One of the things I’ve always liked to read on music albums back when they were a physical entity was the liner notes. In the notes, you could find who wrote the song, what musicians played on it, who produced it, etc.

With this information, I’d start to making connections. For example, if an album I really liked was produced by a certain person, I’d start to look for other albums produced by him or her. Though liner notes are more or less no longer written, there’s still information out there to be found.

The artifact I centered this project on is the 2002 album “Happy Songs” by Audra McDonald. I chose this album because I was already familiar with it, and I was vaguely aware that most of the songs were from an earlier era, so I thought it might make a rich site for archival investigation.

From the list of songs on the album, I started to look online at what I could find about each one. I knew that finding out the songwriters or the musicians would not be hard to find, but as this is an archival research project, I wanted to see what else might be attached to each song, to see what “story” the song might tell that was beyond the recording on the album.

The internet, as might be expected, was my resource for this. Sometimes my search would only yield cursory information listed on Wikipedia, but Wikipedia has improved over the years, and it has become far more reliable than it used to be. Additionally, Wikipedia has footnotes that lead to far richer sources, and sometimes they led to an actual online archive. One of the benefits of this particular project was to discover how many digital archives are available. Some yielded interesting information, while others less so.

I also decided that this would not necessarily be a deep dive into each song. Also, some have more interesting stories than others, so I present varying levels of depth depending on the song and what I found.