D.C. Music Archive Opens at Gelman Library

New university collection chronicles history of local music, including folk, hardcore, go-go.

October 29, 2014

“Hear In D.C: Vernacular Music in the Nation’s Capital" opened this month at Gelman Library.

Washington’s reputation as a glossy, suited-up political mecca often overshadows its thriving music scenes. The light guitar strumming of folk, the screaming, thunderous vocals of punk rock and the percussion-driven rhythms of go-go showcase just a few of the city’s endemic sounds—and George Washington University Professor of Music Kip Lornell is out to prove there are a lot more in D.C. that need to be heard.

That’s why he partnered with university librarian Tina Plottel, B.A. ’93, and other members of the GW community to form “Hear In D.C: Vernacular Music in the Nation’s Capital,” an archive that turns up the volume on Washington’s music history.

The collection formally opened in late October at the Melvin and Estelle Gelman Library with its first exhibit and a symposium featuring the Folklore Society of Greater Washington President Andy Wallace, Fugazi frontman Ian MacKaye and GW’s artist-in-residence Stephen Wade. The archive is the latest university effort that increases the footprint of GW on the D.C. arts and music scenes.

Kip Lornell.

I saw a void and sought to fill it,” Dr. Lornell explained. “There is no other vernacular music archive dedicated to a particular city or country.”

As an ethnomusicologist, Dr. Lornell constantly is surrounded by sounds of Washington’s past. On the morning of the archive opening, he sits by a wall in his house that’s completely stocked with recordings. On his desk lay copies of the Unicorn Times, a music-focused alternative weekly from the 1970s that he’s been poring over for his forthcoming book on bluegrass in the area.

He started researching the city’s music scene two decades ago and hasn’t stopped.

He’s also committed to exposing the cultural blind spots residents have when it comes to the city. There’s a quiz he gives on the first day of class, and it’s one that even native Washingtonians often fail. A sampling: What influential go-go band is named after a product found at many local chicken and fish joints? Where was the Black Hole located? Name two musicians with very strong ties to Washington, D.C., that have both a bridge and a public school named after them.

It’s not an easy test, but Dr. Lornell has a prescribed antidote for bringing students up to speed. He sends them out into neighborhoods to conduct interviews, research and field work. Former Colonials have handed in papers recounting the work of the Folklore Society of Greater Washington. One traced 20 years of the university’s South Asian dance competition, Bhangra Blowout. Because those pages of careful historical analysis have spent years in what Dr. Lornell calls the “neverland” of his office filing cabinet, he’s putting the bulk of past research into the “Hear in D.C.” archive, where all of GW can access the collection.

Folk Music for the City

Student work makes up a fraction of the burgeoning collection. There are also pieces of GW’s own history dating back to the ’60s and ’70s, when former Colonials organized the university’s Folk Music Club. Black-and-white photographs in the archive capture the energy of banjo-wielding musicians who gathered at the historic Woodhull House for open sings—think group karaoke where the full crowd knows all the words and melodies.

Archival material on folk music from the new music archive.

The Folk Music Club can be seen as one of the early predecessors to the Folklore Society of Greater Washington, which celebrated its 50th anniversary this year. At the archive’s opening, Mr. Wallace described how the society came together in the summer of 1964. The union was informal. Just a bunch of guitarists and singers gathered in folklorist Chuck Perdue’s living room with the goal of creating an alternative to mainstream music. The society cosponsored concerts featuring heavyweights like Pete Seeger and the Clancy Brothers.

An organized society was appropriate at a time when folk music flourished in the city’s club scene. Georgetown’s the Shadows—renamed the Cellar Door—was a hotbed for soulful vocal talents like Emmylou Harris, who showed off her crooning chops with singer Fletcher DuBois, and Mama Cass, a regular on the venue’s stage before becoming a founding member of the Mamas & the Papas.

Mr. Wallace said he has a tough time using the word “folk” since it doesn’t fully encompass all the traditional music styles bred in the D.C. area. He calls the Washington region “the Piedmont blues capital of the world,” where left-handed guitarist Elizabeth Cotten became known for her “Cotten-picking” bass style. Blues player John Fahey gained national recognition out of Takoma Park. Bluegrass lovers tapped their heels to the songs the Seldom Scene played at Bethesda’s Red Fox Inn.

Stephen Wade performs at the archive opening.

GW’s new archive has the opportunity to chronicle all these different folk styles—especially because many of them, Mr. Wallace said, are still going strong in Washington.

“The old timers created a vibrant new-time culture that continues to thrive today,” he said, citing artists like Mr. Wade, whose recordings bring elements of traditional folk to music today.

Punk Rock: ‘Like a Traffic Accident’

In the early ’80s, a self-proclaimed misfit named Ian MacKaye spent hours skateboarding around D.C. with two mantras in mind: Question your government and don’t trust authority.

He’d grown up attending St. Stephen's Episcopal Church, a progressive cooperative off of 16th Street Northwest, known for pioneering civil rights. That church became something of a sanctuary for D.C. residents in ’68 when riots erupted after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. Parts of the city blazed for days. Once the chaos subsided, Mr. MacKaye remembers walking past smoldering storefronts to the church, where local blues singer Mother Scott took the stage. As her voice riveted the crowd, a sense of calm suddenly eclipsed the panic from the days before.

Mr. MacKaye was only six at the time, but that Mother Scott performance became the cornerstone of his music philosophy. He understood music as something that connected people in troubled times, something that could define the tumultuous world he experienced.

The archive's collection includes punk rock materials, such as CDs from Mr. MacKaye's Dischord label.

Those ideas came to a head when Mr. MacKaye’s classmates at Wilson High School exposed him to the jarring, stripped down style called punk rock. It was grating, Mr. MacKaye remembered, “and it did not sound like music.” Still, his curiosity led him to piles of records by The Sex Pistols and The Clash, which “like a traffic accident, were hard to not stare at.” Seeing The Cramps live at Georgetown University only solidified his interest.

A neighborhood bully had taught Mr. MacKaye to play the bass line from English rock band Deep Purple’s “Smoke on the Water.” That’s all he needed to start playing this newfound music on his own. He joined his first band, ‘The Slinkees,” as a bass player and performed a debut show in a garage on MacArthur Boulevard—attended by both Mr. MacKaye’s 9-year-old sister and Kim Kane of the local punk band, the Slickee Boys.

“What we created was kind of a gang, in a weird way, a tribe, especially in a city like this where you feel so disconnected,” Mr. MacKaye said. “We felt like we were construction workers, and we were gonna make something.”

Mr. MacKaye would go on to front Minor Threat, and, a few years later, the enormously successful hardcore outfit Fugazi. He also formed Dischord Records, an independent label that signed local bands like Teen Idles, Jawbox and Q and Not U.

Ms. Plotell, university librarian, met Mr. MacKaye in 2010 when she was helping to launch a punk rock collection at Gelman Library with researcher Mark Yoffe. Ms. Plotell also will be contributing an oral and visual history of Kansas House, a D.I.Y. venue in Arlington that served as a major fixture of the local rock scene until it was sold to a Virginia-based development company in 2009.

Go-Go Music: More Than Chuck Brown

Like hardcore, go-go is part of Washington’s D.N.A.—so much that Dr. Lornell calls it the “most regional genre” in the United States, adding that go-go is really only found in the DMV.

Dr. Lornell was living near Capitol Hill in 1988, working on a post-doctoral assignment at the Smithsonian Institution. That’s when he first came across the signature clang of go-go, and realized that if he was unfamiliar with Chuck Brown and Trouble Funk, lots of other people were, too. He partnered with Charles C. Stephenson Jr., a former go-go band manager, and wrote “The Beat: Go Go’s Fusion of Funk and Hip Hop,” later titled “The Beat: Go-go Music from Washington. The book that takes readers through the events in Washington that influenced the evolution of the genre.

To really understand the intersection of music and D.C. culture, Dr. Lornell and Mr. Stephenson conducted research for several years. Their work generated box after box of photographs, transcripts of interviews with go-go musicians, audiocassettes, magazine clippings and other mixed media, all of which are now part of the archive.

The ephemera traces Dr. Lornell and Mr. Stephenson’s research, shedding light on how early bands like the Young Senators and Agression gave go-go a kick-start until singer-guitarist Chuck Brown came along and brought the style roaring to life. He formed the band the Soul Searchers in 1966 and began releasing songs that got people dancing the way he described go-go was supposed to: “The music just goes and goes.”

The genre was further popularized by Trouble Funk, one of the first go-go bands to broaden its audience outside of the DMV with songs like “Pump Me Up” and “Drop the Bomb.” The local musicians would often share the stage with Mr. MacKaye’s Minor Threat.

In “The Beat,” Dr. Lornell and Mr. Stephenson liken live go-go to attending a black Pentecostal church service. The musicians and patrons know each other, they’re passionate about the music and they get together on a regular basis, the writers explain.

But beyond the music, go-go also represents black identity in Washington. Take the frequent call-and-response refrains in go-go music, for example. In their book, Dr. Lornell and Mr. Stephenson describe how Trouble Funk opened live shows asking, “Who we gonna put on display tonight?” Backyard Band would ask, “Who’s in the house?” The crowd would respond, often promoting neighborhood pride.

“Go-go has really stayed very local—it is the DMV,” Dr. Lornell said.

Go-go albums, posters and other media make up part of the new collection.

While Dr. Lornell recognizes that the collection’s major draws will be folk, punk and go-go, he said there is tons of terrain that archivists still need to comb. Dr. Lornell lists Somalian and Salvadoran music as just some of the genres that have been “criminally overlooked” and in danger of fading without proper preservation.

“What seems to be so commonplace and so ephemeral today is exactly ephemeral, unless somebody steps up and decides this kind of thing should be archived,” Dr. Lornell said.