Archives and Special Collections

Archives, Historical Records, Special Collections

Staff Picks: Selections from the Larry Katz Interviews

By Emily Allen and Anna Ryerson

Cassette tapes lined up

There is nothing more fascinating than listening to musicians describe the process, passion, and dedication that goes into making music. This is something we learned first-hand while working with the Katz Tapes collection. The Katz Tapes were compiled by Larry Katz, a former music critic and columnist at the Boston Herald and a personable and thoughtful interviewer. Katz recorded hundreds of interviews he conducted with musicians, both internationally famous and local Boston-based artists. The majority of the collection focuses on music and musicians, but there are also interviews with authors, writers, comedians, and actors. Overall, the scope and variety within the collection is impressive. From Liza Minelli to Willie Nelson to Miles Davis: classical, jazz, rock, R&B, and pop artists are all represented.

When the Northeastern University Library received the Katz Tapes’ digitized files, we identified a subset with known description and file questions. Incomplete description made it hard to determine who was being interviewed. File issues to solve involved trimming content like white noise, silence, or music. Our job was to listen to the tapes in this subset to resolve these issues, and to confirm who was being interviewed so that researchers and members of the Northeastern community can better access these rich sources of music history.

We would love to share some of our favorite interviews with you:

Emily Allen’s Picks:

  • Hal Blaine—If you only listen to one Katz interview in the whole collection, this is the one I would recommend! Hal Blaine was a drummer and a session musician in the 1960s and ’70s. Sessions musicians are artists who are hired to play for specific recording sessions or live performances, and often end up playing with a lot of different artists and bands. Blaine was a prolific session musician in his own right and a member of The Wrecking Crew, a famous session musician group. Inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2000, Blaine played drums for 40 songs that reached number one. Blaine discussed several performers he worked with, including Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley, The Monkees, The Beach Boys, and The Carpenters. His personal anecdotes and the way he speaks about these legendary artists is what makes this interview stand out from the rest. Talk about name dropping!
A black and white photo of Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg looking at a book
American beat writers Jack Kerouac (1922 – 1969) (left) and Allen Ginsberg (1926 – 1997) read a book together, 1959. Kerouac holds a cigarette in one hand. (Photo by John Cohen/Getty Images)
  • Allen Ginsberg—Allen Ginsberg, an American poet and writer who was famous for being a part of the Beat Generation, is someone I knew very little about. I never studied this period in American history, and while I have heard of Ginsberg, I did not know anything about him or his work. The way Ginsberg answers questions is insightful and his longtime partner Peter Orlovsky was present and interjects at various points during the interview. If you’re a fan of Ginsberg or interested in learning more about the Beat Generation or Jack Kerouac, give this interview a listen!
  • Henry Kaiser—I had never heard of Henry Kaiser prior to this project, but he is an American guitarist and composer. During this interview, Kaiser discusses the album The Sweet Sunny North, which he made in collaboration with David Lindley and a host of Norwegian musicians and instrumentalists. This album is meant to highlight various Norwegian musical traditions and styles. Previously, Kaiser and Lindley recorded a similar album, but with musicians from Madagascar. I think it is such an ingenious idea and album concept to immerse yourself in the music of a completely foreign country, promote new styles of music to American audiences, and introduce lesser-known and unknown musicians to a wider audience.
  • Yoko Ono—Everyone knows Yoko Ono as the woman who broke up The Beatles, but besides that dubious claim, I don’t think I’ve ever learned about or heard Ono speak. This was a group interview with several Boston-area reporters, including Katz, asking Ono questions. The interview was conducted because a touring exhibition of artwork created by John Lennon and Ono was making a stop in Boston. Highlights of the interview include her in-depth discussion of Lennon and the surprising admission that Boston has a special place in her heart.
  • George Winston—George Winston is also a musician I had never heard of, but he is an American pianist with a massive discography. The interview was unexpected because Winston discusses his dislike of the piano, a surprising admission for a professional pianist! When Katz asks if he ever practices or plays piano just to play, Winston states that he only practices or plays (outside of scheduled performances) when he’s touring! He never listens to piano music at home and easily tires of listening to classical piano music. Instead, Winston prefers the guitar and enjoys listening to guitar and harp music in his spare time.

Anna Ryerson’s Picks:

Lindsey Buckingham plays guitar on a stage
Lindsey Buckingham
  • Lindsey Buckingham—Lindsey Buckingham talks to Katz shortly after the release of Fleetwood Mac’s album Tango in the Night, which Buckingham compares favorably to their previous album Mirage, calling it a more experimental album. He shares how he came to work more on the production side of the group’s records. Interestingly, Buckingham took a decade-long hiatus from Fleetwood Mac within a year of this interview. Although he shares his desire to work on more solo material, he does not hint that he might be leaving the group any time soon.
  • Jerry Butler—Jerry Butler was originally a musician and singer-songwriter, but Katz interviews him later in his career when serves as chairman of the board of directors of the Rhythm and Blues Foundation, so this interview gives more insight into the practical side of the music industry. Butler talks about his organization’s decision to move their annual event from Los Angeles (where it took place at the same time as the Grammys) to New York, in order to make more money to help pay the medical bills and other necessities of older musicians without a safety net. Butler also talks about the importance of proper recognition in situations where newer musicians are borrowing from and taking inspiration from older ones, and how excited he is to be able to honor songwriter Clyde Otis, who contributed to the songs of so many other artists.
  • Jim Carroll—An author and poet as well as a musician, Jim Carroll was best known for writing the memoir Basketball Diaries, which became a movie starring Leonardo DiCaprio. When Katz interviews him, he does talk about the music industry and his career as a punk musician but focuses more on his experiences in the poetry scene and on his own writing. Carroll, who played basketball at a high level in high school, mentions his love of the sport in both Basketball Diaries and his second memoir Forced Entries: The Downtown Diaries 1971-1973. However, he tells Katz that he does not regret focusing more on poetry than on basketball as a young adult, particularly considering the longevity of his work in poetry and in writing in general. Thirty-seven years old at the time of this interview, he considers himself “still a young writer” but feels he would “be a very old basketball player.”
  • James Carter—Katz interviewed James Carter shortly after the filming of the 1996 movie Kansas City, where he worked with actor and musician Harry Belafonte to pay tribute to great Kansas City jazz musicians of the 1930s. Carter played the famous saxophonist Ben Webster. Carter also talks about his desire to pay tribute to other jazz artists, including some who had never been recorded before, and talks about his recent album, Conversin’ with the Elders, which showcases a long continuum of great jazz musicians.
  • Ornette Coleman—A saxophonist, violinist, and trumpeter, Ornette Coleman was best known for his jazz compositions and performances, but when interviewed by Katz, alongside his friend Randy Harrison, he shares a fascinating story about an experience with classical music. When Coleman hoped to perform in England, he was told by the British government that he first needed to write a piece of classical music and qualify as a concert artist. He ended up writing a piece of music called “Forms and Sounds” for himself and a woodwind quintet. He also talks to Katz about how he taught himself how to play the violin!

We hope that these remarkable examples give you some idea of the value of recorded interviews in the music world. It’s particularly interesting to hear the voices and intonations of these musicians, people whose lives were built on sound, and sometimes the interface between sound and the spoken (or sung) word. In addition, through these interviews, you can learn a great deal about the history and the making of music—because they are contemporaneous recordings, they capture the creative process as it occurs.

The best part of working with any kind of archival material is that opportunity for discovery, and the surprises that you will encounter!

The Equal Rights Amendment: A Journey for Women’s Liberation

On January 27, 2022, the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) officially took effect two years after it was ratified with Virginia’s historic vote as the 38th state to support the amendment. The ratification of this version of the ERA, which was introduced to Congress in 1972, took 48 years to complete. The ERA begins:

“Women shall have equal rights in the United States and every place subject to its jurisdiction. Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.”

A woman wearing sunglasses, a white button-down shirt, and a large button that says "ERA YES" holds her right fist in the air and yells.
A woman takes part in the ERA March to the Common in 1982. Photographed for the Boston Globe by Wendy Maeda.

Initially drafted in 1923 by Crystal Eastman and Alice Paul, the ERA was seen as the next step to take for women’s liberation following the passing of the 19th amendment, which gave women the right to vote and prevented them (on paper) from being disenfranchised. Women’s suffrage movements occupied a great space in the American consciousness throughout the end of the 20th century and the first two decades of the 21st century.

Empowered by this, Bostonian women formed groups to keep advocating for women’s rights, even as the passage of the ERA throughout this period did not look promising. Organizations such as the Reproductive Rights National Network and individuals like Sondra Gayle Stein worked tirelessly to advance gender equality in the legislature and in the streets. The Northeastern University Archives and Special Collections (NUASC) is fortunate to maintain the records of many women’s rights organizations that have worked for change throughout the Boston area.

NUASC also holds the Boston Globe Library collection, which contains photographs of life in and around Boston and includes photographs of demonstrations and protests, including those featured in this blog post. More can be found through Northeastern’s Digital Repository Service.

A large group of protestors hold signs with messages of women's power and urging the stoppage of sex discrimination.
Equal rights demonstrators gather on Boston Common in 1970. Photographed for the Boston Globe by Elizabeth Jones.

Fortunately for the ERA, a sea change within the legislative branch took place in 1970, when more women than ever before were elected to Congress and were persistent in pursuing the ratification of the ERA. The ERA in its final form that we know today was brought before Congress for its next steps in 1972.

NUASC has a wealth of information on women’s organizations in Boston, such as the Women’s Educational Center, The Second Wave: A Magazine of the New Feminism, and the Women’s School, all of which were organizations that existed in the 1970s-1990s to further women’s rights, promote discussion of feminist theory, and organize for women and other marginalized groups in the Boston area. The records of these organizations and many more groups and people are available for research for all Northeastern students, faculty, and staff, and the greater Boston community, at the Archives and Special Collections.

Sources:
Codrington, Wilfred U., and Alex Cohen. “The Equal Rights Amendment Explained.” Brennan Center for Justice, October 9, 2019.

“Equal Rights Amendment.” Equal Rights Amendment, 2018.

Wegman, Jesse. “Opinion: Why Can’t We Make Women’s Equality the Law of the Land?” New York Times, New York Times, January 28, 2022.

“ERA march to common.” Boston Globe Library collection (M214). University Library Archives and Special Collections Department.

“Equal rights women gather on Boston Common.” Boston Globe Library collection (M214). University Library Archives and Special Collections Department.

Celebrating Women’s History Month in East Boston

In honor of Women’s History Month, the Northeastern University Archives and Special Collections is highlighting the work and accomplishments of two East Boston women: Evelyn Morash and Mary Ellen Welch. Their decades of community organizing and advocacy beginning in the 1960s were effective in improving the quality of life for residents in their neighborhoods, from the establishment of parks and greenspaces to improvements in their neighborhood schools, improved access to healthcare, and mitigation around air and noise pollution from the airport.

A group of people stand in front of a rendering of a community center. The woman in the center is pointing at it while the others look on
Edith DeAngelis, Anna DeFronzo, and Evelyn Morash, pictured with two others, January 12, 1972. Photo by Charles Carey, Boston Globe.)

Meet Evelyn Morash
Evelyn Morash grew up in East Boston in the 1930s and ’40s, the daughter of Italian immigrants. As an adult with children in the Boston Public Schools in the 1960s, Evelyn became an outspoken advocate for desegregation and improving education in all the city’s schools. In 1970, she founded the advisory committee Parents and Teachers Who Care, a coalition that grew out of her efforts to ensure school libraries in all of East Boston’s elementary schools. During this same time, Evelyn worked with other community members to establish the East Boston Neighborhood Health Center, which opened in 1970 to serve a geographically isolated and largely immigrant and low-income community. She later served on its board in the 1980s.

Recognizing her leadership around issues of education in East Boston, Governor Francis Sargent appointed Evelyn to the Massachusetts State Board of Education in 1973, where she prioritized making quality vocational education available for women, since secretarial training was women’s only option at the time. Following the 1974 court order to desegregate Boston’s public schools, Judge Arthur Garrity appointed her to serve on the Citywide Coordinating Council, an autonomous oversight committee to monitor the progress of desegregation efforts across the city. Along with her city- and state-level work, Evelyn continued to focus her activism on East Boston, later serving on the planning committee for the construction of the Mario Umana Academy in the 1980s, where she fought for the new building to serve both as a school and community center for the neighborhood.

The Northeastern University Archives and Special Collections maintains oral histories and written records of Evelyn’s organizing efforts and achievements. In 1997, Evelyn was interviewed as part of the East Boston Greenway Council’s Oral History Project, an effort to capture memories of East Boston from before the expansion of Logan Airport in the 1960s and ’70s and to reflect on changes to the neighborhood. In the recorded conversation with fellow East Boston activist Roberta Marchi, Evelyn describes her early life in East Boston, her involvement with the Girl Scouts, her efforts to establish the East Boston Neighborhood Health Center, and how she got involved in school advocacy. You can listen to both parts of Evelyn’s interview in the Digital Repository Service (DRS) (Part 1 and Part 2).

Two decades later in 2018, Evelyn was interviewed by Greta de Jong about her role in parent organizations during school desegregation in the 1970s and other efforts around school reform. You can listen to the interview and view accompanying materials in the DRS here.

A black and white photo of a woman standing in front of city planning map and pointing while two seated men look on.
Mary Ellen Welch presenting to Massachusetts Port Authority leadership, August 21, 1969. Photo by Charles Dixon, Boston Globe.)

Meet Mary Ellen Welch
Mary Ellen Welch was an indefatigable activist and teacher at the Hugh R. O’Donnell Elementary School in East Boston, who advocated for civil rights and affordable housing, and against the impacts of airport expansion felt by many East Boston residents, such as noise and air pollution. Throughout her decades of activism, Mary Ellen was active across numerous causes and groups, including the East Boston Neighborhood Council, the East Boston Area Planning Action Council, and Airport Impact Relief.

In the mid-1980s, Mary Ellen, as a member of the East Boston Ecumenical Community Council, joined a newly formed housing committee to address the many issues facing East Boston housing, including absentee owners, rising rents, and lack of aid for the new wave of immigrants from Southeast Asia and Latin America. The committee soon incorporated as its own entity in 1986 under the name NOAH, East Boston’s Neighborhood of Affordable Housing, with Mary Ellen as its first president. Anna DeFronzo, Lucy and William Ferullo, Evelyn Morash, and other prominent East Boston activists participated in establishing the community development corporation.

While the legacy of her neighborhood improvement activism is visible throughout East Boston, it is no better appreciated than along the collection of parks joined by a walking and biking path called the Greenway. In the late 1990s, Mary Ellen helped found the East Boston Greenway Council, a community group that worked with the Boston Natural Areas Fund to identify areas in the neighborhood to transform into recreational greenspace, including the old Conrail railroad yard, now the location of Bremen Street Park. Construction on the East Boston Greenway broke ground in 1997 and opened its first completed section in 2007. Following her death in 2019, the East Boston Greenway was renamed the Mary Ellen Welch Greenway in her honor.

The Mary Ellen Welch papers include personal papers, event flyers, newspaper clippings, reports, letters from O’Donnell Elementary School children to Massport, and other correspondence, the bulk of which relate to Mary Ellen’s anti-airport activism. The collection is available for viewing and research at the Northeastern University Archives and Special Collections.

Further Reading
Evelyn Morash and Mary Ellen Welch participated in a large network of activists and community organizers in East Boston, including Anna DeFronzo, Edith DeAngelis, Roberta Marchi, and the staff at the East Boston Community News. For more archival materials and biographies about these and other East Boston community figures, be sure to check out the following resources:

Library team works to digitize Boston Gay Men’s Chorus performances

The Northeastern University Archives and Special Collections is fortunate to have the records of the Boston Gay Men’s Chorus (BGMC), founded in 1982. BGMC is a 200-voice community ensemble that sings popular and classical music and works to “inspire change, build community, and celebrate difference.”

A black and white photo of a Boston Gay Men's Chorus live performance, with a view of center stage and a pianist, from 1987.
Boston Gay Men’s Chorus live performance, view of center stage and pianist, 1987 https://repository.library.northeastern.edu/files/neu:m041vr30r

Some chorus recordings are already available in Northeastern’s Digital Repository Service (DRS) but there are many more in the Archives that haven’t been digitized yet. Recently, members of BGMC working on a documentary requested the digitization of recordings on 1/4″ reel-to-reel tape and Digital Audio Tape (DAT) from the 1980s and 1990s. These recordings included holiday performances, Pride concerts, and a collaboration with the Connecticut Gay Men’s Chorus.

A black and white photo of a group of men walking down a street. Two men in the front hold a large banner that reads "Boston Gay Men's Chorus" while someone in the back holds a flag that says "BGMC Pride"
Boston Gay Men’s Chorus march in Boston’s Pride parade
https://repository.library.northeastern.edu/files/neu:m041vr24m
A small DAT cassette tape
DAT cassette

We’re always happy to help make the collections accessible, but the digitization of older audiovisual formats presents challenges. DAT cassettes were released in 1987 and used throughout the 1990s. They encode digital information onto magnetic media and allow for high quality recordings. However, Sony stopped producing DAT cassette decks in 2005 and few people know how to maintain the equipment needed to digitize them. In addition, use of an out-of-repair machine might damage the tape. You can read more about the preservation issues with DAT in archival collections here and here. Luckily, we were able to work with National Boston to digitize these DATs with no issues.

A reel-to-reel tape and deck
A reel-to-reel tape and deck

The reel-to-reel or open reel format using magnetic tapes was popular from the 1940s through the 1980s. We also sent our reel-to-reel tapes to National Boston but due to the age and condition of the materials, an extra step was required. Many of the tapes had sticky shed syndrome. This preservation issue is common and affects magnetic media. The tape has three layers: the magnetic portion which contains the information; the base layer; and the binding agent. Sticky shed syndrome causes the binder to degrade, leading the tape to shed bits of itself while being played. Since this causes irreversible loss of information, tapes with sticky shed should be baked before playback. This involves putting them in an oven at a low heat to rebind the layers. You can read more about baking tapes at the Library of Congress here.

Luckily, these gorgeous vocal performances are now preserved in our repository and available here. Thanks to my colleagues in the Archives, especially Molly Brown, and to my colleagues in Digital Metadata, especially Anna Ryerson, for their work coordinating the request and cataloging the recordings.

A group of men in tuxedos and dress clothes stand informally smiling and chatting. Two men in the center pose for the camera hugging and making kiss faces.
Boston Gay Men’s Chorus members talking pre-performance
https://repository.library.northeastern.edu/files/neu:m041vq97x

The Faces Behind History: Working for the CRRJ

Students of history become familiar with the vast array of human accomplishments. With that knowledge also comes an understanding of human cruelty and racial violence: a perspective humanity shies away from. Perhaps one of the greatest examples of social depravity was in the Jim Crow-era South, a topic I only knew from textbooks and lectures. Working for the Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project completely changed my awareness of the subject and opened my eyes to the importance of restorative justice.

The CRRJ (part of the Northeastern University School of Law) spearheads a variety of projects meant to bring justice to the victims of racial crimes. Examples of restorative justice include public apologies, memorials, and reconciliation through education. The efforts of the CRRJ not only provide closure and honorable memory to the families of victims, but also valuable opportunities for law students to advance in their field.

Scanned black-and-white photo of George Stinney, a young boy wearing a dark jacket and hat
George Stinney The Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project, “George Stinney,” Year End Report 2014, 12.

An essential part of the CRRJ’s efforts is the Burnham-Nobles Archive. With an abundance of records (such as police records and death certificates, among many others), the archive serves as the CRRJ’s central hub of information. The latest archive project (set to unveil in 2022) is to transform this data into an interactive and accessible platform that is open to students, researchers, and families. Blending academia, restorative justice, and technology isn’t an easy feat, but it is a relevant and necessary undertaking in today’s society.

I was hired in April of 2021 to work part time assisting the CRRJ’s Burnham-Nobles Archive. I was interested in the position as I recently entered an MA program in Public History and want to work in the archival field. Before working with the project, I was simply passionate about doing archive-related tasks: I didn’t quite realize the breadth of the CRRJ’s project.

It was not until I started doing actual work that I realized the depths of the horror that was the Jim Crow South. It’s one thing to learn about racial violence, but it’s entirely different to work “face to face” with it. One of my first assigned projects was to code cases from Alabama according to the CRRJ’s v1 data dictionary. This seemed straightforward until I began learning about each victim’s story, their age, and their manner of death. Suddenly, the task had taken on a new level of importance: these weren’t faceless victims of race crimes. They were children, parents, siblings, soldiers, students, and workers—human beings senselessly cut down and unprotected by the law. A tragic example is 14-year-old George Stinney (above), a young boy sent to the electric chair on an unfounded accusation of the murder of two white girls.

Today, my outlook on the project is entirely different, and I have learned so much about the history of racial violence in the South, as well as the important connection between archives, history, and social justice. I have worked on a variety of assignments for the CRRJ, including coding work, GeoNames verifications, case abstract extraction/organization, and work on AirTable.

Working for the CRRJ has been essential for my Public History studies because it has given me the “human” element so often missing from the academic world. While I have learned about racial injustice and violence in the past, working for the CRRJ has allowed me to see each incident on an individual level. Additionally, I feel as if I am actually doing something with my work. Rather than just learning about what happened in the Jim Crow era, I feel that my work is helping the CRRJ accomplish its restorative goals to bring justice to the victims.

The CRRJ and the Burnham-Nobles Archives are leaders in the restorative justice movement, and they have given me valuable experience on both a technical level and a deeply human level.