LILLY LIBRARY NEWS & NOTES

Michael Uslan, executive producer for the Batman films and author of America at War: A History of War Comics as well as other books and comic books, will give a talk at the Monroe County Public Library in downtown Bloomington on Sunday, May 9 at 2:00 p.m. about the Golden Age of comic books. Mr. Uslan’s visit is part of this year’s One Book One Bloomington and Beyond, which is centered on Michael Chabon’s novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay.

The Lilly Library holds the Michael E. Uslan Collection of comic books, graphic novels, action figures, and popular culture collectibles. The comic books and graphic novels from this collection may be searched in a special database and requested through the IU Libraries’ online catalog, IUCAT. Collection inventories for the action figures and popular culture collectibles can be found here.

To learn more about comic books at the Lilly Library, please join us on April 19, when Literature Cataloger Whitney Buccicone will present “Whiz! Bam! Pow! Collecting Comics at the Lilly Library,” showcasing the Lilly Library’s comic book collections and providing instruction on how to access this excellent resource.

The Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures, and the IU Art Museum, in association with the Near Eastern Language and Culture Student Organization and the Turkish Student Organization are presenting a series of events at the IU Art Museum entitled Intersections: Middle Eastern Poetries in/and the Arts, April 1, 8 and 15 from 7–9 p.m.

The striking image seen here, the cover of al-Bukhari’s Sahih, is part of the Allen Mss. collection and was used in creating the poster for this series of events.

Yasemin Gencer, IU Ph.D. student in Islamic Art, also drew on these collections to create a permanent online exhibition of Islamic materials entitled From Pen to Printing Press: Ten centuries of Islamic book arts in Indiana University Collections, which was launched earlier this year.

View a schedule for Intersections: Middle Eastern Poetries in/and the Arts and other images from the Allen Mss. collection.

This coming Tuesday, April 6, 2010 at 7:00 p.m. in the Slocum Room at the Lilly Library, Ensemble Lipzodes, currently in Quito, Ecuador to perform at the Festival de Música Sacra, will give a concert and lecture celebrating the release of the group’s most recent CD, Oy Hasemos Fiesta.

“The ensemble’s unique name comes from a creative misinterpretation of the writing on the flyleaf of MS 1, Santa Eulalia, from the Guatemalan Music Manuscripts. What at first glance seems to say ‘Lipzodes,’ actually is the first part of a passage which continues further: ‘LibRodeSancta olaya Puyumatlan. Este libro de canto hize yo franc de Leon maestro deste pueblo de sancta olaya. hizelo En el año De mill y quinientos y ochenta y dos annos. Franc De Leon.’ In an orthographic transformation typical of the region, the letters ‘b’ and ‘p’ became exchanged, and the ‘R’ lost its vertical bar, to become what appeared to be a ‘Z.’” (From press release)

This flyleaf will be on display the evening of this concert; other items from the late 16th–early 17th century Guatemalan Music Manuscripts collection will be on display in this summer’s Main Gallery exhibition: Of Cabbages and Kings: Unexpected Treasures of the Lilly Library.

Come hear Juan Carlos Arango (shawms), C. Keith Collins (dulcians), Yonit Kosovske (organ), Anna Marsh (dulcians, recorder), Kelsey Schilling (dulcians, recorder), and Wolodymyr Smishkewych (voice, percussion) here at the Lilly Library next Tuesday, April 6.

As part of its 50th Anniversary celebration, the Lilly Library is pleased to offer a series of events this year entitled Mondays at the Lilly Library. Each of these Monday afternoon talks features a member of the Lilly Library staff highlighting some of the treasures found within these walls.

On Monday, April 5, 2010, Rebecca Cape, Head of Reference and Public Services at the Lilly Library, will highlight some Latin Americana, including items from the Bernardo Mendel Collection, such as the circa 1760 portrait of Manco Ccapac, first Inca ruler seen here on the left.

Then on April 19, 2010, Literature Cataloger Whitney Buccicone will present “Whiz! Bam! Pow! Collecting Comics at the Lilly Library.” Whiz! Bam! Pow! will showcase the Lilly Library’s comic book collections and provide instruction on how to access this excellent resource.

On May 3, 2010, James Canary, Head of Conservation at the Lilly Library, will host a talk entitled “The Book in the Himalayas.”

Associate Director and Curator of Books at the Lilly Library, Joel Silver, has already given two talks in this series. In February, he presented J.K. Lilly, Jr. (1893–1966), whose collection allowed for the founding of the Lilly Library in 1960. For most of his life, J. K. Lilly, Jr., of Indianapolis, was a devoted collector in many different fields. For some three decades, beginning in the mid–1920s, Mr. Lilly’s collecting attention was focused on assembling one of the finest private libraries of rare books and manuscripts in the world. Mr. Lilly’s collection, which was quite wide–ranging in scope, was particularly strong in American and British literature, American history, voyages and travels, and the history of science and medicine. In the mid–1950s, Mr. Lilly donated his collection of 20,000 books and 17,000 manuscripts to Indiana University, where it became the founding collection of the Lilly Library. Earlier this month, Joel Silver gave a talk which focused on the examples of early printed materials here at the Lilly Library.

All of the events in this series take place on Mondays at 4:00 p.m. in the Slocum Room of the Lilly Library. Please check our calendar or the 50th Anniversary Calendar of Events for more information.

View more images relating to the Lilly Library materials discussed in these talks.

A recent post about painter T.C. Steele’s remote studio on the Indiana State Museum’s blog by Davie Kean, master gardener at the T.C. Steele State Historic Site, featured this photo (left) from the Lilly Library’s Frank M. Hohenberger Photograph Collection. Mr. Kean also posted to the blog this past August using two other images from the Lilly Library, one of which comes from the Hohenberger collection. All of these photos were used with the permission of the Lilly Library.

Frank Michael Hohenberger, 1876–1963, was a Brown County photographer and newspaperman. He spent his boyhood as a printing apprentice and later worked several years on newspapers in Dayton, Ohio, Louisville, Kentucky, and finally for the Indianapolis Star. In 1917 he left Indianapolis to start a small photography business in Nashville, Indiana, concentrating on the subject matter of Brown County. The next forty–seven years were spent recording the life, customs, and scenes of the hills of Brown County, of other areas of Indiana, of Kentucky, of South Carolina, and of Mexico. From 1923 to 1954 he wrote a column for the Indianapolis Star entitled “Down in the Hills O’ Brown County.” The articles were frequently illustrated with his photographs. Hohenberger, who died in November 1963, willed his collection to the Indiana University Foundation. In 1998 the Foundation transferred ownership of the collection to the Lilly Library.

The Indiana University Digital Library Program is currently involved in the project of digitizing the entire Hohenberger photograph collection and designing a more user–friendly search interface for exploring these images. The project will be completed later this year.

Based entirely upon the Lilly Library’s collections, a new work joins the ranks of bibliographical and historical publications that document the long, complicated history of Mexico–Texas relations before 1849. Lilly Texana: One Hundred Eighty Broadsides and Other Ephemera Relating to Texas, Printed and Published in Mexico before 1849 in the Lilly Library of Indiana University, by Everett C. Wilkie, Jr., describes a significant body of materials in the Lilly Library’s collections pertaining to Texas history that until now has been generally unrecognized or not reported to exist in the copy described. Most of the included items are not found in Thomas Streeter’s seminal Bibliography of Texas, the primary work in this area, or in other sources. Several entries represent the discovery of another copy of an item that Streeter believed to exist in only a single example.

The works described in Lilly Texana are part of the Bernardo Mendel broadside collection, which contains approximately 15,000 single–sheet items, pamphlets and ephemera, many of which are laws, other official pronouncements, or proclamations. Lilly Texana provides full bibliographic descriptions and historical context for each of the 180 works included and five indexes covering names, subjects, titles, publication, and bibliographic cross–references. The book will be of interest to anyone concerned with the history of Mexico–Texas relations, descriptive bibliography, the American Southwest, or the history of printing. Many of the items described are believed to be unique and demonstrate the often incredible depth of the Lilly’s unexplored collections.

More information about the publication and its author, as well as how to order Lilly Texana is available at http://www.indiana.edu/~liblilly/texana.shtml.

Save the date! On March 31, 2010 at 5pm author Carol Sklenicka will deliver a talk at the Lilly Library entitled A Pencil or a Meat Cleaver: Raymond Carver and His Editors about her recently published biography of American short story writer Raymond Carver, Raymond Carver: A Writer’s Life (2009).

“When Raymond Carver died too young at age fifty in 1988, readers lost a distinctive American voice. Carver’s reputation as the ‘American Chekhov’ and his influence on a generation of writers and on the form of the short story itself is well documented. What is not widely known, however, is how he became a writer so widely revered, how he suffered mightily to achieve his art, and how others around him were affected by the arc of his remarkable life. Carol Sklenicka…devoted ten years to researching and writing this book, interviewing hundreds of people in Carver’s life, some of them key figures who have since passed away. She has crafted a…meticulous biography.” —From the Scribner press release

The Lilly Library has manuscript collections from two of Carver’s editors: Noel Young (Capra Press Mss.) and Gordon Lish (Lish Mss.). Ms. Sklenicka will talk about both of these editors and the development of Carver’s relationship to them in the period between 1968 and the 1980s.

A reception will follow the talk.

Eileen M. Julien, Professor of Comparative Literature, African American and African Diaspora Studies, and French and Italian at IUB, will read from her recent book Travels with Mae: Scenes from a New Orleans Girlhood at the Lilly Library next Thursday, February 11, 2010 at a reception honoring the 2009 publication.

“Travels with Mae is a series of vignettes at once tender and full of doubt. Eileen Julien tells the story of her girlhood, young womanhood, and cultural and political awakening against the backdrop of New Orleans in the 1950′s and 60′s. Not only the story of the author’s coming of age, this is a loving portrait of family life. Julien gives an insider’s perspective on New Orleans culture. With her we attend Carnival balls and parades, family picnics and swimming parties, and survive hurricanes Betsy and Katrina. Along the way, we meet countless aunts, uncles and cousins, and are privy to family spats, her mother’s upstairs closet, and kitchens stretched from New Orleans to Washington, D.C., rural Louisiana to New York, Paris to Bordeaux and Dakar.” Read the full IU Press description.

The reception will be held on Thursday, February 11, 2010 from 4–6pm in the Lilly Library; at 4:30pm, Sandra Zagarell, Department of English, Oberlin College, will speak and Eileen Julien will do a short reading. This event is presented by Indiana University Press, the Department of African American and African Diaspora Studies, the Department of Comparative Literature, the Department of French and Italian, and the Lilly Library.

In celebration of the Lilly Library’s 50th Anniversary, WFIU’s Artworks program recently presented a compilation of past episodes featuring some of the people and collections that make the Lilly Library the treasure that it is today.

David Wood hosts this episode, which includes his October 2008 visit with Curator of Puzzles, Jillian Hinchliffe (The Lilly Library’s Puzzling Collection) as well as Megan Meyer’s visit to the Lilly Library in September 2009 (The Lilly Library: Anything But Hands Off). Joel Silver, Curator of Books, talks about Shakespeare’s first folio; Becky Cape, Head of Reference and Public Services, explains why a book might be published in miniature form; and IU English Professor Christoph Irmscher shares his fascination with the primary sources found only in the Lilly Library.

The broadcast also includes David Brent Johnson’s piece on last summer’s exhibition Are We There Yet? The Age of the Automobile.

Listen to the full WFIU Artworks broadcast from January 12, 2010.

William Cagle, director of the Lilly Library from 1975–1997, has begun a review of the collections of the American Library in Paris, under the auspices of the American Library’s Julia Peterson Dede Distinguished Visiting Librarian fund. Read the full announcement of this honor in the September 2009 newsletter of the Library.

On Saturday, January 30, 2010 at 4pm, the Lilly Library will present “A Conversation with Peter Bogdanovich” in Room 251 of the Radio–TV Building on the campus of Indiana University, Bloomington.

Bogdanovich was born in 1939 in Kingston, New York. He attended Stella Adler’s Theatre Studio and has appeared on stage, screen and television. He was film critic for Esquire, The New York Times, Cahiers du Cinema among others, and has written numerous books on American cinema, most notably The Cinema of Alfred Hitchcock, John Ford, and This is Orson Welles. He also wrote The Killing of the Unicorn: Dorothy Stratten (1960–1980) based on his relationship with the Playboy centerfold who was murdered by her estranged husband.

He is the owner/founder of several production companies including: Saticoy Productions, Inc., Copa de Oro Productions and Moon Pictures. Bogdanovich directed his first feature film Targets, starring Boris Karloff in 1968. His breakthrough film, however, was The Last Picture Show (1971) based on the Larry McMurtry novel. Several successful and critically acclaimed films followed, notably his documentary Directed by John Ford (1971) and the comedies, What’s Up Doc? (1972) and Paper Moon (1973). Subsequent films include Daisy Miller (1974), They All Laughed (1981), Mask (1985), and The Thing Called Love (1993). He is also credited for the screenplays of The Last Picture Show, its sequel Texasville, What’s Up Doc?, and many others.

You can learn more about Peter Bogdanovich by exploring the Lilly Library’s Bogdanovich Manuscript Collection. An inventory and finding aid are also available for this collection.

And, of course, you can come to Room 251 in the Radio–TV building and meet Mr. Bogdanovich on Saturday, January 30, 2010 at 4pm!

We are very pleased to report, that with the generous aid of John and Julie Lindsey, Trustees of the Chisholm Foundation, in honor of Page Knox, we have completed the processing of the Richard and Helena de Kay Gilder Manuscript Collection. The Gilder manuscript collection, 1781–1984, consists of approximately 23,000 items including the correspondence and papers of poet, editor Richard Watson Gilder and his wife, the artist Helena de Kay Gilder, and their family. Richard, 1844–1909, was born in Bordentown, New Jersey. Among his books of poetry are The New Day (1875), Poems and Inscriptions (1901), and A Book of Music (1906). With Newton Crane, he founded the Newark Register and he edited Scribner’s Monthly (later The Century Magazine), a post he held until his death. His wife, Helena, 1846–1916, was born in New York City. She was a painter, founder of the Art Students league and co–founder of the Society of American Artists. She studied with Winslow Homer and John La Farge, as well as at the Cooper Union Institute and the National Academy of Design. Together Richard and Helena had seven children. Their son Rodman was an author and married Comfort Tiffany, daughter of Louis Comfort Tiffany. Their daughter Dorothea had a brief stage career, while Rosamond, the youngest, also became a writer. She was the author of Enter the Actress: the First Woman in the Theatre and the editor of Letters of Richard Watson Gilder and an unpublished volume of letters between her mother and Mary Hallock Foote, tentatively titled Dialogue. A description, inventory and finding aid are all available online.

Gilder’s brother, William Henry Gilder, was managing editor of the Register, but is most well–known for his Arctic expeditions. He was second in command on the Eothen in search of Sir John Franklin’s lost expedition to discover the North Pole and wrote several books about the Arctic. In 1883 he was a war correspondent in Tonking during the French–Annamese War. Richard’s sister, Jeannette Leonard Gilder, was co–founder and joint editor with another brother Joseph Benson Gilder of The Critic, a literary magazine.

In addition to family members, the correspondence reflects the many friends and acquaintances who visited the Gilders at their Tyringham, Massachusetts home, as well as their private salon in New York. These include artists, musicians, writers, poets, scientists and politicians, such as August Saint–Gaudens, Winslow Homer, Mark Twain, and Nicola Tesla. There is extensive correspondence with Frances Folsom Cleveland (Mrs. Grover Cleveland), artist Cecilia Beaux and writer Mary Hallock Foote. An interesting joint diary of Helena and Richard, dated 1874–1888, may be found in the Diaries/Journals series.

Other items of interest include: a lock of Helena’s hair, dried flowers from John Keats’ grave picked in 1884, a pencil used by Walt Whitman, and dried leaves collected in 1863 from the Bull Run battlefield.

–Cherry Williams, Curator of Manuscripts

View more images from the collection here.

Last week, WFHB Interchange host Dave Stewart interviewed our own Cherry Williams about the Lilly Library, its collections and 50th anniversary, and her role as Curator of Manuscripts. Cherry talked about rare books and special collections at IU predating the Lilly Library, as well the history of IU’s treasured rare books, manuscripts and special collections library.

Many of the people who visit the Lilly Library, including WFHB’s Dave Stewart, are struck by the unique collections and feel a sense of awe or excitement when surrounded by the special materials housed within the Lilly Library building. As Cherry explained in her interview, there may be a number of reasons for this common experience. Some people are fascinated by the antiquity of many of the Lilly Library’s collections; there are, for example, medieval manuscripts dating from the 12th century, a Gutenberg Bible from the 15th century, and copies of the U.S. Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights. Others are excited by a particular item’s provenance, or history of ownership. What famous person owned (and touched) an item before it came to be at the Lilly Library? You would be surprised!

Finally, what strikes many Lilly Library visitors – and what drew Cherry Williams to apply for her post as Curator of Manuscripts – is that all of these wonderful collections of rare and special materials are accessible to the general public. None of the items in the Lilly Library are permitted to leave the Lilly Library, but nearly all of them may be viewed by anyone who wants to see them – either in one of the library’s galleries or by request in the Reading Room (which was renovated just last summer).

In celebration of its 50th anniversary, the Lilly Library will present three exhibitions this year the first of which is called Treasures of the Lilly Library.

You can listen to the entire WFHB interview with Cherry Williams online, or download it, at http://www.wfhb.org/news/interchange-cherry-williams-inside-ius-lilly-library.

Yasemin Gencer, IU Ph.D. student in Islamic Art, has drawn on the collections of the Lilly Library, the IU Art Museum, and the Mathers Museum of World Cultures to create a permanent online exhibition of Islamic materials entitled From Pen to Printing Press: Ten centuries of Islamic book arts in Indiana University Collections.

This exhibition is an adaptation of an Indiana University Art Museum exhibit displayed last spring as “part of a larger project that aims to make the Islamic materials housed at IU better known to the general public.” It includes wonderful descriptions and images of Islamic manuscripts and rare books from the Lilly Library’s collections, such as an illustrated and abridged copy of Firdawsi’s Shahname, a miniature Qur’an, and one of the earliest recorded Mughal manuscripts.

View more images by visiting the exhibition.

Deborah Meier, a leader in education reform and the founder of the modern small schools movement in America, paid a welcome visit to the Lilly Library on Thursday, November 12. Meier, who was visiting Bloomington for an education seminar, is nationally known for her work in the innovative Central Park East schools in New York, which she founded in 1974. Meier’s efforts were recognized in 1987, when she became the first public school teacher to receive a MacArthur Fellowship. She chronicled her experiences at Central Park East in The Power of Their Ideas (1995), which has become an influential work in the field of education.

Indiana University announced in November 2008 that Deborah Meier had donated her papers to the Lilly Library, and work on them began in June of this year. The papers include correspondence, writings and speeches by Meier, and materials related to Meier’s work with the Central Park East schools, the Mission Hill school in Boston, and school restructuring projects in New York City, among other things.

The Lilly Library has created a two–year, grant–funded position devoted to the arrangement, description, and digitization of this collection. Currently, the papers are in the process of being arranged and a finding aid is being created. Once the finding aid is complete, portions of the collection will be scanned and made available online, giving researchers all over the world access to this unique documentation of the beginnings of the small schools movement.

Meier and Steve Bonchek of the Harmony Education Center, a Bloomington school and education institute which assisted in procuring the funding needed to make this collection available, hope that the Meier papers will serve as the cornerstone of an ongoing effort to document schools. The Lilly Library is grateful to the Peck Stacpoole Foundation of New York, and to the Office of the Provost of IU Bloomington, for providing the financial support for this project.

–Valerie Higgins, Meier Papers Project Archivist

Accompanying picture, from left to right: Gerardo Gonzalez, Dean of the IU School of Education; Valerie Higgins, Meier Papers Project Archivist; Deborah Meier; John Ryan, IU President Emeritus; Steve Bonchek, Harmony Education Center Executive Director. Click here to see a larger image.

From November 18 to December 19, 2009, a special exhibit at the Lilly commemorates the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species. The location of the exhibit in the Lincoln Room is particularly appropriate, since Darwin and Lincoln were born on the same day, on February 12, 1809, a coincidence that has led the New Yorker’s Adam Gopnik to label them the two “midwives to the spirit of a new world.” Gopnik’s Angels and Ages is just one of many books published in time for the Bicentennial that celebrate Darwin as a heroic, near–saintly battler against Victorian convention. By contrast, the Darwin highlighted in this exhibit is more hands–on: a thoroughly social and sociable being, a man equipped with an excellent sense of humor and a keen awareness of his popular appeal. The five cases of the exhibit track his career from the publication of Darwin’s first bestselling book, the Journal of Researches, now generally known as the Voyage of the Beagle, to his last popular success, The Formation of Vegetable Mould through the Action of Worms, in which he wanted to find out, among other things, if worms were susceptible to music (they weren’t). Unpublished letters (one of them even unknown to Darwin scholars) round off the image of a fluent writer who rebelled against the idea that scientific writing had to be, in the caustic words of Darwin’s admirer Stephen Jay Gould, “boring, inaccessible, illiterate, or unreadable.”

Highlights include a rare first edition of Origin as well as a late printing, annotated by his son Francis. The latter was originally in Darwin’s library at Down House and was recently purchased with the help of the Friends of the Lilly Library. Another new acquisition, the American edition of Origin, published by Appleton in New York, thanks to the Harvard botanist Asa Gray (1810–1888), Darwin’s most important supporter in the United States. Thanks to Curator of Manuscripts, Cherry Williams, we also now own a late carte–de–visite, likely one of Darwin’s last images from life.

Darwin’s friend Gray, a devout Presbyterian who did not work on Sundays, had hoped that there would be a way to reconcile evolution and faith. Difficult as it may be to assume that divine purpose governed natural selection, he wrote in his book Darwiniana (a first edition is on display at the Lilly), the alternative was even less satisfactory. Darwin politely disagreed. Would God have wanted to design a world in which cats cruelly play with mice? The subject was, he felt, too profound for the humans to comprehend—as if a dog wanted to understand Isaac Newton. Said Darwin, “Let each man hope and believe what he can.”

The exhibit is accompanied by a free, illustrated catalogue, written by the curator.

– Christoph Irmscher, Exhibition Curator and IU Professor of English

View a larger image of Charles Darwin.

One hundred fifty years ago today, Charles Darwin’s book On the Origin of Species was published in London. Although he was not the first person in England to publish something about evolution, his work gained ground based on its accuracy and detail on the subject.

The Lilly Library is home to several editions of this work (see the link in the paragraph above), and many other editions and related works can be found in IUCAT.

Be sure to check out Music for the Worms: A Darwin “Themester” Exhibit at the Lilly Library in the Lincoln Room now through December 19, 2009. This exhibit is part of Evolution, Diversity, and Change, Indiana University’s Fall 2009 Themester.

Megan Meyer of Indiana Public Media visited the Lilly Library earlier this fall for an interview with Joel Silver and Becky Cape (among others). Her interview, The Lilly Library: Anything But Hands Off, was broadcast on WFIU on September 15, 2009 and rebroadcast more recently, but if you missed it, you can listen to a podcast of it or read the transcript here.

Items related to the Lilly Library have popped up on a number of blogs in recent months. Here are three that may be of interest:

Blog Squad

The IU Libraries “Blog Squad” is a group of five students who blog about the IU Libraries. Each student is paired with a librarian who helps them learn about the libraries and how the libraries can contribute to the student’s academic success. Librarian David Oldenkamp sent squad member Joey on a visit to the Lilly Library. Read about it on Joey’s blog.

To read more about the Blog Squad, visit http://www.libraries.iub.edu/index.php?pageId=8537.

Persian playing cards

The IU Libraries Preservation Lab blogged about treating a collection of Persian playing cards from the Lilly Library.

The collection consists of 8–10 different sets of Persian playing cards ranging in date from ca. 1850–ca. 1950. More information about the cards is available in the library catalog.

Late age of print

IU Professor Ted Striphas new book, The Late Age of Print, focuses on contemporary book culture with attention to “e–books, book superstores, online bookselling, Amazon.com, and Harry Potter.” He shot a promotional video for his book at the Lilly Library during the 2009 spring semester. You can see glimpses of the Remembering Lincoln exhibition as Striphas strolls through most of the Lilly Library’s public spaces. I haven’t read the book (yet) but it is getting good reviews. Richard Nash describes it as a “must–read” for “those interested in the confluence of culture and economics as it relates to books.”

Watch the video and read about Striphas’s experience making it on The Late Age of Print blog.

– Erika Dowell, Public Services Librarian

As a part of IU Libraries’ celebration of Archives and Special Collections Month, the Lilly Library will host a performance of selections from the Starr Sheet Music Collection and Sam DeVincent Collection of American Sheet Music.

Last year’s presentation showcased Presidential Campaign songs; this year’s theme (as the title states) is songs of the Great Depression.

The show will occur on the 80th anniversary of the actual stock market crash of October 29, 1929 (Black Tuesday). Come out and hear Christopher Goodbeer, Alicia McCarthur, Thea Smith (singers), and Yonit Kosovske (pianist) perform these sometimes mournful but mostly optimistic songs.

Selections include the title song, “Brother Can You Spare a Dime,” “We’re in the Money,” “On the Good Ship Lollipop,” “Hallelujah I’m a Bum,” and others. A reception follows.

–Christopher Goodbeer, IU Jacobs School of Music student

Event Details
Brother Can You Spare a Dime: Popular Music from the Great Depression
Thursday, October 29 5:00pm
Slocum Room, Lilly Library