About the Urban Pioneers Project
The Urban Pioneers Utah Folk Music Revival project was supported by a grant from LSTA.
The purpose of this project is to create an “Urban Pioneers” digital library documenting the urban folk music subculture that was centered in Salt Lake City, Utah in the 1940s-1960s. The digital library fills a gap in available research information that folklorist Polly Stewart discovered when she was asked to review the book “Folklore in Utah” (USU Press, 2004). In Stewart’s words:
In January 2004, I was a reader—upon request of the Utah State University Press—of the manuscript of this book Folklore in Utah, edited by Dave Stanley. There was virtually no mention of Rosalie Sorrels and her husband Jim or about Utah Phillips; I was outraged because I had been involved with that group four decades before. I was shocked that there was no mention of them in this anthology about folklore in Utah, but what I learned is that the people who contributed to that anthology were asked to deal only with documentary sources. The second thing was, no one in that stable of writers had direct experience or knowledge with the 1960s Urban Folk Revival era. I realized that the reason there was nothing on that era was that there was no documentation—there were just a few scraps in archives. If someone did not document that era, when we were all gone there would be no record of us. (Polly Stewart Interview, UW-Madison Women’s Studies Program, Oral histories: Scholars of Feminism/ http://minds.wisconsin.edu/handle/1793/52561)
The digital library brings together material from various library archives with material donated by Stewart to Weber State University to create a Mountain West Digital Library collection searchable from popular search engines and library catalogs and is a collaborative effort between partners including the J. Willard Marriott Library (Salt Lake City), Weber State University Stewart Library (Ogden), Utah State University libraries (Logan) and the Utah State Historical Society (Salt Lake City).
Muse Intership [***]
Polly Stewart, Folklorist
Alison Regan, Librarian
Amy Brunvand, Librarian
Ambra Gagliardi, Student Intern
Jamie Quing Ye, Student Intern & Web Page Developer
University of Utah Marriott Library Digital Operations scanned the digital library.
Original copies of the material is preserved at the Weber State University Stewart Library.
In Memorium, Polly Stewart (1943-2013)
Shortly after this project started , Folkorist Polly Stewart who was the driving force behind the collection died from complications of cancer. We miss her, and hope that this project stands as testimony to her scholarship, influence and zest for life.
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