On 16 September 1976, in the neighbourhood of Cite du Havre in Montréal, Québec, a 24-year-old singer and songwriter named Christina ‘Tia’ Blake recorded a demo tape in Studio A of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC). Tia had responded to a general request from CBC Radio looking for original songs written by local artists. She recorded three original songs that Thursday, including one song about her father and another written for an old boyfriend. She and the CBC producer listened to the playback together. The producer shook his head. There was nothing there he could use. He gave Tia the tape to keep.

Thirty-five years later, Tia called me on the phone. She had been in touch with the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress, who had referred her to me at the Southern Folklife Collection in Chapel Hill. Tia was born in Columbus, Georgia, had lived much of her life in Montreal, and now lived in the village of Pinehurst, North Carolina. Our archive was located 60 miles north of her residence at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She explained that in the early 1970s she had recorded an album of English and Irish folk songs for a small independent record label in Paris, France, and the record, which had sold very modestly, had gained something of a cult following among record collectors over the years, much to her amazement. Water Records, a small independent record label in the United States, had recently contacted her about reissuing the record along with the unreleased CBC sessions as additional bonus tracks. She wanted to find a safe place to store her master tapes and be able to hear them again while she decided what to do about the reissue proposal. Open reel tape machines had disappeared from the consumer market in the mid-1980s, around the time that sales of compact disc players were on the rise. Tia wondered if her open reel tapes were even playable.

As a curator, it wasn't uncommon for me to receive a call like this. Often when my phone rings, the voice at the end of the line is an unfamiliar one. I was intrigued that such an obscure record had a following. We agreed that Tia would send me the tapes so I could audition them and consider them as a possible acquisition for our permanent collection. Our audio engineer would make digital copies of the tapes for her in return.

I oversee the acquisition and preservation of and access to over a quarter of a million sound recordings. Over a hundred years of recorded sound are represented in the SFC, recorded on formats ranging from wax cylinders to MP3 files on USB drives. It is impossible for me to hear them all. Our two audio engineers, who work full time digitizing the original recordings, have heard about 15 per cent of the collection. As an administrator, I've heard significantly less. Some of the recordings I've heard are ones I've been curious about either from seeing them as they are received as donations or through research.

The package arrived safely the following week and it included two 7” open reel tapes. One was in a plain white box, the other in the original manufacturer's box. Tape boxes provide archivists with a lot of information about the tape. If it is a manufacturer's box, the brand, formulation, and the thickness of the tape are printed on the cover. Audio archivists become familiar with the illustrated cover designs used by a manufacturer over time and can identify the age of the tape based on the cover illustration.

For those specializing in restoring old sound recordings, binder hydrolysis or ‘sticky-shed syndrome’ is one of most troubling playback problems associated with certain tape brands and stocks. The binder is the adhesive that holds the oxide or magnetic particles to the thin ribbon of plastic that moves through the player and rolls over the playback heads converting the magnetic particles arranged on the tape into voltages. When the binder polymers break down, the tape becomes sticky. Adjacent layers of tape stick together and when the unwound tape rolls over the tape heads it creates a squealing noise from the friction of the tape sticking to and releasing from the tape heads. That gummy friction sometimes causes the oxide to shed from the tape, usually in small fragments, but in severe cases it peels off in large strips. Tape affected by sticky shed is usually back-coated polyester tape from the late 1970s and 1980s. Tapes made by Ampex during this period are particularly notorious. A temporary remedy for the problem is to bake the affected tape in a scientific oven at a low temperature for a few hours. Once the tape has cooled for twenty-four hours following the baking process, the tape is able to be played without shedding for about a week before it reverts back to its sticky shed condition. The treatment provides a small window of time for the tape to be safely played for digitization. Like most sound archives, we see a lot of tapes affected by sticky shed in the Southern Folklife Collection and have experienced tapes that respond well to treatment as well as terminal tapes for which we may only get one shot at playback for digitization as the tape falls apart as it is played.

A plain white box offers little info unless someone has handwritten notes on the box. Often it is a total mystery as to what type of tape it is, and the reel of tape has to be inspected for physical clues. Does the tape have a dark back-coating? Unwinding the first few layers of tape, do the layers of the tape stick together or loosely unwind? If you hold the tape up to the light can you see light piping through it? With a magnetic viewer, you can look at the magnetic patterns on the tape's oxide to determine what track configuration was used to record the tape: full-track, half-track, or quarter-track.

Thankfully both of Tia's tapes, recorded in the early 1970s, were not from the period known for sticky shed and played trouble-free. Initial inspection of the tape, after unspooling the first few layers, showed no signs of layer adhesion. Whatever brand of tape in the white box was, it was likely professional tape stock which the CBC used regularly and bought in bulk. A national radio station operating in the early 1970s, which were the heyday for analogue recording, would have burned through a lot of tape. Open reel tape was the professional recording format. Digital recording was still years away from its introduction into the recording studio.

I passed Tia's tapes over to our audio engineer with instructions for the transfers and went back to my office. About thirty minutes later I got a call: ‘I think you should come by and hear this.’ Because of the volume of the work and the amount of interesting materials, rarely do I get this type of call from my staff, unless there is a physical problem with the playback of the recording.

Using Steinberg Wavelab, our audio engineer had already digitized the first tape at a high resolution of 24bit 96kHz. The bold blue two-channel waveform was visible on the screen of the computer monitor. John hit the space bar on his keyboard and Tia began singing ‘My Father is a Lonely Man’. The musical arrangement was simple, just her voice accompanied by a nylon string folk guitar. Her voice was close-mic'd and sounded as clear and as natural as if she was there in our studio singing directly to us in the open air. Her voice and the song were instantly familiar, intimate, sincere, and wistful. It reminded me of June Tabor singing unaccompanied traditional British ballads, but also of Joni Mitchell, Judee Sill, and Sandy Denny. Possible influences and associations aside, Tia's was a unique and beautiful voice.

I wondered why the CBC producer would have turned her down and not held on dearly to this tape. Why was this exceptional singer-songwriter largely unknown, except now to a few record collectors? I was eight years old when this recording session happened. Why was I so moved by this music? Were my values and expectations as a listener that different from those hearing it in the 1970s? Had my senses been dulled to the appreciation of music through overexposure and this new discovery lifting the fog?

I can count many artists from the early 1970s whose work has been rediscovered and who have found sizable followings of young fans in their commercial afterlife: Nick Drake, John Fahey, Big Star, to name just a few. These artists were certainly in step with their times, yet their work was commercially eclipsed by the Rod Stewarts, Carol Kings, and James Taylors of the music industry.

The songs on the CBC tape were published as previously unreleased bonus tracks on the Water Records CD 2011 reissue of Folksongs & Ballads by Tia Blake and her folk group.Footnote ¹ Discovering Tia's music, the way I did through archival work, made me wonder how many other artists like Tia are out there awaiting discovery and appreciation by fresh ears. I've heard so little of what is in the Southern Folklife Collection. The negative space, the unknown, is a large part of the picture. How many treasures lay in wait? In an archive of unpublished treasures, my staff and I are excited to share what we find with each other and with the public.

There is much more to say about Tia Blake, who was an equally talented writer.Footnote ² I hope you will give her music a listen. Of the music I have heard in the Southern Folklife Collection, which includes outstanding work by a who's who of American folk music, hers is my favourite.