Cuca Records at the Mills Music Library

One of the things I love most about my job as the Ethnic American Music Curator in the Mills Music Library at the University of Wisconsin-Madison is that we get an acquisitions budget each year and I am allowed to spend part of it on things I feel make important contributions to the Wisconsin Music Archives. Among my various projects within that mission is completing the Cuca Records catalog. There are so many incredible records on this Sauk City, WI label and its subsidiaries, and fortunately the founder--Jim Kirchstein--is still around to talk about it with us (or, as it were last week, with Bill Malone on his Back to the Country program on radio station WORT--which was recorded and archived in the Wisconsin Music Archives). Here are just a few of the gems I have acquired for the Mills Music Library within the past month, but if anyone else has any Cuca Records for sale, please do let me know. More importantly, if anybody wants to hear these records or take on a Cuca-related research project, come visit us at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the Memorial Library. So far we've tracked down 293 45s and over 100 Cuca LPs, but there's still a pretty good way to go before the collection is complete.