One of my favorite things to do is giving tours of Mills Music Library and the Wisconsin Music Archives, sharing our musical mission while also getting to talk about our amazing collections. This week Jody Berndt of the Madison Record Club asked me to give her club members a tour of Mills and to specifically focus on the Cuca Records Collection–among my favorite collections I’ve helped guide to the WMA and one I have continued to grow over the last decade. Last year, our music technical services librarian Matt Appleby completed the online collection guide (https://cuca.library.wisc.edu/) and we currently have two exhibit cases full of Cuca gems on display in our reading room.
In addition to the online and cased materials, this tour was a rare chance to get up close and personal with many of the Cuca 45s and LPs as well as the publishing contracts, pressing orders, artist photographs, newspaper clippings, release index cards, processing metadata, as well as unique artist puppets and various ephemera from Jim Kirchstein’s collection. We even had a few minutes to listen to some of the rarer recordings in the collection.
Not only did the Record Club bring a record turnout (get it?) to the event, we also had TWO Cuca recording artists and their wives present–Marcus Sullivan of the King’s Men Five AND Jon Stanbridge of both the Changing Tydes Revue and Bill Allen & the Fugitives. And if that weren’t exciting enough, we were also joined by Cuca Records founder Jim Kirchstein’s daughter, Vicki Widdecombe and her husband, and we were treated to several fun stories of having sleepovers in the Sara Sound Studio and working on the LP assembly line at Cuca!
Many thanks to everyone who came out to take the tour and spend a few after-hours with us in the library! It was particularly great to see fellow Stardazer Jamie McCloskey, who says he is onboard with working up a new Cuca Records tribute show with me, and Bob Koch, who has contributed several 45s to the Cuca Collection over the years! It was a special event, indeed! [for more info on the Madison Record Club, check out https://madison.citycast.fm/best/madison-record-club]
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Post-tour Photo-op with the Madison Record Club [photo by Tom Caw]
Jim Kirchstein, Raylene Bartel, and myself
Cuca Records founder, Jim Kirchstein, and his collection of Ken Vogel puppets
Some of my favorite Cuca Records
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