Raphael and Simon with Captain Luke and Ironing Board Sam

Last week we said bon voyage to our two French interns, Raphaël and Simon, who have been with us since last October.  As they head back to France and University, they carry with them the many experiences and great training they received playing with Ironing Board Sam, Captain Luke, John Dee Holeman and others. They visited many homebound artists throughout the South. They also logged countless hours in our archive, and we thought it right to catalog a bit of the amazing work they completed while with us.

Simon Arcache, a third year student from Sciences Po Toulouse, France, set to work on the photo archive. He spent over 200 hours meticulously scanning 700 photographs in multiple formats. He spent an additional 40 hours with Tim, tagging and ranking a total of 70,000 images. The digital photography archive is now conditioned for sharing with the Southern Folklife Collection in the Wilson Library at UNC Chapel Hill.

(Be sure to check out the Timothy Duffy collection!)

The great attention to detail required to get high quality photo scans gave Simon the opportunity to study the photography we have in our collection closely. The experience inspired Simon to pick up a camera and begin shooting photos himself. He learned black and white photographic processes and wound up returning to France with several cameras, a box of film and an enlarger, replacing clothes in his luggage. The photo archive takes a smidge over 1 TB of space and contains 1779 pictures of Ironing Board Sam alone.

Raphaël Evrard, also a third year student from Sciences Po Toulouse, France, trolled through and organized our expansive audio archive. In his first three months at Music Maker, Raphaël completed digitizing and databasing all of Tim’s digital audiotapes, a project that’s been going on since 2003. Comprised of 80,372 individual tracks spanning 1,922 recording sessions, it would take almost 2,000 hours to listen to it beginning to end, or about 83 days.

The collection will now be housed by the Southern Folklife Collection in the Wilson library at UNC Chapel Hill where scholars and students can access the collection from anywhere in the world. While digitizing and organizing the Music Maker catalog, Raphaël began mastering sound engineering through recording 6 projects including the forthcoming Lakota John and Kin record, Shelton Powe’s upcoming release and several others.

Through their hard work and passion, Raphaël and Simon left a mark on Music Maker that won’t soon fade. Thanks guys!