The recording was unearthed in Baton Rouge, Louisiana in January 2018, more than a half century after it was made. The audio captured on the portable reel-to-reel tape machine – a German-made UHER 4000 Report-L popular in the early 1960s …
Category: From The Archives

Developing characters at the Austin Film Festival
Editor’s Note: For the past several years, the Austin Film Festival has been busy digitizing their recordings of the festival panels, which they’ve maintained since the first year in 1994. That’s over 25 years’ worth of conversations from the best …
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“It’s Only Rock ‘N’ Roll” in Tennessee and Texas
By Wittliff staff member, Library Specialist, Sherri Turner-Herrmann. Rock and roll hit me like a freight train early on. When I was 8, my cousin introduced me to Alice Cooper and that’s when the first train hit. Shock rock, hard …
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Re-discovering Peter Pan at The Wittliff
By Wittliff student worker, Eric Robertson-Gordon. Growing up, my childhood was filled with movies. My father would often show me and my sister movies that he remembered loving when he was a child. My dad was a cinephile and it …

Waylon and Lefty: Marine Corps pitch men?
The forgotten 60-second Marine Corps. recruiting spot fades in with the familiar symphonic chorus of “MacArthur Park” – “Someone left the cake out in the rain . . .” But the voice is not that of actor Richard Harris, who …

Digital Treasures: Here today, here tomorrow.
The Digital Preservation Coalition cites November 7th as World Digital Preservation Day. It is just another day here at The Wittliff Collections, but I thought it would be a good opportunity to share with you some of our ongoing digital …

Processing Jane Sumner’s audio archives opened up a fascinating world to me.
By Wittliff student worker, Jessica Henriquez. Jane Sumner, an award-winning film journalist for The Dallas Morning News, has interviewed directors, producers, writers, book authors, and the former Governor of Texas, Ann Richards. Through the years, she’s kept her roughly-recorded microcassettes …
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Susannah Broyles discusses “The Ramón Hernández Tejano Music Collection.”
The Wittliff has recently acquired the extensive Tejano music archive of Ramón Hernández, a San Antonio publicist, journalist, and photographer. The collection includes music memorabilia consisting of various artist’s costumes, records, original marketing posters, handwritten sheets of music, personal photographs, …
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The Boys Who Wrote the Songs
The Rogers & Hammerhead Show aired from 1996-1997 on the Austin Music Network on cable access TV. Freddy Powers and Bill McDavid created the show to shine a spotlight on songwriters who developed country music in Texas—and whose songs …

Willie Nelson OBJECTified
(by Katie Salzmann) We never know who might request to use material from our archives, and earlier this summer the folks at the television show “OBJECTified” reached out to us for images of Willie Nelson to complement their hour-long interview …