Music scholars at IU East now have an exciting new tool!  Over 300 original Starr-Gennett music recordings from the 1920s in a number of genres have been digitized and made available for listening.  The recordings were digitized at IU Bloomington’s Archive of Traditional Music, and were funded by a LSTA grant.

The resources can be used in the library by IU student and outside scholar alike.  We have headphones available at the front desk, in the event that you don’t have your own.  We’ve prepared step-by-step instructions to help you access them quickly and easily.

Starr-Gennett has been a big part of Richmond’s local history, and is internationally significant for helping popularize jazz as a music genre.  Many artists like Hoagy Carmichael, Bix Beiderbecke, Jelly Roll Morton, Louis Armstrong, and Duke Ellington recorded significant work at Gennett Records.

These sound files aren’t remastered or altered in any way – every skip and scratch of the old records is preserved in the digitaizations.  Playing them is exactly like listening to the original records.  A treat for music researchers or classic jazz aficionados alike!