UCLA’s digital Archive of Popular American Music documents the history of music in America from as early as 1790 up until the present. Much of the music comes from films, theater, radio, and television but the archive also includes more general popular music. The archive holds almost 450,000 records of music, including sheet music, anthologies, and arrangements.
When looking at a particular piece of music, you can view and zoom in on the cover art and look at metadata such as the song’s title, composer, year, lyrics, tempo, and key. The description also has a list of subjects that you can click on and look at related titles, and some songs have links to sheet music. You can add a song to a personal virtual collection where you can write notes and retrieve bookmarked songs.
Though the website claims to hold 62,500 recordings on disc, tape, and cylinder, it is not clear where to find these recordings. They are not hyperlinked in the information about a song, and I couldn’t find them anywhere on the website. The website has filters to search with on the “Browse” page, but the home page showcases very few records. I think this archive would be most useful if you already had some idea of the topic and were searching for specific information.
If I was to write a paper about the information in this archive, I think the most helpful feature is the subjects that group together songs with similar themes. I could tell the story of the progression of popular songs in America that deal with women, African Americans, or many other subjects. This archive seems to have the most information about songs in the early 1900s, so if I wanted to write about a larger time period I think I would need to look somewhere else, and if I wanted to listen to the songs I would need to find where they are on the website or look somewhere else. By looking at the sheet music, I could tell a story more focused on musical trends or changes in songwriting over time.
One interesting thing that the archive does not include is how the songs were received. By being included in the archive, the songs are assumed to be “popular,” but you can’t tell anything about its target audience, its sales, or for how long it was popular. You would also need more sources to see whether a song was from a play, a movie, or if it was just popular on the radio.