John’s Immense Archive

Greetings Hartford fans! We are updating our newsletter a bit, and this month we want to re-cap the story around John’s immense archive, and give you a behind-the-scenes look at projects we’ve been working on.

To give you a little background…in 2007, about seven years after Dad passed, his estate settled and we were tasked with figuring out what to do with an extremely large storage unit full of stuff. Eric and I had just moved into a home with a finished basement, so we decided to bring all of his things there to sort.

Oh. My.

We had no idea. The basement was so full, we had to make paths through stacks of boxes. Each box was a surprise trove of interesting, and sometimes strange, things, anywhere from books, to tapes, to files, to photos, to collections…you name it. Hundreds of old hotel keys? Check. A cigar boxfull of river rocks? Check. Personal letters from Pete Seeger, who signed everything with his name and a drawing of a banjo? Check. Cassette tape recordings of jam sessions with a host of legends, including Bill Monroe, Earl Scruggs, and Benny Martin? Check. We started referring to the room in the basement as “the Vortex”, because every trip down there could suck you in for hours.

Over the years, we sorted, reviewed, read, laughed, gasped, and breathed in more that our fair share of old paper dust. God bless our children for their patience with all of Grandpa’s stuff. And ultimately, we have placed this treasure into the hands of some very capable folks at some of music’s most revered institutions. Ninety-three boxes (maybe more) of river memorabilia have gone to the Herman T. Pott Inland Waterways Library at the Mercantile on UMSL campus. All the books Dad collected on various topics (music, fiddling, American history, etc) have gone to the Anne Potter Wilson Library at the Blair Music School at Vanderbilt University. All of Dad’s personal cassette tapes with those cool jam sessions (and more), all his video tapes, and all of his fiddle composition journals (with a few thousand tunes at least!) have gone to the Center for Popular Music at MTSU. And all his photos, ephemera, stage clothes, and so much more–including those letters from Pete Seeger–have gone to the Country Music Hall of Fame.

Our family has moved a couple of times since 2007, and the house is much cleaner and easier to walk through now. And we’ve turned our attention from sorting and donating to creating and sharing. What does that look like? We’ll it probably will help to understand that Eric and I are not musicians; he’s a professor, and I’m an artist. And we had no intention of being in the music business until it showed up unannounced on our doorstep. Dad was such a prolific creative, and it seemed a shame to let all of that fade away, so we started by just keeping up with his website. And then my brother Jamie recorded “Part of Your History”, a wonderfully moving tribute to Dad, supported by a bunch of his musical buddies. And then a few years later, Tony Rice reached out and asked if we still had some tapes that he, Dad, and Vassar had recorded years prior but never released (that phone call resulted in the album, Hartford Rice Clements). And on, and on. And then we realized we were in the thick of it, so we kept at it.

As we would go through the boxes in the basement, I kept finding these composition books containing all kinds of handwritten music and large numbers written in Sharpie on the outside. I had no idea what these were, but I just kept stacking them up as I found them. Later, Matt Combs told me that Dad had been using them to compose fiddle tunes, as he had been learning to write notation. Matt brought Nancy Blake over to the house to look at them, and she knew exactly what they were; she implored us to preserve them because they had great historical importance. I will write more details about it in a later post, but this discovery became what is now John Hartford’s Mammoth Collection of Fiddle Tunes, and The John Hartford Fiddle Tune Project, Vol 1 (Vol. 2 is coming soon!)

We’ve got so many stories like this to tell, and we have additional friends and musicians who are going to help us tell them. We recently began a Patreon page in hopes of it becoming a vehicle for sharing these artifacts, creating a unique Hartford community, and giving Dad’s fans a chance to participate in the furthering of his legacy. We hope you will consider joining us on this journey, and I can assure you that every penny generated goes back into these projects, and helps us to keep this thing going.

Thanks for keeping his music alive,

Katie Harford Hogue

(Info and photo recently shared on Patreon.)