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Dolly Parton’s first recording is among the items that the Southern Folklife Collection at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill will preserve, thanks to a new grant from the National Endowment from the Humanities.

The $131,765, three-year grant is called “From the Piedmont to the Swamplands: Preserving Southern Traditional Music.” It will help digitize and make available more than 1,650 hours of rare sound recordings and 4,500 photographs of musical figures from the 1920s to the 1980s.

The Parton recording dates from 1960, when the 13-year-old Dolly traveled by bus from Tennessee to Lake Charles, La., to record “Puppy Love” for the Goldband Recording Corporation. The collection holds the original master tape.

Other rarities to be preserved include:

• Studio and field recordings of musicians B.B. King, Elizabeth Cotten, Hazel Dickens, Bob Dylan, Iry LeJune and Tommy Jarrell;
• African-American musician “Boozoo” Chavis’s “Paper in My Shoe,” the first commercial recording of Zydeco music (1954); and
• Early photographs of the musical Seeger family, whose members include musician and folklorist Mike Seeger and his sister Peggy and half-brother, Pete.

“This grant allows us to preserve national treasures and provide online access to our collections for the first time,” says Steve Weiss, curator of the Southern Folklife Collection, one of the nation’s largest repositories for Southern music and culture.

The grant will preserve materials from four significant collections: the Goldband Recording Corporation Collection, 1930-1995; the William R. Ferris Collection, 1910s – 2003; the Mike Seeger Collection, 1955 – 2002; and the John Edwards Memorial Foundation Records, 1960 – 1988. Once digitized, the materials will be accessible online through the UNC library website, http://www.lib.unc.edu.

Media contact: Steve Weiss, (919) 962 -7105, This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it