I began collecting when I was five years old.  My parents would take me to second-hand stores in Columbus, OH where I could buy old 78 records for a nickel a piece; and even though I could barely read the labels, I would take home as many as my weekly allowance could afford and savor them in my basement lair.  Admittedly at that age I was hardly a connoisseur, but even then I loved the sounds of those old songs and was captivated by the emotions and ideas and even the vibrations that emanated so magically from that plain black disk.  As I grew older and began making music myself I became increasingly curious about where it came from. Who wrote it? How was it notated and arranged and published and recorded? Who were the people who performed it, and what made them so great?

Nearly half a century later I’m still trying to answer those same questions.  My passion for this music–some call it my “mission” although that sounds alarmingly evangelical to me–is the driving force of my career as a performer and also as a preservationist, and it’s the spine that runs through our three-part series Michael Feinstein’s American Songbook (Wednesdays October 6, 13, and 20 at 8 PM.)

The television programs are kind of a road trip across the country and also through history, with a combination of really interesting and rare archival footage juxtaposed with live performances of my own in venues ranging from symphony halls to intimate jazz clubs. And in between, there are expeditions to flea markets, storage lockers, basements, attics, and warehouses where we search for the physical evidence of the American Songbook: sheet music, posters, records, radio transcriptions, film and videotape, manuscripts and orchestrations and–best of all–first person encounters with what I like to call “the original cast:” the men and women who were first person witnesses to that golden age in the middle of the 20^th century when good music was popular and popular music was good.

What we’ve assembled here for this virtual exhibition is a very small slice of some of the musical artifacts I’ve collected over the years. (Many more are on view, with detailed biographies, timelines, essays, images, video and audio at our series companion site www.michaelfeinsteinsamericansongbook.org.). There’s a story that goes with every item on view, so I encourage you to read the accompanying explanations. 

I’ve always been aurally oriented (I play the piano by ear, and learned to read music only when I became a professional performer and had to be able to communicate with my fellow musicians) so audio is at the heart of my personal collection.  Here you can listen to recordings of iconic performers that were never commercially released and came into my hands through the kindness of fate; you can view a slideshow of some extremely rare photographs of George Gershwin and see pages from his own musical sketchbook, written in his own hand.  There's a recently discovered video clip from a previously lost TV special, and a beautiful song that was written for Frank Sinatra that Sinatra never got around to singing or recording.

I confess I feel a little odd being called the “curator” of this on-line exhibit, since I think there’s a difference between one who collects (everything is equally valuable, the important thing is to preserve it) and one who curates (value judgments are made and interpretations are put forth.) I believe that Time is the ultimate Curator.  But I am also confident that in the future, these great songs will survive because of their quality, and because of the collective efforts of so many performers, musicians, collectors, historians, teachers, students, and fans who have helped keep the music alive.

Michael Feinstein

October 1, 2010