The Green Room: Getting to know the Hogan Jazz Archive

Bruce Raeburn is the director of Special Collections for the Howard-Tilton Memorial Library and the curator of the William Ransom Hogan Archive of New Orleans Jazz at Tulane University. He began working at the archive in 1980 as a student worker.

In this edition of the Green Room podcast, Raeburn discusses the 1958 origins of the Hogan Jazz Archive, the leading research center for the study of New Orleans jazz and related musical genres.

Among its holdings are 2,000 reels of oral history interviews with musicians, family members and observers that document the stories surrounding the emergence of jazz in New Orleans from the late 19th century forward. Other holdings include sound recordings, film, photography, sheet music, personal papers, records of the American Federation of Musicians local 174-496, ephemera and realia.

Throughout the year, Raeburn, along with associate curators Lynn Abbott and Alaina Hébert, assists researchers from around the world in navigating the jazz archive, and in doing so, keeps Tulane and New Orleans in the spotlight for important jazz scholarship.

Through collaboration with Music Rising at Tulane and a grant from the Grammy Foundation, many Hogan Jazz Archive oral histories are now streaming online on the Music Rising website. For more information about the Hogan Jazz Archive, visit http://jazz.tulane.edu/.