by Kevin Coffey
In spring 2022, researcher Kevin Coffey contacted the Homestead about his interest in issues of a musicians’ union publication called The Overture. Over the course of several weeks emails were exchanged, including the sharing of images from some of the editions concerning his work on dance and jazz bands in Los Angeles and others areas of the western United States. While the Museum was able to assist Kevin, who lives more than 5,000 miles away at the northern reaches of Scotland, with scans of pages from the magazines, he, in turn, helped us identify individuals and groups in a couple of photographs in our holdings. The idea and value of mutual exchange and overlapping interests is the subject of Kevin’s post and we thank him for his submission, which reminds us of what historic artifact collections can provide for historical research and interpretation of various kinds.
As many before me have pointed out, especially in recent, decidedly turbulent years – listen to the intense litany of Bo Burnham’s song Welcome To The Internet, for a prime example — the Internet has proven to be very much a double-edged sword, arguably upending life as we knew it as much as it has enhanced it. One area, though, in which it has proven very much more a boon than a bane is in the field of historical research and preservation. Some might even argue against that point, but in my experience — as I’ve tried to document several under-documented areas of American musical history — it has been a godsend.
And I’m sure I’m far from alone. Although I’m American born and reared, I’ve lived the past quarter century in Orkney, the island group of the northern coast of Scotland. Not as remote or isolated as some who’ve never been here might imagine, it is still far removed from the places the bands and musicians I’ve researched for almost four decades plied their craft. I did a considerable amount of research on the ground in Texas and surrounding states when I still lived in the Southwest, but as someone with limited financial resources — not to mention family and work commitments — doing that sort of research now is a luxury I can’t afford, in more ways than one. Again, I am far from alone in that.
In pre-Internet days, public and college/university libraries were an invaluable resource and they remain so in 2026, especially the many special collections that focus on cultural history, housing music, photographs and other important documentation of times and places. Accessing this material can often be understandably expensive, particularly for someone (like me) without institutional backing. In-house research is often difficult (in my case, nearly impossible), something that was acutely exacerbated and underscored by the Covid-19 pandemic.
Fortunately, many of these special collections have been fully or at least partly digitized and more crucial source material becomes available to researchers almost daily. For example, the Internet Archive (archive.org) has been an invaluable source for researchers for years and its holdings, and the material it offers online, are staggering, despite the efforts of some parties to limit or shut down the site altogether.
Although not without its drawbacks, the digitization of these collections and other resources is the “godsend” I mentioned above. Researching music history of America in the years between World Wars One and Two (and occasionally beyond) over the past quarter century since I moved abroad would have been impossible for me without the Internet. In addition to the digitized special collections of universities and museums, there are literally hundreds of period newspapers now available and more becoming available all the time. For those who did not have to research using old newspapers on microfilm in pre-Internet days in a library, with limited time and space and no concept of a search engine, it will be hard to appreciate how amazing this development is. It’s not ideal – access can be expensive and there are still many newspapers yet to be digitized, for example – but it’s an invaluable resource.
Of course, this wide availability does little to overcome the effects of segregation and racism of the time and place: it’s indisputable that it’s far easier to research the activities of white musicians of the era than musicians of color, who were rarely mentioned in mainstream press beyond performance ads for more prominent bands, though the increased availability of African-American newspapers has helped with that imbalance.
Beyond the newspapers are the many resources – magazines, trade journals, recordings – made available in recent years not only by the Internet Archive, but many specialist websites celebrating specific performers, or specific film or musical genres, and including sites like YouTube, which have made accessible a huge number of otherwise largely inaccessible musical performances, on recordings, film, etc.
There are blogs, too. Many are simply the product of an individual’s obsessive interest and desire to spread their particular gospel. Others are organizational – like this one, exploring and celebrating the collection of the Homestead Museum (though it, too, brims with a fervid individual interest and a desire to disseminate to a wide audience the amazing individual items in the collection).
I found The Homestead Blog, particularly Paul Spitzzeri’s “Striking A Chord” entries devoted to the music scene in and around Los Angeles in the early decades of the last century, while researching the early jazz and dance band scene in Southern California. While the blog as a whole was endlessly fascinating, the music-related entries were an amazing find for me.
These posts included explorations of 1920s issues of The Overture, the monthly magazine of Local 47, the Los Angeles branch of the American Federation Of Musicians. While I knew of the existence of The Overture, I had little knowledge of its content, which included ads from local bands that sometimes included photos and full identifications of band members, columns discussing the activities of orchestras in local theatres (a big deal before the Talkies [sound movies] came along), and the minutes of meetings of the local’s board, which included valuable info about the comings and goings of musicians in and out of its jurisdiction, and of new members, among other things. It’s an incredibly useful and important resource and Homestead’s handful of copies are like gold dust. Of similar value are the photos the museum holds that were taken by the famed Los Angeles photographic studios of Albert Witzel, who was particularly favoured by local dance and jazz bands. Paul’s exploration in this blog of this material was, again, an absolutely amazing find for me.
Homestead holdings like The Overture and the Witzel photographs are not quaint relics of a century ago, but are invaluable glimpses into a history that has largely been ignored – and would otherwise be lost. The items Paul shared from the blog filled numerous research gaps for me, allowed me, for example, to put faces to names, and to trace certain musicians’ heretofore unknown movements. Seeing these items was informative and exciting – and I was so grateful that they were saved and housed at the Homestead Museum. I was able to return the favor, too. For example, I could confirm that a Witzel photo the Museum holds of a drummer identified only as “Sherman” was Sherman Davidson, and was also able to identify the full line-up of a previously unidentified Witzel photo of pianist Al Newman’s Rendezvous Orchestra. This fortunate dovetailing of the Museum’s collection and my research was made possible not only by the existence of the museum itself, but of Paul’s fascinating explorations of the museum’s holdings in The Homestead Blog.