Their names were Billy Stewart and Van McCoy, and this weekend they’re remembered at a free event called “D.C.’s Unsung Native Sons.” It’s part of a larger remembrance project organized by filmmakers Beverly Lindsay-Johnson and Michelle Jones, who began their work when Jones — whose aunt served as the first president of Billy Stewart’s fan club — shared with Lindsay-Johnson her admiration of the two native Washingtonians and her desire to help preserve their legacies.

A panel of those who knew or studied Stewart and McCoy are expected to shed light on their music and lives at the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library in downtown Washington Saturday afternoon.

One panelist — who will also sing — is Stewart’s first cousin, Calvin C. Ruffin, Jr. Eleven years younger than Stewart, he was dazzled by the singer’s chops. He used to watch him and his other cousins sing and fight over girls.

“He was my idol,” says Ruffin. “Always has been — even though he was my first cousin.”

A soulman, Stewart first achieved acclaim in the 1950s and reached the charts in the 1960s with his unique, upbeat take on George Gershwin’s “Summertime” and his own suave “Sitting in the Park.”

Stewart came from musicians on both parents’ sides, and he performed in family gospel and secular groups as a kid. These days, Ruffin looks back glowingly on his late cousin’s talents. But he acknowledges that Stewart had personal problems, too.

Discovered by Bo Diddley and signed to Chess Records, Stewart released a song in 1962 called “Fat Boy” that referred to his own large size. When others mocked him for his weight, it was a different matter.

“When I was with Billy he had an entourage, before we had even heard of the term ‘entourage,’” says Ruffin. “If someone called him ‘fat boy,’ he pulled out a gun on them. I was with him at that time. The only reason I know that is the gun’s barrel is about as big as I was. Real long. He would always get an attitude if someone called him that. He had a real complex when it came to his weight, as he was real heavy.”

While Stewart wrestled privately with his health, his fans seemed aware only of his multifaceted vocals. He harmonized with Marvin Gaye as fellow substitute members of The Rainbows, and developed a distinctive variation on jazz scatting, where he repeated words in a powerful yet sweet, church-developed manner.

“If someone called [Billy Stewart] ‘fat boy,’ he pulled out a gun on them.” — Billy Stewart’s cousin Calvin C. Ruffin, Jr.

“Billy did jazz, Billy did blues, he did lots of things that fit his style of music,” Ruffin says. “The thing that excited him most was when he did George Gershwin.” He adds that many people, including record-label executives, failed to understand Stewart’s desire to fit jazz, blues and R&B into his sound.

In January 1970, several months before his 33rd birthday, Stewart and members of his band were killed when their Ford Thunderbird collided with a substructure support of a bridge, then plunged into a river in North Carolina.

Ruffin says that two months before the crash, Stewart told him that, because of his struggles with his weight and with the record industry, he knew he hadn’t treated people as kindly as he once had.

“It was almost like Billy was confessing to me — all the people that he stepped on, all the people that he hurt, and that he was going to change and come back a different person,” Ruffin says. “He was going to help me out and some of my female cousins. He wanted to make amends.”

* * *

Van McCoy is best known for his huge 1975 disco hit “The Hustle,” with its distinctive flute melody. He also wrote and produced R&B songs for many artists throughout the 1960s. Like Stewart, McCoy learned to play the piano when he was young, sang in the church, and later emoted street-corner doo-wop in a high school vocal group. His ensemble was called The Starlighters.

McCoy later enrolled at Howard University, but after two years, music beckoned and he moved to Philadelphia where he started his own record label.

The D.C. native’s songwriting skills caught the ears of songwriter/producer greats Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, who hired him as a staff writer and arranger. McCoy was soon writing songs for Jackie Wilson, Gladys Knight and The Pips and Barbara Lewis. For the latter, he penned the hit “Baby I’m Yours,” later featured on the Bridges of Madison County soundtrack.

McCoy also worked with D.C. R&B artists such as Peaches and Herb and The Choice 4 before he scored his biggest hit with “The Hustle,” which he co-wrote in New York City after checking out the disco scene there.

Four years after “The Hustle” made it big, McCoy died suddenly of a heart attack at age 39.

Mark Puryear of the Smithsonian Folklore Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage, who will be moderating Saturday’s panel, describes McCoy as “very focused.” He “directed and mastered his craft,” arranging strings, horns, an orchestra and a rhythm section. Production-wise, Puryear says, “there was nothing he couldn’t do.”

“Billy Stewart and Van McCoy: D.C.’s Unsung Native Sons” takes place June 25 from 1 to 4 p.m. at the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library.

“I came not to work, but dressed to party,” Stubs says. “I had a little skirt on.”

Usually, when Stubs checked in at the downtown D.C. rock club, she was there to do her job: run a camera. She’d seen more than 1,000 acts during her 10 years at the venue. Most of the time, though, Stubs didn’t record them — from her seat above the audience, she normally just shot for the in-house video system.

But this was New Year’s Eve of 1995, and Tiny Desk Unit was getting ready to play the final show on F Street before 9:30 Club moved to a bigger building uptown. It cried out for documentation. Stubs wasn’t on the clock, but her pal couldn’t let her miss this one.

“A friend said to me, ‘Get your butt in that chair. You’re gonna regret it the rest of your life if you don’t shoot the last band that plays there,'” says Stubs. “I said, ‘I have a little skirt on! I don’t think I should get up there.'” But her friend insisted. “Get your butt in that chair,” she said.

“So that’s exactly what I did,” Stubs says. “I got my butt in the chair and held my legs tight together that night.”

That video went into Stubs’ small collection of tape she’d shot at 9:30 Club, much of which sat in her Takoma Park house after the venue relocated and retired its camera-operator position. It took Stubs 20 years to find a new home for the videos. Now they live at the D.C. Public Library.

“Over the years I kept thinking, ‘OK, I’m gonna digitize these things,’ and I never got around to it,” Stubs says. Brendan Canty, the former drummer of D.C. punk legends Fugazi, suggested that she donate them to the library’s growing D.C. Punk Archive.

Now, the library can boast that it has original footage of Nine Inch Nails, Gwar, Psychedelic Furs, Youth of Today, Mudhoney, Jawbox, Seven Seconds and Fugazi — among many others — playing 9:30 Club back in the day. (Her Tiny Desk Unit video isn’t there, but it’s on YouTube, above. See a complete list of her donations, below.)

Rumors have swirled for years that someone, somewhere, must be sitting on a goldmine of old 9:30 Club footage. Stubs probably has the closest thing to it — and there may be more tape she hasn’t found yet, she says. But her collection isn’t exactly vast.

“People were far more protective of their music at that time,” she says. “Most of the time, the best work I ever did was gone. It was not recorded… It wasn’t like people today, recording things with their cell phones.”

Stubs’ contribution to D.C. music history is now digitized and accessible to anyone who visits the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library downtown. Librarian Michele Casto says members of the public just need to contact her division to arrange a viewing. (Some of the videos were also shown at 9:30 Club’s recent World’s Fair exhibition.)

Stubs looks back on her 10 years at 9:30 Club warmly. But she says it wasn’t all bad that the venue stopped filming shows when it relocated to V Street. If it hadn’t, she doubts she would have moved on.

“I’d be a geezer up on the pole,” Stubs says, laughing. “It would be so hard to give up that job.”

A list of the 9:30 Club performance videos Teri Stubs donated to the D.C. Punk Archive, by band name: Adolescents, Clutch (four tapes), Cop Shoot Cop (two tapes), Executive Slacks, Firehose, Fudge Tunnel, Fugazi (three tapes), G.I., Gumball, Gwar, Happy Go Licky, Henry Rollins, Holy Cow (four tapes), Ignition, Jack Hammer, Jawbox (three tapes), John Sex, Killing Joke, Kingface, Lucy Brown (four tapes), Marginal Man, Mudhoney, Nine Inch Nails (two tapes), Pain Teens, Psychedelic Furs (two tapes), Royal Crescent Mob, Seven Seconds, Slickee Boys, Sonic Youth, Strange Boutique (two tapes), Sugartime, That Petrol Emotion, Thud (six tapes), Velocity Girl, Who is God, Youth of Today.

Top photo: A screenshot from Teri Stubs’ video of Tiny Desk Unit’s Dec. 31, 1995 show at the 9:30 Club.

Nationwide this week is called Banned Books Week. At the D.C. Public Library, it’s called “Uncensored.”

Banned Books Week was established in 1982 to raise awareness of books that people want off the shelves. It’s not an issue limited to the McCarthy era — even now, parents, leaders and various interest groups rally to censor or remove books from libraries for all kinds of reasons. But the D.C. Public Library widens the scope of Banned Books Week, looking at any form of expression that’s been challenged, including music.

That’s why the library has made a playlist for Banned Books Week two years in a row, says Maggie Gilmore, a librarian in DCPL’s adult information services division. This year, the D.C. Public Library Foundation asked her to compile a list of songs with a dual theme: censorship and D.C. music.

Gilmore consulted her fellow librarians for ideas and solicited input from attendees at August’s D.C. Record Fair at Penn Social. This is the resulting playlist, streamable via Spotify and YouTube, below:

Bad Brains, “Banned in DC”
Chain & the Gang, “Free Will”
Parliament, “Chocolate City”
Chuck Brown & the Soul Searchers, “Run Joe”
The Evens, “Wanted Criminals”
The Cornel West Theory, “DC Love Story”
Ice-T, “Freedom of Speech”
Coup Sauvage & the Snips, “Don’t Touch My Hair” (JD Samson Remix)
Minor Threat, “Straight Edge”
Bikini Kill, “Rebel Girl”
Unrest, “Malcolm X Park”
The Blackbyrds, “Rock Creek Park”
The Roots with Wale and Chrisette Michele, “Rising Up”
Diamond District, “March Off”
Marvin Gaye, “Got To Give It Up”

The playlist comes across as a celebration of outspoken music — not hard to find in this town, Gilmore says.

“[D.C.] is a natural environment for people to discuss political issues,” Gilmore says. Plus, she says, the city’s constantly shifting population can aggravate local tensions.

“With D.C. having so many people moving in and out of the city, there’s always been tension in the various groups that are represented in D.C.,” Gilmore says. She cites D.C.’s signature funk sound as an example. “Go-go has always been challenged by those who may feel it’s obtrusive — and maybe not even the music itself, but the social scene around go-go.”

The playlist debuted at last Friday’s opening party for “Uncensored: Information Antics,” the library’s new exhibit in honor of Banned Books Week. The show remains on view at the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library through Oct. 22.

Gilmore says “Uncensored” and this playlist are part of the library’s larger efforts to document and support local expression in all forms. DCPL’s D.C. Punk Archive has been in the works for a year now. Gilmore coordinates the library’s series of punk-rock basement shows, meant to highlight its punk collection. After this, the library focuses on archiving go-go, then jazz, Gilmore says.

“Trying to highlight local music, [D.C.’s cultural] history and current artists — that’s one of the main goals of the basement shows, to provide a space for bands to play,” Gilmore says. “So this was an opportunity to continue on that.”

Related: WAMU’s Kojo Nnamdi Show airs a segment on Banned Books Week Tuesday at 1:32 p.m. Can’t tune in? The segment will be archived on kojoshow.org.

Warning: Some songs contain explicit lyrics.

Via Spotify:

The Silver Spring photographer has been shooting photos and video of the contemporary go-go scene since 2010, and he captures conversations with D.C.-area musicians with a new web series called Locally Grown. Py’s videos live permanently on YouTube. His newest photo show, on the other hand, is one-night only.

Py plans to share and discuss some of his go-go images Monday, Aug. 17 at the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library in downtown D.C., just in time for the late Chuck Brown’s birthday. The godfather of go-go would have turned 79 on Aug. 22. One of Py’s images can be found at the Chuck Brown Memorial in D.C.’s Langdon neighborhood.

The photographer says his presentation will be more than just a random collection of band photos on a screen.

“The photo talk is really designed for people who are somewhat familiar with the go-go culture but haven’t really been into the go-go culture,” Py says in a phone call. “I talk about the music of go-go and how it is distinctive and unique to Washington D.C. How it is a big part of the culture for African-Americans who have grown up and lived in D.C.”

But he has his own side of the story to share, too. “I speak to my adventure in go-go and my work with many of the bands, especially my work with Chuck Brown,” Py says. “A very personal adventure.”

Capturing go-go

When Py calls his photography a personal adventure, that’s important. He’s spent time in places, and with people, who are crucial to the go-go scene. He hung out at clubs such as Tradewinds, the now-shuttered Maryland go-go hall. And he worked as one of Chuck Brown’s official photographers in the final year of Brown’s life.

In 2009, Py was just another local shooter who had photographed old-school D.C. rock acts like The Nighthawks and The Slickee Boys. Then in 2010 he saw Brown perform at the annual National Capital Barbecue Battle on Pennsylvania Avenue NW. He took some photos from the crowd and got hooked.

“So I started shooting [go-go groups] Bela’dona [and] Da Mixx Band, and worked my way up to Rare Essence,” Py says. “I kept sending my work to Chuck and [his manager] Tom Goldfogle, and within three months I was onstage with Chuck shooting his shows. I quit my job and pursued this for two years.”

Between the summer of 2010 to 2013, Py went out three or four nights a week and came home at 6 a.m., he says. He enjoyed crossover-friendly go-go gigs, but he tended to prefer the late-night shows that attracted genre devotees.

“It’s much more interesting when the audience is engaging at eye level with the band,” Py says, “and the lead talker is talking about those people’s lives and what is happening that week, and whose birthday it is, and the guy who just got out of jail after 20 years and gets to come onstage and dance with the band. You don’t see that at the Strathmore Hall show.”

Py’s presentation at the library, which he’s shown only twice before, will include images of gigs by The Backyard Band, Team Familiar (formerly Familiar Faces), Suttle Thoughts, Be’la Dona, Da Mixx Band and Rare Essence in addition to Chuck Brown.

But Py isn’t shooting as much as he once was. He still regularly hits Silver Spring’s Society Lounge to see Team Familiar play its Sunday gig there, but he’s slowed down his go-go photography. He’s working a day job again, for one — and he also found himself in an artistic rut.

“For the most part I stopped shooting go-go two years ago,” Py says. “You can’t shoot the same thing over and over again and still have it be creative.”

So Py has channeled his love of documentation into his YouTube show that serves a similar purpose: to record D.C.’s music culture.

Locally Grown

Py has a green thumb. “I have a very beautiful — I call it a ‘yarden,” he says. “It’s no longer a garden, it has taken over the entire yard.”

Sunday afternoons he invites musicians to his backyard jungle. He grills up a meal and switches on his video camera for a chat and a performance. “Grill, garden and grooves,” he calls it.

This summer Py is recording 10 to 12 programs of artists playing in his garden. Each show runs for 15 to 20 minutes and features local musicians from go-go and roots bands performing original material and answering Py’s questions. He handles the entire production, from setting up microphones to interviewing artists to editing tape. He likes it that way.

“I decided I didn’t want to wrestle with cell-phone photographers in clubs for a position to video,” Py says. Plus, he’d been inspired by NPR’s Tiny Desk concerts, a series of live performances filmed at the cluttered desk of All Songs Considered creator Bob Boilen.

Py has taped Locally Grown episodes with musicians including keyboardist Marcus Young from The Chuck Brown Band, Esther Haynes and Hokum Jazz, Frank “Scooby” Marshall (aka Frank Sirius) from Team Familiar and The Chuck Brown Band and guitarist Genevieve Konecnik (aka Genny Jam), formerly of Be’la Dona and now with Pebble to Pearl.

Py usually wears something outlandish on his show — a tie-dyed shirt or a loud thrift-store sports jacket — and his enormous, phallic microphone adds a goofy, public-access feel. Occasionally, Py’s dog Bebop will wander into the frame.

The photographer says he’s “extremely uncomfortable in front of that camera,” but he sticks with it. “As a kid, I wanted to be a game-show host. I grew up on The Gong Show.”

Py admits Locally Grown hasn’t racked up many views online, but he’s happy with the project, and he suspects his guests are, too.

When go-go artists join Py in his “yarden,” he asks them to play original music — not covers, which many go-go acts play live. He also sometimes asks them to collaborate with people they haven’t worked with before.

“A certain joy comes out,” Py says, when musicians are doing that kind of thing. Take Claudia “Kool Keys” Rogers from Be’la Dona and Salt-N-Pepa’s band. She’d only met bandleader and violinist Chelsey Green once, briefly, but their dual performance on Locally Grown felt authentic.

It was the kind of creative chemistry Py wants to capture on his program.

“I put [Rogers] in a situation that she was a bit uncomfortable with, but afterwards she thanked me,” Py says. “It allowed her to be an artist.”

Chip Py shares and discusses his go-go images Aug. 17 at 6:30 p.m. at the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library in downtown D.C. Free admission. The library also hosts a Chuck Brown tribute Aug. 22 at 1 p.m. The Chuck Brown Band plays a Chuck Brown Day concert Aug. 22 at the Chuck Brown Memorial in D.C.

“Obviously, at first, music and libraries seems like a head-scratcher because libraries are quiet,” says local promoter, artist manager and record-label owner Jim Thomson. But for the past six months, Thomson has been helping change expectations about what goes on inside D.C.’s public libraries.

On behalf of scrappy theater nonprofit Capital Fringe, Thomson has been programming “Fringe Music in the Library,” one of two series bringing live music to the D.C. Public Library system. The other series is strictly punk rock, presented by the library’s D.C. Punk Archive. DCPL has been hosting those noisy gigs since October 2014 to help promote its growing collection of D.C. punk ephemera. The latest show takes place downtown tonight — with D.C. bands Give, Puff Pieces and The Maneuvers — then Friday it’s back to Thomson, who’s bringing in D.C.’s CooLots under the Capital Fringe banner.

For the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library — D.C.’s central library downtown — these shows help it build a reputation as a cultural center. It’s a rebranding for a facility that’s been dogged by systemwide budget cuts and criticism of its Brutalist architecture. (The District is planning to overhaul MLK Library in two years and add an auditorium.) DCPL has also had to confront complaints from residents who openly — many would say crudely — gripe about homeless residents who utilize the library’s amenities. Then there’s the bigger picture: Libraries all over the world are facing questions about their role in the 21st century. Could it be prudent to focus on libraries not just as information warehouses, but cultural beacons?

“One of our primary goals is to establish the library as a go-to place for local culture.” —Linnea Hegarty, executive director of the D.C. Public Library Foundation

Linnea Hegarty, the executive director of the D.C. Public Library Foundation, seems to think so. She says the foundation covers the costs of both D.C. Public Library concert series — including fees to the bands — and says they’re now funded through 2016. “One of our primary goals is to establish the library as a go-to place for local culture,” Hegarty writes via email.

Capital Fringe is best known for its annual performing-arts event, the Fringe Festival. But last year, under Julianne Brienza’s leadership, the organization hired Thomson to take over music-booking at the festival, then asked him to handle the eclectic library shows she had set into motion. Those events overlapped with the D.C. Punk Archive’s basement shows, which Martin Luther King Jr. Library music librarian Maggie Gilmore says were “designed to increase attention to and support of the D.C. Punk Archive,” its ongoing effort to document the District’s three-chord rock scene.

Michele Casto, one of the librarians who helped get the D.C. Punk Archive off the ground, says DCPL wants to show that the punk archive isn’t just about long-gone history.

“Having shows that feature current local bands helps reiterate the point that the archive is 1976 to the present, that we’re documenting local music that’s happening now not just local music of the past,” Casto writes in an email.

The punk gigs also aim to support the next generation of D.C. musicians. “For every show, we’ve tried to include a band that’s either just getting started, or that consists of kids — i.e. bands that might have a hard time getting a gig in a club,” Casto writes. “This gives them a place to get experience performing.”

The punk shows take place every other month and have included raucous performances from Joy Buttons, Hemlines, Flamers and Priests. Under Thomson, the Fringe gigs have dabbled in punk, too — roping in punk provocateur Ian Svenonius multiple times — but they’ve prized diversity, bringing in the rarely seen soul singer George Smallwood, Afropop vocalist Anna Mwalagho, jazz/poetry act Heroes Are Gang Leaders and the Ethiopian Jazz Quartet with Feedel Band‘s Araya Woldemichael.

“I hope that the citizens will come in and get inspired by seeing an Ethiopian jazz quintet and go, ‘Wow,'” Thomson says.

Some younger residents, it seems, have already found that inspiration. When guitarist Anthony Pirog performed at the downtown library with his surf band, The El Reys, librarians projected the film Endless Summer while kids bopped around. They were “dancing and bouncing around wildly, full of excitement for the music,” Gilmore emails. “That put a smile on everyone’s face.”

Now, if only more people would come to the shows.

Woldemichael guesses that at his recent library gig, “50 percent of them were curious folks and the rest were my friends, family members and fans.” Thomson acknowledges that a recent performance at the Benning Road library only brought a handful of people. “The branch libraries are a little more challenging to get attendance,” he says. “Mainly location, location, location. It’s hard to get interest in it, or to publicize it.”

The promoter hopes that momentum will build over time. “I know from when you are working with regular venues, you don’t get a slam dunk in the beginning, always,” he says. “You have to plant a seed and let it have a chance to germinate. We are really in a very early stage.”

Meanwhile, artists seem appreciative of the series’ benevolent mission — even if the room doesn’t fill up.

“Heroes Are Gang Leaders really felt that this performance [at Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library] was a special opportunity to reach out to and interact with longtime D.C. residents, amidst the city’s advanced stages of gentrification, displacement and widespread oppression of many Washingtonians,” band member Luke Stewart writes in an email.

Plus, it gives residents a chance to absorb culture — for free — that they wouldn’t normally come across, Thomson says. In a way, that’s the role of a library in the first place.

“For me, the side benefit is to go into libraries that are in parts of the city that are not part of my everyday life,” the promoter says. “It helps you interact with the city. I like to see these different things that makes the city as an organism come to life.”

Give, Puff Pieces and The Maneuvers play the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library at 6 p.m. June 11. The CooLots play at noon on June 12. For a complete schedule of Capital Fringe concerts at D.C.’s libraries, consult this calendar. The Punk Archive basement shows are usually publicized on the D.C. Public Library’s Facebook page.

Top photo courtesy of Jim Thomson

It’s called the D.C. Vernacular Music Archive, and it’s formally unveiled Thursday afternoon at the college’s Gelman Library.

Music professor and prolific author Kip Lornell began putting together the archive last year with university librarian and ex-journalist Tina Plottel. “Hear in DC: Vernacular Music in the Nation’s Capital” is their first effort to show off what they’ve assembled so far—and while it’s still a tiny collection, it could eventually become the broadest of any D.C. music archive yet.

The Washington region currently boasts several other archives that specialize in local music culture. But four key genres in D.C. music history—punk rock, go-go, bluegrass and folk—all get equal billing in the small collection that Plottel and Lornell have organized.

“There’s all kinds of stuff out there… it just seemed like there was a gulf,” Lornell says. “The intent is that the Vernacular Music Archive will [fill] that gap, and give a more rounded view of vernacular music around D.C.”

To build a foundation for the archive, Plottel contributed materials from her Kansas House Project, an oral history she conducted about the late punk-rock house in Arlington. Lornell and Charles Stephenson, who co-wrote The Beat: Go-Go’s Fusion Of Funk and Hip-Hop, chipped in some of the go-go artifacts they picked up while writing the book. On the folk and bluegrass sides, Lornell says they have objects from The Seldom Scene‘s Tom Gray, the Washington Area Music Association, the university’s own stash (the college once housed the 1960s-era Folk Music Club, a group Lornell describes as the basis of the Folklore Society of Greater Washington) and Lornell himself, who’s written a few books about traditional music and picked up numerous artifacts over the years.

Thursday’s kickoff runs at the somewhat inconvenient time of 2 p.m. to 5 p.m., but those who can swing it can expect panel discussions with Plottel and Lornell, Dischord Records co-founder Ian MacKaye, TMOTTGoGo’s Kevin “Kato” Hammond, Folklore Society of Greater Washington co-founder Andy Wallace, Steve Lorenz from the Ralph Rinzler Folklife Archive and folk musician and author Stephen Wade, who is also scheduled to perform. Marc Eisenberg, founder of the D.C. Music Salon series, will moderate the afternoon’s panels.

This promises to be just the first in a series of related symposia and events, and future editions will probably take deeper dives into specific chapters of D.C. music history, Lornell says.

The educator doesn’t seem concerned about competing with the region’s other music collections, like D.C. Public Library’s punk archive, the University of Maryland’s punk fanzine collection, the University of the District of Columbia’s Felix E. Grant Jazz Archives and the various D.C. music items housed at the Library of Congress and Smithsonian. He says the university’s collection aims to complement, not compete.

“There’s such a range of vernacular music out there, I don’t see any way the topic can be exhausted,” the professor says.

He and Plottel have already thought about how to work with all of those institutions, too. Last month, they hosted a gathering of the archivists at Gelman, bringing together representatives from a range of local institutions, big and small (I was there listening in), and they took turns discussing their mutual challenges and potential points of collaboration. Lornell says the university seems enthusiastic about teaming up with those entities in some way—and treating the D.C. Vernacular Music Archive as a portal to other collections that specialize in things the college doesn’t have access to.

Looking ahead, Lornell also hopes the archive will go even broader, preserving music that’s normally ignored by local institutions and the press, like the output of Somalian and Salvadoran immigrants, as well as all kinds of sacred music, which he calls “criminally overlooked.”

He says if someone doesn’t archive these cultures, there’s a good chance it will all wind up in history’s dustbin.

“Things seem so commonplace now, but as we go through the future, these things that seem like everyday events for us will become lost to time unless somebody throws them into an archive somewhere,” Lornell says. “Because they will just get tossed, or they’ll get recycled in some way or thrown away—and that’s exactly what we don’t want to have happen.”

“Hear In DC: Vernacular Music in the Nation’s Capital” runs from 2 p.m. to 5 p.m. at George Washington University’s Gelman Library, Room 702. Have something you’d like to donate to the archive? Email Lornell. Photo by Flickr user Geronimo De Francesco used under a Creative Commons license.

The idea had been kicking around for a few years, says Michele Casto, a special collections librarian in DCPL’s Washingtoniana collection. Casto says she’d started looking into it some time ago, but she later changed jobs and the idea fell through the cracks. It wasn’t until after she’d transferred back to Washingtoniana—and Schneider got in touch—that the plan sprouted legs.

Now the D.C. Punk Archive is officially coming together at the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library, in the hopes that its physical and digital components will help capture what Casto calls a “big piece of D.C. history.”

The punk archive aims to date back to 1976—the year the Slickee Boys released their Hot and Cool EP, a recording now seen as a key predecessor to D.C. punk and hardcore—and track the scene to its bustling present day. A $20,000 grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services will pay for an online multimedia showcase so both locals and out-of-towners can explore the collection. The library hopes to unveil the web portal in the spring or summer of 2015.

When Schneider contacted DCPL, Casto says, he said he’d come across various punk collections in people’s houses while making his in-progress documentary with Paul Bishow, and some of those pieces of the past could be in danger of being lost. It seemed like a smart idea to house vulnerable objects like flyers, records and photographs in a venue that was both secure and accessible to the public. Casto, of course, agreed. “That’s the gospel of preservation: making sure these things don’t disappear,” she says.

But what would a D.C. punk archive look like, and whose stories would it tell? DCPL reached out to people in Schneider’s network to solicit guidance for the project. Their efforts led to one well-attended meeting last year, where numerous figures in the punk scene showed up to offer their feedback.

Cynthia Connolly, the photographer who assembled the seminal punk-rock photography book Banned In D.C. and formerly worked at Dischord, attended the meeting. She says she stressed the importance of bringing in original, handmade material with distinctive and personal touches like pinholes and tape marks. “Any subculture thrives on the passion of the people who are involved,” Connolly says, “and those little details are important.”

Now the library is asking the public to donate their own pieces of D.C.’s punk history to the library. It already has some items, including a flyer collection (now being digitized) donated by musician Eddie Janney. But right now the library has mostly secured “firm verbal commitments” from several people with small collections of things like records, film footage and posters. Some folks with larger collections have expressed their support, but Casto says they’re “waiting to see where it goes before deciding what they want to do.”

As items come in, Casto says the library is harnessing people power to organize it all. It’s already recruited dozens of volunteers that it will train as “community archivists” to help catalog and digitize donated artifacts, and it’s working with the people behind the University of Maryland’s fanzine collection to see how they can pool their resources.

The library hopes to use this process as a template for another music project it wants to pursue: a D.C. go-go archive. That initiative is on hold at the moment; a previous attempt to solicit donations from the go-go community hit a wall, Casto says. They’re hoping to reboot it after learning some lessons from the punk collection.

Schneider says that now seems like an opportune time to build an archive like this. For one, D.C.’s punk scene is surprisingly energetic right now, with new bands and venues cropping up regularly. Plus, he and Bishow are readying Punk the Capital for a release in late 2014 or early 2015, and Scott Crawford’s Salad Days film is also in the works.

But even as the local punk scene grows, D.C. is speedily transforming into a wealthy, built-up city with fewer obvious traces of its musical heritage. The filmmaker says it should be a priority to preserve and reflect on what came before.

“With the city changing so fast, on so many fronts,” Schneider says, “it’s more important than ever now to ensure that the city’s identity is firmly anchored before a remodeled city takes over.”

D.C. Public Library is currently accepting items for the D.C. Punk Archive. Contact Michele Casto or Bobbie Dougherty for more information. The library has also set up a Google Form for members of the public who want to suggest D.C. music for the archive. Follow @dcpunkarchive on Twitter.

Both images: Materials donated by Eddie Janney