About the Preservation Hall Archives

The Preservation Hall Foundation Archives protect and preserve the tens of thousands of documents, instruments, artwork and other historically important artifacts collected by Preservation Hall over the past 60 years. Our goal is to ultimately make this essential collection of materials digitally accessible to researchers, students, and jazz aficionados around the world.

Ranging from precious photographs, reels of film, vinyl and more, the Archives tell the story of Preservation Hall, and the musicians who have graced its stage.

This year for the first time, the Preservation Hall Foundation has hired a small team of highly-trained archival and museum specialists, who are just beginning the long process of assessing, preserving, researching and digitizing these priceless collections. We are very proud to present a series of never-before-seen works from the archives in our first collaborative exhibit at the Hall, entitled Presence and Precarity: A Louisiana Fairytale, and to make these collections available in the future to our musical community, to scholars and the world via an online space. 

Currently, the Archives are spread throughout several units in an offsite storage facility, numerous rooms at Preservation Hall, and the Jaffe family’s private residence. With full funding, the Preservation Hall Foundation will be able to bring all materials to an interim facility to be assessed, catalogued, annotated, photographed, and properly preserved. 

Our vision for the future of the archives includes digitizing and displaying collections of the most important items in an online accessible rich content database. The Archives program will eventually extend to information architects, a database programmer and user interface designers to create the definitive public web archives with regular updates, highlighting the historical significance of specific items and the greater context of the materials in the Archives.

Our ultimate goal will be to establish a permanent archives facility to act as a neighborhood historical center, providing public access to our presently uncatalogued collections. Access would fuel original scholarly research in history, the humanities, arts and cultural criticism by giving scholars and musicians access to our archives and collections.

We envision that this new home for the archives and collections could become the site of public exhibits, lectures, screenings, publications, dialogues, workshops, neighborhood oral-history sessions and collaborations which explore the history and perpetuation of New Orleans’ traditional music. We also plan to make our collections available online and to create regular web-based exhibits for fans, listeners and musicians across the globe.

With your help, the Preservation Hall Archives will be available as a resource and learning tool for all.

The Preservation Hall Archives are dedicated to William “Bill” Russell, one of the leading authorities on early New Orleans jazz, and founder of American Music Records, which helped bring many forgotten New Orleans performers, including Bunk Johnson, to public attention. Russell moved to New Orleans in 1956, and was a catalyst of early activities at Preservation Hall.

He also co-founded and became the first curator of The Hogan Jazz Archive at Tulane University. In his obituary, The New York Times noted: “Russell was the single most influential figure in the revival of New Orleans jazz.”