The collection consists of scrapbooks, photos, sheet music, manuscripts, and other material documenting the personal and professional life of popular music lyricist Gus Kahn who collaborated on many of the most enduring hits of the 20th-century including “Yes, Sir, That’s My Baby,” “Carolina in the Morning,” and “It Had to Be You.”
Collection consists of drafts of Will Friedwald’s book A biographical dictionary of jazz and popular singers. Includes draft notes. A large collection of music recordings were donated along with the papers; they have since been catalogued and removed from the collection. A complete listing of recordings is available in the finding aid.
The collection contains 2 DVD's on the life of Jimmy Van Heusen who composed the Academy Award-winning song "Swinging on a Star" for the 1944 Paramount film Going My Way.
The collection contains 4 scrapbook pages with photos of the Wolverine Orchestra, including member Bix Beiderbecke; 1 bound scrapbook containing news clippings and other items concerning the travels of Dick Voynow's Wolverine Orchestra; miscellaneous unlabeled photos; miscellaneous news clippings
The Newton Wayland Collection was received along with the larger Bethards-Massey Collection in November 2019 from the Paramount Theatre, Oakland. It was the working library used by Wayland in his performances as conductor of pops orchestras. The collection includes arrangements (scores and parts) of primarily popular music by Wayland and others, as well as some light classical sets. The majority of the materials are not published. The collection was a working rental library under the auspices of Jean Cunningham at the Paramount Theatre, Oakland. While it is presumed that it was organized in some manner while at the Theatre, it came to us haphazardly with individual sets of the same arrangements located far apart. The materials were housed primarily in manila envelopes or accordion folders, often they were kept in whatever mailer was used to return them to the library. Labels, when they were present, were often for other titles.
Three Paige boxes and two flat boxes of newspaper clippings, correspondence, music, and manuscripts. A2018-023 originally consisted of eight (8) scrapbooks.