I'm making a playlist of all Hasil Adkins, Hazel Dickens and Little Jimmy Dickens, because why not?

In my bluegrass harmony singing class this week (taught by Michael Daves and Jen Larson, a pair whose expertise and ease with the music inspires and astounds me, and who joined me in the studio recently to master Jen's knockout of an EP), we learned the Hazel and Alice version of the Bill Monroe song "The One I Love Is Gone." As I was leaving the studio to go to class, I hurriedly put the song on my iPhone so I could learn it en route. I listened to it on repeat the entire train ride to Brooklyn. I could not tear my ears away. As Jen said in class, it's the "torchiest" of bluegrass duets, and the Hazel and Alice version is knife sharp. Ordinarily, I am a modest singer, and I like to sing modest songs, nothing showy, not too much love, not too much heartbreak. But I tell you, I have been belting this song at home.

Now I'm on a mission to find out how many of Hazel and Alice's recordings are still in print, and if they are out of print.... maybe someone needs to track them down, send them to me, and we can get them back into this world.

Incidentally, my introduction to Little Jimmy Dickens came via my 93 year old grandfather, born and raised in West Virginia, who told me his mom used to tell him to "take an old cold tater and wait." Had to google that one, but it led me right to Jimmy. I doubt grandpa listened to much Hasil Adkins, but who knows? They were fellow West Virginians.

I attended the ARSC (Association for Recorded Sound Collections) conference in Chapel Hill, NC last month and presented on the Caffe Lena Archive with my colleague, the director of the Caffe Lena History Project and producer of the box set, Jocelyn Arem. I was pleasantly surprised to run into so many people I already know who work in archives, at record labels, mastering studios, the LOC. Mastering and restoration is pretty much a solo gig, and I spend a lot of time by myself in front of my gear or under headphones. It's nice to hang with a crowd that swoons over rare 78s and metadata standards in equal measure. The highlight? Being heckled by Arhoolie Record's Chris Strachwitz because I dared to talk over a clip of Hedy West performing "Shady Grove" during our presentation. (The link goes to the mp3s on Amazon, because the CD has SOLD OUT!) What can I say? We were short on time, and I was trying to cram in a lot of information.

Strike that, the real highlight was having a tin type picture taken while an impromptu banjo jam broke out poolside.

The highlight of my whirlwind trip to Seattle for the Experience Music Project Pop Conference was not an early morning run around Lake Union, past dewy purple wildflowers and toddling goslings in perfect 55 degree weather. But that was pretty freakin nice. The EMP crowd is smart, thoughtful, passionate and a whole lot of fun. Since I spend most of my work days in the trenches, that is, in my windowless mastering studio with the door shut, the lights low, and the music loud, the opportunity to talk to people about music, and especially about music archiving, was invigorating and inspiring. My panel on The Geography of Music Archiving looked at how place and space inform the process of archiving and presenting historic musical materials. For me, that means what I look for when I'm in a basement filled with boxes of tapes and memorabilia, what I listen for when I'm transferring decades worth of recordings by the same artist, what I hope to make you feel when I master and restore a collection recordings by a single artist or from a single venue, as I did for the Caffe Lena Box Set. (The highest praise I received in reviews of that box set was that listeners felt transported to that tiny room in upstate New York).

My fellow panelists had terrific stories about their experiences in archiving. Biographer and journalist Charles Cross told us about reading Kurt Cobain's diaries and trying to understand the man. Holly George-Warren showed us the earliest television footage of Alex Chilton performing The Letter with the Box Tops, and, man, could that teenager sing. Kevin Strait told us about pushing Chuck Berry's Cadillac across the lawn and into a moving truck to have it delivered to the the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture (slated to open in 2015). And moderator Timothy Anne Burnside held it all together for us.

What I most wanted to convey to the (admittedly modest-in-size) audience is simply that there are lots of ways to deal with audio archives, and there are people and organizations who can help. It's not just a matter of donating to the Library of Congress and locking everything in a climate control room, or selling piecemeal on eBay, or ignoring the boxes of audio and visual recordings gathering dust in basements and closets. There are ways to find funding when no money for preservation exists. There can be multiple streams of presentations, both non-commercial and (revenue generating) commercial. Just ask my Magic Shop colleague Jocelyn Arem how she did it with the Caffe Lena archives. All it took was twelve years of sending emails, making phone calls, weathering rejection, and then, eventually, winning a lot of grants and finding the right partners to make it happen. Piece of cake.

I hope the audience got that. And I also hope they got a chance to pose in the Iron Throne, which was in the Experience Music Project Museum as part of an exhibition on fantasy.