Well It’s Black History Month and maybe you missed the story on the LP we have on display in our front window on White Street.  So here it is …

Fred Schneider, lead singer and driving force behind The B-52’s rock band, is a good guy. Every year he donates hundreds of LPs, 45s, CDs and other stuff to the ARChive of Contemporary Music. To illustrate this fact, in the window is one of the records he recently donated to the ARC: WVON – The Good Guys.

WVON was a Chicago radio station owned by Phil and Leonard Chess, who ran Chess Records. During the sixties, the station featured blues, soul and R&B music aimed primarily at the black audience of the south and west sides of Chicago. Known as “the Voice Of the Negro,” It also had a strong community presence. This album, for instance, is a compilation of doo wop tracks that was sold in order to generate money to feed hungry people at Christmas time in 1964.

The ARC is hungry, too. We can always use LPs, CDs and 45s, as well as music-related magazines, posters, videos, books and memorabilia as we build the library—grown now to an estimated 3,000,000 pieces! It sounds like a lot, but there are many things we don’t have.

Oh, yeah, we can always use money, too. Feel free to click on “Support” to see how you can help.

Be a Good Guy (or Gal, as the case may be)!