Content area
Full Text
Review Essay
On 16 September 1976, in the neighbourhood of Cite du Havre in Montréal, Québec, a 24-year-old singer and songwriter named Christina 'Tia' Blake recorded a demo tape in Studio A of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC). Tia had responded to a general request from CBC Radio looking for original songs written by local artists. She recorded three original songs that Thursday, including one song about her father and another written for an old boyfriend. She and the CBC producer listened to the playback together. The producer shook his head. There was nothing there he could use. He gave Tia the tape to keep.
Thirty-five years later, Tia called me on the phone. She had been in touch with the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress, who had referred her to me at the Southern Folklife Collection in Chapel Hill. Tia was born in Columbus, Georgia, had lived much of her life in Montreal, and now lived in the village of Pinehurst, North Carolina. Our archive was located 60 miles north of her residence at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She explained that in the early 1970s she had recorded an album of English and Irish folk songs for a small independent record label in Paris, France, and the record, which had sold very modestly, had gained something of a cult following among record collectors over the years, much to her amazement. Water Records, a small independent record label in the United States, had recently contacted her about reissuing the record along with the unreleased CBC sessions as additional bonus tracks. She wanted to find a safe place to store her master tapes and be able to hear them again while she decided what to do about the reissue proposal. Open reel tape machines had disappeared from the consumer market in the mid-1980s, around the time that sales of compact disc players were on the rise. Tia wondered if her open reel tapes were even playable.
As a curator, it wasn't uncommon for me to receive a call like this. Often when my phone rings, the voice at the end of the line is an unfamiliar one. I was intrigued that such an obscure record had a following....