Thanks to a generous grant from the New York State Archives Documentary Heritage Program, previously inaccessible audiovisual materials from the Brooklyn Arts Council Folk Arts collection are now available to researchers!
One of the programs included in this project is "Praise in the Park: Musical Expressions of Faith." Held annually from 1999 to 2002 at the Prospect Park Music Pagoda, the program featured performances of traditional praise from houses of worship across Brooklyn, bringing spiritually inspired music and dance to a general audience. The program held in 2000 also included an installation of artifacts representing the traditions demonstrated during the performances. The full lineup can be seen here:
Charlie Storey and his All Stars, an award-winning Gospel group performed for the crowd at 4:50 that evening. Formed in 1950, the group was a fixture on New York City's WLIB radio station, and went on to record numerous albums, two of which hit gold. Thanks to this digitization project, the audio and video of that performance is available to CBH researchers.
Contact us to make an appointment, and see this one-of-a-kind performance for yourself!
Interested in seeing more photos from CBH’s collections? Visit our online image gallery, which includes a selection of our images, or the digital collections portal at Brooklyn Public Library. We welcome appointments to research our entire collection of images, archives, maps, and special collections. Our reference staff is available to help with your research! You can reach us at cbhreference@bklynlibrary.org.
This blog post reflects the opinions of the author and does not necessarily represent the views of Brooklyn Public Library.
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