Join us for a music-filled, hands-on, all-ages Saturday morning workshop featuring a live performance by local musician Simon Balto at 10:30, a record album silk screening workshop with artist Matt Bindert, free art projects, and a listening lab with record players, reel-to-reel tape decks, and more. Learn about Wisconsin’'s very own Paramount Records, a record label based in Grafton, WI that during the 1920s and 30s released some of the most influential blues, jazz, and folk records of the 20th century.

This program is part of The Rise and Fall and Rise of Paramount Records, a three-day, multi-disciplinary seminar hosted by the UW-Madison Center for the Humanities at both on-and-off-campus venues. In 2013-2014, Jack White'’s Third Man Records, in partnership with John Fahey’'s Revenant Records, issued a groundbreaking archive of vernacular American music released by Paramount Records, a division of the Wisconsin Chair Company. Furnishing audiences with nearly 1,600 songs from Paramount'’s vast catalog, The Rise and Fall of Paramount Records, Volumes 1 and 2 also take the form of curated exhibit of words, images, and music, providing a window through which the American of the 1920s and 30s can be interpreted and understood. These programs highlight the unexpected centrality of Wisconsin in the history of Paramount Records and American blues and folk music and draw attention to the richness of the archival holdings of the UW-Madison libraries, which played a central role in the production of both volumes.

Art supplies donated by Mad City Music Exchange.