FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

SONGCATCHERS—IN SEARCH OF THE WORLD'S MUSIC

WASHINGTON (March 12, 2003)—For 30 years, Grateful Dead percussionist Mickey Hart has been on a quest to search out and record the wealth of different music in the world—much of it little known. He also has been fascinated by the recordists, or songcatchers, who came before him and the extraordinary technological developments that have made their work possible.

In SONGCATCHERS: In Search of the World's Music (National Geographic Books, ISBN 0-7922-4107-X, June 2003, $30), Hart teams with National Geographic and writer K.M. Kostyal to trace the story of our love affair with music and the adventures of those who have recorded its rhythms and melodies for more than a century. The book looks at our universal appreciation of music and the technology and curiosity that have carried ethnic sounds such as the shamanic chants of Siberia, Native American drumming and singing, music of the rain forest peoples in New Guinea and the Amazon region, and the intoxicating gamelan orchestras of Bali to music lovers all over the world.

"The musics of a people are cultural legacies of unmeasurable worth and significance," Hart writes. "Our musical heritage is one of humanity's greatest inventions—the most vital repository of humanity's histories, dreams and hopes."

Recording music is vital to its preservation. "Just as we try to protect our forests and rivers and the air we breathe, we have to put our musical heritage right up there in the 'necessity of life category.'… To allow such a loss is totally unacceptable," he adds, while hoping that "someday, all the world will be able to hear and appreciate all the world's music."

In SONGCATCHERS Hart chronicles his travels around the globe in search of different sounds and compares his experiences to those of songcatchers who went before him. Their tales are heroic, full of romance, derring-do, adventure and personal intrigue.

The world's first recordist songcatcher was Jesse Walter Fewkes, who, in March 1890, using an Edison phonograph, went to Calais, Maine, to make recordings of Passamaquoddy Indian songs, folktales and language. Others coming soon after ventured much further afield, to Siberia, Africa, the High Andes and remote Pacific Islands. The machines that made their work possible progressed from treadle-powered phonographs that imprinted sound waves on wax cylinders, to magnetic tape that captured sound in iron oxide particles, to the digital domain of today.

The songcatchers did much more than capture sound. They brought back adventure, they broadened the idea of what music meant and what different cultures could produce. Hart ventures across time and continents in following the songcatchers and their machines, and throughout it all he celebrates music and its ability to transcend the mundane and transport the human spirit.

Hart, who lives in Northern California, is best known for his nearly three decades with the Grateful Dead, in which he played percussion instruments from around the world. He is on the board of trustees of the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress, where he serves on the Leadership Committee of Save Our Sounds and is involved with America's Recorded Sound Project at the Smithsonian Institute and Library of Congress, which is digitizing and preserving the Center's vast music collection.

CONTACT:
Hilsinger Mendelson
Sandi Mendelson/Nancy Friend (East Coast)
+1 212 725 7705

Judy Hilsinger (West Coast)
+1 323 931 5335