Above are some photos from our Classic Urban Harmony Archives. Click on any one to enlarge and use the side arrows to view more. .Located at an undisclosed site in the eastern half of the United States, a temperature and humidity controlled, guarded and constantly monitored facility houses our archives of more than 55,000 phonograph records. About 40,000 are vinyl 45 RPM records, mostly r&b, doo wop, gospel, reggae and soul vocal groups on original labels. The rest are 78’s, 16″ transcriptions, LP’s and even a few wax cyclinders of black vocal group recordings. This location also houses hundreds of video cassettes and DVD’s of vocal group concerts.
Our library at Classic Urban Harmony World Headquarters contains about 600 books on African American derived popular music and continues to grow. For space reasons, we concentrate mostly on vocal music. We recently had to donate 200+ books on jazz to the Harlem Jazz Museum to free up shelf space. Our library also includes hundreds of issues of important music magazines, along with our collections of posters, lobby cards, and sheet music. We now believe we now have one of the world’s top collections of photographs of R&B and doo wop groups. Recent acquisitions to our photo archives include the Phil Groia Photo Archives, the Mike Caldarulo Photo Archives as well as digital scans from the Paul Ressler Photo Archives and the Angelo Pompeo Photo Archives. We also have 8 double file drawers of news clippings about vocal groups.
The walls of our headquarters are smartly decorated with rare posters of the Mills Brothers, Ink Spots, Dixieaires and Golden Gate Quartet along with lobby cards of the Hurricanes in the movie “Rockin’ The Blues” and the Marcels in “Twist Around The Clock”. We also display works from some of our favorite artists: two original paintings of New Orleans bands by Linda Lesperance; a signed numbered print of Frankie Lymon’s Teenagers by Jimmy Merchant; a numbered print of the (5) Scamps by Kansas City artist Cindy Alkine; and a print of noted black artist Horace Pippin’s “Harmonizing” (we couldn’t afford the original of that!).
For casual listing around the office, we have 4000 – 5000 CD’s by vocal groups. Our car has an IPOD with 11,000 of our favorite r&b and doo wop vocal group songs, which we play in “shuffle” mode while we drive.
To view our collection of Mills Brothers Sheet Music, click the button below.
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