Marian Anderson

The University of Pennsylvania is the principal repository for documents concerning the life and career of singer Marian Anderson. Her music library and personal memorabilia are now housed just a short distance from the neighborhood where she grew up. The papers comprise 495 boxes and include correspondence, business records and contracts, biographical materials, notes, journals, calendars, and financial documents. Programs and publicity materials documenting her singing career are extensive, as is the collection of awards and honorary degrees she received.

The Marian Anderson Collection also includes her entire music library and her collections of sound recordings and photographs, all of which have been separately cataloged. The music library contains more than 2,000 songs in manuscript--including many by Florence Price--as well as more than 2,000 printed scores. Interviews with Howard Taubman and with Studs Terkel and lectures featuring Miss Anderson on audio tape have also been preserved and cataloged. Among the most interesting recordings are those made of rehearsals in her home studio and the test pressings of her commercial recordings. The thousands of photographs in the collection are preserved in albums and scanned on the ArtStor.