ’FMT and Old Town had a very close relationship. Before the station went classical, you couldn’t tell the difference between the folkies here and there. But before that, Paul got on the L regularly with a DAT deck — not a little one, mind you, a big one — and filled these shoeboxes with transfers. So the picture we have is fairly complete.”

Once everything had been digitized, Maddox loaded the whole collection into the school’s iTunes account — 11,220 songs. Teachers, students, folklorists of various stripes began poking through it, advising what was good, great, amazing.

“This was always meant as a curriculum initiative for us,” Maddox says. “We wanted to pull out things that could be teachable, that showed songs in different lights, stuff that was good but entertaining and also comes out of this tradition of community music. It’s not something to put out as musical wallpaper. This is stuff to listen to — and learn [from]. That’s kind of our whole deal.”

Those thousands of songs were winnowed down to these four batches and mastered by Grammy-nominated producer Michael Freeman (Pinetop Perkins).

The first set is titled “Family,” though it’s a loose definition. Likewise, the “New Folk” section is loosely defined, spanning Joan Baez to Steve Earle, encompassing anything that was “discernable from the music that was predominant before Dylan showed up and blew it apart,” Maddox says. The “Traditional Folk” section features some of those pre-Dylan artists, as well as contemporary players who work within that style. The fourth set focuses on world music, and here a majority of the sessions date from within the last 15 years that brought the school’s expanded international focus.

Why a digital-only release? Cost was the main factor. Plus, this is the medium of the moment.

“All our shows are recorded direct to hard drive now,” Maddox says. “I get three a week.”

In other words, no more shoeboxes — but fans can expect more music to come.