This project was conducted by ethnomusicologist and folklorist Harold Anderson, Ph.D. under a grant from Maryland Traditions and the NEA with the Pennsylvania Avenue Redevelopment Collaborative (PARC), the Eubie Blake Center, Baltimore City and community scholars in an advisory capacity. It was originally conceptualized as generating materials for the production of “heritage tours” to encourage cultural preservation and growth through cultural tourism in the geographic area known as Old West Baltimore. To this end, we set about researching local genres and cataloguing and mapping sites of past and current performances and performance practices and collecting oral history interviews representative of various cultural expressions.

What we have discovered is that this area has an incredible depth - the number of notable sites, genres and people is huge. We have just begun to mine this fertile ground and this report can only serve to indicate how much more there is to be discovered and documented.