Songbook Foundation awarded GRAMMY Museum grant

Digitization project will make rare radio recordings publicly accessible

The Great American Songbook Foundation has been selected as one of 14 recipients nationwide to receive funding from the GRAMMY Museum Grant Program, which supports research, archiving and preservation initiatives across the United States.

The $20,000 grant will fund the Songbook Library & Archives’ efforts to digitize and provide access to approximately 350 lacquer and vinyl discs from the James McDowell Collection. The recordings document McDowell’s career as “Jimmy Mack,” a prominent Midwestern radio and television broadcaster known for his influential role in the region’s mid-20th-century music scene. This project will make the full collection of rare and commercially unavailable recordings publicly accessible through the Songbook Foundation’s Preservica digital asset management system and online archives.

“We are thrilled to have been awarded a GRAMMY Museum Grant, which will allow us to digitize an incredible collection of radio recordings,” said Emily Rapoza, the Songbook Foundation’s Director of Library & Archives. “Recordings like those in the James McDowell Collection provide archives and researchers with access to a wealth of information about a specific and important time period. Without preservation, these stories are much harder to tell. Thanks to this grant, we will be able to share rare radio recordings that document wartime and local Indiana news through the lens of Jimmy Mack.”

Born in Nebraska, McDowell met his wife and creative partner, Peggy, at an Indianapolis record shop while stationed at Camp Atterbury during World War II, according to his obituary. After serving in England during the war, the lifelong music aficionado launched a broadcast career that eventually brought him back to Indianapolis, where in the late 1950s he and Peggy produced the Teens & Tunes radio show and a TV dance party called Teen Twirl for WISH. After stints at radio stations including WXLW, WBRI and WIRE, he hosted the teen dance show Bandstand 13 on WLWI (now WTHR) from 1965 to 1969 and came to be known as “Indy’s own Dick Clark.”

McDowell was inducted into the Indiana Broadcast Pioneers Hall of Fame in 2009 and donated his collection to the Songbook Library & Archives in 2018 before passing away at age 99 in 2021. The items include recordings of his radio shows as well as WWII-era transcription discs – music and other programming issued by federal agencies and other organizations to entertain and inform military personnel, often on extra-large 16-inch platters.

Generously funded by the Recording Academy, the GRAMMY Museum Grant Program provides annual support to organizations and individuals working to advance the preservation of the Americas’ recorded sound heritage, as well as research exploring the impact of music on the human condition.