The White House’s Forgotten 1970s Vinyl Record Collection: Talking Heads, Sex Pistols, Captain Beefheart, Donna Summer & More

Though it may not be for every­one, the job of Pres­i­dent of the Unit­ed States of Amer­i­ca does have its perks. Take, for exam­ple, the abil­i­ty to screen any film you like at the White House: here on Open Cul­ture, we’ve pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured lists of movies watched by Richard Nixon, Jim­my Carter, and Ronald Rea­gan. But for Carter in par­tic­u­lar, music seems to have been even more impor­tant than cin­e­ma. So explains John Chuldenko, step­son of that for­mer pres­i­den­t’s son Jack, in the episode of The 1600 Ses­sions above. In it, he tells of his redis­cov­ery of an insti­tu­tion cre­at­ed under Nixon, great­ly expand­ed under Carter, and packed away under Rea­gan: the White House Record Library.

“The Library, begun by First Lady Pat Nixon, was curat­ed by a vol­un­teer com­mis­sion of not­ed music jour­nal­ists, schol­ars, and oth­er experts,” says the White House His­tor­i­cal Asso­ci­a­tion. When it came time to update it at the end of the nine­teen-sev­en­ties, writes Wash­ing­to­ni­an’s Rob Brun­ner, “the selec­tion process would be head­ed by John Ham­mond, a huge­ly influ­en­tial fig­ure who had signed Bob Dylan, Aretha Franklin, and Bruce Spring­steen.” Ham­mond also enlist­ed genre experts like “Mod­ern Jazz Quar­tet pianist John Lewis, who was respon­si­ble for jazz, and Boston music crit­ic Bob Blu­men­thal, who led the pop picks.”

The result­ing col­lec­tion of more than 2,000 LPs con­tains more than a few albums you would­n’t expect to hear at the White House. These include Van Mor­rison’s Astral Weeks, Randy New­man’s Good Old Boys (which con­tains “one of the great­est cri­tiques of both South­ern and North­ern racism,” as Blu­men­thal recalls), Talk­ing Heads’ More Songs About Build­ings and Food, Cap­tain Beefheart’s Trout Mask Repli­ca, and Nev­er Mind the Bol­locks, Here’s the Sex Pis­tols. On the more dance­able end of the spec­trum, the White House Record Library also includes Funkadelic’s, Earth, Wind, and Fire, and Don­na Sum­mer — all of their work select­ed express­ly for pres­i­den­tial use.

Hav­ing last been updat­ed in 1981 and sum­mar­i­ly cart­ed off to “a secure undis­closed stor­age facil­i­ty,” the Library remains a musi­cal time cap­sule of that era. So Chuldenko dis­cov­ered when, fol­low­ing a thread of fam­i­ly lore, he man­aged to track down a cura­tor who could arrange a lis­ten­ing ses­sion for him. “There is no rap or hip-hop in there,” he said to Wash­ing­ton­ian. “There’s no elec­tron­ic music. There are no boy bands, no Madon­na or Brit­ney Spears. No Michael Jack­son!” Hav­ing suc­ceed­ed in his mis­sion of find­ing the White House Record Library, he’s set for him­self the even more for­mi­da­ble chal­lenge of bring­ing it up to date. Cer­tain­ly its geo­graph­i­cal purview will have to widen, giv­en how Amer­i­ca now lis­tens to so much music from beyond its bor­ders. Would the White House care to hear any K‑pop rec­om­men­da­tions?

Relat­ed con­tent:

Haru­ki Muraka­mi Announces an Archive That Will House His Man­u­scripts, Let­ters & Col­lec­tion of 10,000+ Vinyl Records

Google Gives 360° Tour of the White House

Lis­ten to James Baldwin’s Record Col­lec­tion in a 478-track, 32-Hour Spo­ti­fy Playlist

The Library of Con­gress Makes Its Archives Free for DJs to Remix: Intro­duc­ing the “Cit­i­zen DJ” Project

David Bowie Lists His 25 Favorite LPs in His Record Col­lec­tion: Stream Most of Them Free Online

The Inter­net Archive Is Dig­i­tiz­ing & Pre­serv­ing Over 100,000 Vinyl Records: Hear 750 Full Albums Now

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.