Listening in the Archives — Blues and Hawaiian Guitar Recordings

Blues and Hawaiian music appear in the Library of Congress's recording selections, documentary collections and interpretations of archive songs. The materials range from the Hawaiian Quintette's 1913 “Aloha ‘Oe” to one-song videos of Archive Challenge performances from 2025.

A recording and its documentation

The American Folklife Center's May 13, 2026 feature on the Pete Welding collection describes recordings, photographs and manuscripts relating to American music. The collection is especially rich in African American vernacular music, including blues and gospel, and also contains recordings and writings about jazz, pop, folk and other styles. The Center acquired the collection in 2010.

The feature identifies Welding as a historian, collector and record producer.

Hawaiian recordings and Kohala

The Library of Congress's 2025 National Recording Registry selections include “Aloha ‘Oe,” recorded by the Hawaiian Quintette in 1913. It is the earliest recording in that year's list, whose selections span 1913 to 2015. The list includes folk, jazz, country, pop, Latin, choral and musical theater, as well as comedy and sports recordings. Ten of the selections date from the 1970s, and the registry list itself began in 2002.

On April 9, 2025, the American Folklife Center announced the online availability of Unearthing the Lost Songs of Kohala, a collection of documentary field research created through its Community Collections Grants program. A year of work produced video recordings, song sheets and photographs documenting generations-old heirloom songs of Kohala, in the northwest portion of the island of Hawai’i.

The collection features several generations of performers. Their repertoires include traditional hula chants, original compositions for solo and ensemble performance, slack-key guitar playing, and pop songs reworked to reflect community sensibilities. For tunings and slide, see the technical guide.

From archival source to new arrangement

The American Folklife Center's August 1, 2025 Archive Challenge announcement reports that 40 more videos have gone online. In the challenge, the Center helps accomplished musicians and groups choose a song from its archive, make their own interpretation and perform it in a special showcase. The resulting videos each present one song, with musicians interpreting material from the Center's archive.

The set announced in 2025 includes videos from the Folk Alliance International conferences in 2024 and 2025. It also includes a set of 2020 videos whose publication was delayed by the COVID-19 pandemic. Folk and blues performers come from the U.S., Canada, Scotland, France, Nigeria, Haiti, New Zealand and Australia.

US public-domain context

Duke University School of Law's Center for the Study of the Public Domain reports that sound recordings from 1924 entered the US public domain on January 1, 2025. Its account also identifies thousands of copyrighted works from 1929 entering the US public domain on that date. The Center specifies that its discussion concerns US law, with different copyright terms applying in other countries.

Duke's Public Domain Day 2026 account places sound recordings from 1925 in the US public domain on January 1, 2026, alongside thousands of works from 1930. The recording examples include Bessie Smith and Louis Armstrong's “The St. Louis Blues” and Marian Anderson singing “Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen.” Duke describes the works entering the public domain as free for copying, sharing and building upon.

Musical compositions — the music and lyrics represented in sheet music — and recordings of those songs have separate copyrights with different terms of protection, as Duke explains. The repertoire page covers the blues and Hawaiian traditions discussed in the class descriptions.