ONEONTA, N.Y. --
Dr.
Donald Hill,
Professor in the
Africana & Latino Studies and
Anthropology
Departments at the SUNY College at Oneonta, is the co-author of a book and
co-compiler of a ten-CD set entitled West Indian Rhythm, which were
recently released by the Bear Family in Hamburg, Germany. Dr. Hill also
received a 2007 Grammy Foundation Grant to convert original tapes of
American blues, country, and folk music to digital format for the collection
of the American Folklife Center of the Library of Congress.
West Indian Rhythm is the joint effort of a team of three
historians, an anthropologist, and a linguist. The CDs include all the
recordings of Creole music made in Trinidad between 1938 and 1940, a
total of 264 titles, many of which were not released on record but were
censored by the British colonial government. The book contains essays on
topics ranging from calypso to the music's relationship to World War II.
The
Grammy Foundation Grant of $39,999 will enable Dr. Hill to preserve
in digital format the tape recordings of folk musicians that he and
colleague David Mangurian made between 1958 and 1961 in Chicago, St.
Louis, Los Angeles, and the South. The collection includes field
recordings of music and interviews of more than 25 musicians and groups
and six folk concerts.
Hill and Mangurian recorded performers such as Carl Weaver, a
personality from the early days of country radio; Meade Lux Lewis, a
famed boogie-woogie piano player; and Daddy Stovepipe, one of the oldest
blues musicians to have made commercial records. The concert recordings
include performances by Odetta, Pete Seeger, Peggy Seeger and Ewan
McCall, and Stan Wilson.
With the support of the grant, Dr. Hill will convert approximately 63
hours of recordings, develop a numbering system in collaboration with
the American Folklife Center, and create a digital database of the
materials.
An authority on the ethnography and ethnomusicology of the Caribbean,
Dr. Hill is the author of "Calypso Calaloo: Early Trinidadian Carnival
Music," which won the 1994 Chicago Folklore Prize, and "The Impact of
Migration on the Metropolitan and Folk Society of Carriacou, Grenada,"
published by the American Museum of Natural History. He produced the CD
"Peter Was A Fisherman: The 1939 Trinidad Field Recordings of Melville
and Frances Herskovits, Volume 1," and co-authored the accompanying
booklet.
Professor Hill has created a digital database of 18,000 commercial
recordings and deposited hundreds of hours of his own ethnomusicological
recordings at the Indiana University Archive of Traditional Music. He
has been a consultant to "60 Minutes" and PBS and lectured at the
Library of Congress.
Dr. Hill joined the SUNY-Oneonta faculty in 1978. He worked
previously as Curator of Education at the American Museum of Natural
History and Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Hunter College.
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