In 2023, the Museum acquired an enormous and valuable labor of love: the British Archive of Country Music (BACM). Dave Barnes, a British country music fan, established the nonprofit archive in 1987 to catalog and preserve thousands of country music recordings, videos, magazines, and books. Upon Barnes’s death in 2020, his family arranged for the Museum to acquire the BACM, underwritten by a generous gift from the Tyson Family Foundation. Around 50,000 recordings were shipped from England to the United States to join the Museum’s existing collection of more than 250,000 sound recordings. This program, moderated by the Museum’s Paul Kingsbury, will celebrate the history of that important collection from England and explore its significance. The panelists are Alan Barnes, son of Dave Barnes and a fine art dealer now living in Dallas, Texas; Kevin Fleming, the Museum’s director of library and archival collections, who managed the acquisition of the BACM; and Martin Hawkins, music historian, record collector, and author of A Shot in the Dark: Making Records in Nashville, 1945–1955. Following the panel, the Museum’s longtime curator of recorded-sound collections, Alan Stoker and the Museum’s recorded sound processing specialist, Brenda Thomas, will lead a listening session of and discuss records from the BACM collection. Ford Theater. Included with Museum admission. Program ticket required. Free to Museum members.
NON-MEMBERS MUST PURCHASE MUSEUM ADMISSION HERE
When purchasing admission:
- select the date of this program,
- select a gallery entry time of 2:00 p.m. or earlier,
- select your Experience, and
- select the Panel Discussion as an add-on.
