MURFREESBORO, Tenn. — “Out of the Blue,” Middle Tennessee State University’s monthly television magazine program, takes viewers inside the Center for Popular Music in the June episode, highlighting the nationally recognized archive and a major collection recently added to its holdings.

Located inside the Bragg Media and Entertainment Building, the Center for Popular Music serves as a research archive devoted to preserving and documenting American popular music and its cultural impact. Its collections support everyone from MTSU students and faculty to researchers, musicians and music enthusiasts from around the country.

“I think it’s really important because it’s a really strong curated collection,” said Logan Dalton, head librarian. “Music is a great way to learn about history and learn about American society.”

The segment also explores the newly acquired Maximum Rocknroll collection, an extensive archive connected to the influential California-based punk magazine that chronicled underground music scenes for decades before ultimately finding a home at MTSU.

Archival Assistant Harlow Crandall said the collection offers a unique perspective on the evolution of punk music and the communities that helped shape it.

“One of the things that’s really special about this is the sort of cross-section of what’s available,” Crandall said. “There are records from Japan, South America, Europe. You get to see these little microcosms of different scenes interpret punk in different ways.”

The collection is currently being processed by center staff and includes thousands of items that help document not only the music itself, but also the culture that surrounded it.

For Crandall, preserving the collection as a whole is part of what makes it so valuable.

“It’s important for collections like this to actually be able to be housed together and not split up,” Crandall said. “It allows people to get an understanding of not only a culture’s evolution, but also the magazine’s specific role in that.”

As work on the collection continues, the acquisition further strengthens the center’s reputation as a destination for the study and preservation of American popular music.

You can watch the segment below:

To watch, listen

• “Out of the Blue” is available anytime on the university’s YouTube channel, the True Blue TV channel, Roku, Apple TV and Amazon Fire TV.

• It also airs on Murfreesboro cable Channel 9 daily at 6 a.m., 11 a.m. and 1:30 p.m.; NewsChannel5+ at 6:30 p.m. Sundays; WKRN+ at 7 p.m. Thursdays and noon Sundays; and streamed on the MTSU Jazz Network through WMOT.orgat 7 a.m. on the first Sunday of each month; and on other cable outlets in Middle Tennessee, so check local listings.

• It is also available as a podcast on iTunes and Google Play and as individual interview segments on Spotify at https://spoti.fi/453hxg3.

Watch previous episodes of “Out of the Blue” at https://mtsunews.com/out-of-the-blue.

— Karli Sutton ([email protected])