April 22, 2007

The Grammy Foundation has awarded a grant of $35,128 to the nonprofit San Diego Folk Heritage. The grant will underwrite the initial costs to begin digitizing more than 400 reel-to-reel tape recordings made between 1967 and 1987 by local music institution Lou Curtiss at his San Diego Folk Festival and at other area festivals and concerts he staged before and since. The grant request was co-sponsored by the Library of Congress and UCLA, which will receive copies of the digitized recordings.
"Some reels have upward of six to seven hours of music each, and some just have a single concert," Curtiss, the proprietor of Folk Arts Rare Records, said. "I have more than 5,000 reels of material totaling up to 90,000 hours of music, so as far as I'm concerned this is just the beginning."

Artists who performed at the folk festival here who are featured on the tapes that will be digitized Tom Waits, Roscoe Holcomb, Sam Hinton, Ramblin' Jack Elliott, Jean Richie, The Boys of the Loch, Reverend Gary Davis and Bessie Jones & The Georgia Sea Island Singers.

The money given to San Diego Folk Heritage on behalf of Curtiss is part of $650,000 in grants awarded to 18 recipients across North America by the Grammy Foundation. The grants are underwritten by The Recording Academy, under whose auspices the annual Grammy Awards are presented. Four other California recipients were selected this year to receive grants from the Grammy Foundation, which has provided $4.6 million over the past 20 years to more than 200 recipients devoted to researching, archiving and preserving a wide variety of music and music-related projects.

Curtiss has already put some of his digitized recordings up on the Folk Arts Web site (www.FolkArtsRareRecords.com). With additional grants, he hopes to eventually establish a folklore center in San Diego to house his extensive music archives.

"They tell me that getting one grant is a beginning," he said. "I hope that that's the case."