Appalshop Archive Partnering with Iron Mountain

Iron Mountain, a global leader in storage and information management services, invited our Archive to be part of their Living Legacy Initiative, through which they preserve and make accessible cultural and historical artifacts. In addition to financial support, Iron Mountain is helping us preserve over 9,000 assets by moving them into cold storage in their state-of-the-art underground facility in Boyers, Pennsylvania. For more information, check out this incredible film they created about our partnership. We are very grateful to Iron Mountain for this opportunity.

Recovered Audio and Visual Tapes

Additionally, in the past few months, audio and video tapes that were damaged in last July’s flood are beginning to return from other preservation partners. Folks from Specs Brothers and AV Geeks have been working steadily to clean and digitize our flooded materials, and we are excited to now have access to a wide variety of previously unseen or unheard Appalshop work. Here are some highlights from recently preserved media. 

In this excerpt, an unidentified woman tells a story about an angel visitation. This was recorded by youth media makers at Appalachian Media Institute, circa 1990, for an unfinished training project film called "Haints.”

Oaksie Caudill was a musician and basketmaker from Letcher County, Kentucky. He was recorded several times by Appalshop documentarians, particularly Anthony Slone, who directed the film Oaksie (1979). Several recordings of Caudill’s fiddle and harp playing were made during production of Oaksie, but only a fraction ended up in the final film—the rest remained in the archive vault for decades, until the flood hit, and now they can be heard by all of us.

This recording of the Home Folks playing at the Carter Family Fold was made during the production of Sunny Side of Life (1985). This song is also known as “Two Soldiers.”

More flood salvaged materials will be continually added to our Appalshop Archive Youtube page, so stay tuned.