About Us

The Field Recorders' Collective is an organization dedicated to the release of materials (music and photographs) from private collections. Your support for this extremely-focused project is important. In purchasing products from the Field Recorders' Collective, you will be making it possible for us to continue this endeavor and provide funds back to surviving musicians, immediate families and those collectors in the group attempting to maintain often endangered collections.

Although some recordings in the collection have been shared between collectors informally, never before have they appeared with the higher quality found in the FRC releases. This is because of the technology available using pro-audio digital workstations. Further, these recordings have never before been generally made available to the old time and traditional music community. In so doing, the Field Recorders' Collective hopes to "democratize" these collections and see them form a public archive. This is opposed to seeing them disappear in the "black hole" of university and government archives which are, at best, difficult to gain entrance to or at worse, only for those with credentials for accessing them. We hope you will find the FRC releases an important addition to your traditional music library.

The growing group of collectors providing materials includes:

• Ray Alden
• Andy Cahan
• Brandywine Friends of Old Time Music
• Susie Goehring – for the Jeff Goehring Collection
• Peter Hoover
• Reed Martin
• Kilby Spencer
• John Cohen

The Field Recorders' Collective is attempting to keep the cost of the CDs and the shipping economical through several factors.

1. Use environmentally friendly cardboard sleeves that can be sent at high speed through priority mail without incurring the abnormally high cost of mailing multiple jewel cases.
2. Although the cardboard jacket prevents us from producing a large packet of information to accompany each CD, we will gradually provide more complete liner notes and additional information in the Notes section of our Web site.
3. The Internet now allows us to sell our CDs on-line. We hope that by adding this function to the web site we can reduce your time and mailing costs in sending checks.

We hope that you will enjoy the FRC releases and support our efforts.