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Encoded by Nora Yeh and Judy Ng, January 2006
Finding aid URL: http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.afc/eadafc.af006001
Series I: Manuscripts | |||||||||||||
Series II: Sound Recordings | |||||||||||||
The collection is arranged into two series. The Manuscript Series consists of the accession log, administrative correspondence, and interview transcripts. The Sound Recording Series consists of the interview cassettes. Both the transcripts and the sound recordings are arranged in chronological order.
Prior to the collection's arrival at the Library, Pete Seeger requested that his materials be sealed for a number of years. The transcripts and tapes became unrestricted in 1996 and access to the collection is currently unrestricted. Consult reference staff in the Folklife Reading Room about reference copies of material and additional reference tools that may be available onsite only. Duplication of the collection materials may be governed by copyright and other restrictions. Please refer to the AFC web site for information on ordering copies of unpublished recordings (http://www.loc.gov/folklife/recordering.html).
The American Folklife Center purchased the collection from David Dunaway in February 2000, after nine years of negotiation. Joseph C. Hickerson, and later David Taylor, represented the Center as Head of Acquisitions. Prior to 2000, Dunaway maintained sole possession of the recordings at his residence. These recordings and others in his collection were made available to scholarly researchers and folk musicians. Dunaway himself used the Pete Seeger recordings to write his 1981 biography of Seeger, How Can I Keep from Singing: Pete Seeger (McGraw Hill, 1981). In the early 1990s, fearing that his collection materials were deteriorating, Dunaway began to contact likely archives about purchasing the collection. As part of the acquisitions negotiations for the Center, Dunaway was responsible for transcribing the Pete Seeger interviews, which were transcribed by his students at the University of California at Berkeley and his colleague, the oral historian W. K. Baum.
Alex Sheriff initially processed the collection in the summer of 2002. He rehoused the manuscript materials, then arranged them in chronological order, and made reference copies of the sound recordings. In December 2002, Rosemary Graham and Valda Morris-Slack began preliminary work on the collection guide. The guide was completed by Valda Morris-Slack in December 2003.
David Dunaway Collection of Interviews with Pete Seeger and Contemporaries, Archive of Folk Culture, American Folklife Center, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.
AFC 1996/076: Bill Moyers' Journal / Pete Seeger Videotape Collection. The collection contains an interview with Pete Seeger by Bill Moyers on the "Bill Moyers' Journal" TV program, 5/20/94. Other related collections with Pete Seeger can be accessed at the Folklife Reading Room, and the Performing Arts Reading Room. They include sound recordings and interviews with the Seeger family.
David Dunaway Collection of Interviews with Pete Seeger and Contemporaries is a multi-format collection with eight hundred pages of transcripts and thirty sound recordings of ten interviews that document Pete Seeger's life. This collection comprises one segment of approximately sixty-five interviews David Dunaway conducted beginning in 1976 as he sought to capture the essence of the folk music movements from the 1930s to the 1960s. Dunaway was an assistant professor at the University of California, Berkeley in 1976 when he began the interviews with a number of prominent figures, ranging from Moses Asch to Judy Collins. The information he assembled has been used extensively by folk musicians and researchers. Dunaway's main objective, however, was to utilize the interviews as source material for his folk music program "Sing Out!," a National Endowment for the Arts funded radio series called Pie in the Sky, and most importantly, his biography of Pete Seeger, How Can I Keep From Singing (McGraw Hill, 1984).
In February of 2000, the collection arrived at the Library of Congress. In the interviews, Pete Seeger discusses, among other things, his "innocent" beginnings, his social affiliations, his musical career, and his family. Each transcript has a full table of contents identifying the topics covered and serving as a cross reference to the sound recordings. Both the transcripts and the tapes are identified by the date of the interview and the name of the interviewee and are arranged in chronological order
David Dunaway was born on October 3, 1948, in New York City, New York. He is the son of Phillip and Lillian Dunaway, who were both scholars of the arts. His father was a writer and his mother a teacher.
In 1971, David Dunaway worked as a radio producer at a radio station, KPFA, while attending graduate school at the University of California, Berkeley. He and Susan Kernes hosted a weekly radio program that was called Sing Out!. In this medium, Dunaway produced many programs about folk music and its history every Thursday afternoon. He aired segments on Pete Seeger, rare recordings of Bob Dylan, world folk music, and many other topics. Dunaway's early experiences at KPFA provided him the basis for later successes as a prize-winning radio producer specializing in historical and literary documentaries. He has won many awards including The Berkeley Folklore Prize, University of California, 1976; The Deems Taylor Award, American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers, 1982; The National Association of Broadcasters', The American Legion Auxiliary and the Associated Press; and most recently an Annual Unity Award in Media, 2002.
Influenced by his keen interest in the arts, Dunaway also wrote for the New York Times, Mother Jones, and Country Music. During this period Dunaway began to establish himself as an oral historian, interviewing various folk musicians from across the United States and researching the mid-20th-century folk song revivals. In 2001, Dunaway produced a three-part documentary series titled Across the Tracks: A Route 66 Story.
David Dunaway received his Ph.D. in American Studies from the University of California, Berkeley. Currently, Dunaway is a professor at the University of Mexico, but his work as an oral historian has offered him the opportunity to lecture at universities in over a dozen countries. Dunaway is also the author of five volumes of history and biography, which include Aldous Huxley Recollected: An Oral History. Rev. ed. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press, 1999; How Can I Keep From Singing: Pete Seeger. New York, NY.: Da Capa Press, 1990, 1981; Huxley in Hollywood. 1st Anchor Books ed. New York: Anchor Books, 1991; Oral history: An Interdisciplinary Anthology. David K. Dunaway, Willa K. Baum, editors. 2nd ed. Walnut Creek: AltaMira Press. 1996; and Writing the Southwest. David King Dunaway and Sara L. Spurgeon, editors. Rev. ed. Albuquerque: University of Mexico Press, 2003.
Biography Resource Center: Dunaway, David King. 2003-03-27. http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/BioRC
California Thinkers: David Dunaway. 2003-03-27. http://geography.berkeley.edu/ProjectsResources/CaliforniaThinkers/profiles/dunaway.html
Dunaway, David King. 2003-03-27. http://www.booklocker.com/books/286.html
Writing in the Southwest: David K. Dunaway. 2003-03-27. http://www.unm.edu/~wrtgsw/dunaway.html
| Quantity | Physical Extent (original) | Location | Item Numbers |
|---|---|---|---|
| Manuscript Materials | |||
| 17 | Folders | AFC | Box 1-2 |
| Sound Recordings | |||
| 30 | audiocassettes | AFC | Box 3-4 |
| 11 60-minute and 6 90-minute audiocassettes | AFC | Box 3 | |
| 4 60-minute and 9 90-minute audiocassettes | AFC | Box 4 |
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