Acknowledgements & contributors

The project has grown over nearly two decades with the help of collectors, researchers, translators, veterans, artists and their families.

Founding editor

Justin A. Brummer, PhD is the founding editor of the VWSP. He started compiling, writing, and editing this project in 2007 to share his Vietnam War song collection. Since then he has developed the VWSP to be a unique cultural-historical living archive, cataloguing, analysing, and digitising music that references the war.

Containing 6,500+ songs, and 4,300+ original vinyl records, the project is now a respected academic resource and a significant source of reference in popular culture. As part of the project, he has written articles, consulted with artists, and promoted the project through social media. He gained his PhD in history from University College London (UCL) in April 2012 on the subject of Anglo-American relations 1969-1974. He also conducted research on "British policy, the Vietnam War and East of Suez (1964-1967)", and "British policy towards Palestine (1914-1917)".

Collections

Thanks to Hugo Keesing, a popular music collector and teacher (formerly at the University of Maryland), for sharing songs and label scans. He produced the 2010 compilation Next Stop Is Vietnam on Bear Family Records (# BCD 16070 MS), helping to find, select, and evaluate most of the songs included. See The Keesing Collection on Popular Music and Culture. (1) He also started the discography Vietnam on Record, first published in 1993 with about 550 entries, and now hosted by the University of Maryland Libraries as Vietnam War Songs: An Incomplete Discography. From 2009 the editor, Justin A. Brummer, PhD, contributed titles, images and audio to it.

Thanks to Frank Merrill, Saturday Night Records, of Illinois, USA, whose collection of 60,000+ uncharted singles has added over a thousand titles to the collection.

Thanks to the late Lydia Fish, who founded and directed the Vietnam Veterans Oral History and Folklore Project, which from 1983 collected the songs, tapes and songbooks of Vietnam veterans, preserving the folklore of the war as the soldiers and civilians who served there sang it. Material from the project was performed at the In Country concert at the Library of Congress in 1989 and released on the album In Country (Flying Fish Records, 1991).

Research & publications

Thanks to the following for helping with research-related areas & publications: Holly C. Shulman (UVA), Kathleen Burk (UCL), James Akenson (Tennessee Council for the Social Studies), Phil Milstein (American Song-Poem Music Archives), Bob Purse (The Wonderful and the Obscure), Warren Fahey (Australian Folklore Unit), Mark Gregory and Rich Farron.

Articles & media interviews

Thanks to the editors who published articles by the editor, Justin A. Brummer, PhD: Rhys Griffiths (History Today) and Jason Mellard (The Journal of Texas Music History, Texas State University). Thanks to Franklin Fantini (Dollar Country), who published an article by him and also interviewed him. Thanks also to the journalists and writers who interviewed him or wrote about the project: James Barber (military.com), Robin Washington (WPR, NPR), Cori Brosnahan (PBS), Seán Casey (Shindig!), Erin R. McCoy (University of South Carolina Beaufort), Rachel Lee Rubin (University of Massachusetts Boston) and Alexander Plaum (Deutsche Welle). See Press & reception.

Tracking down rare titles & records

The following have helped track down rare titles and records (thank you!): Anthony Ryan, Jose Guerrero, Ronald Erickson, Dan Wagner, Margaret G. Still, and Jamie Davey. Thanks to Cecilia Fanucci for helping to collect Vietnam War song from Italy. Thank you Thomas Browne for donating a couple rare records for the collection. Thanks to Yates Menda for identifying several rare records.

Vietnam veterans

Several Vietnam veterans have provided many songs they produced during and after the war - thank you for sharing those unique persepectives - Emily Strange, Barbara Hagar, Dick Jonas, James Purtell, and Jim Tukey.

Donations

Through Donor Box: thanks to - Rick Biskit Roth (WMBR), John McAuliff (Coordinator, Viet Nam Peace Commemoration Committee).

Translations

Thank you Thảo Nguyên for translating some of the Vietnamese songs. Thanks to GETchan channel for helping track down Chinese and Japanese records related to the Vietnam War. Thanks to Nguyen Hoang Huy for helping with Vietnamese genres. Thanks to Lonán Ó Briain for work on Vietnamese Nhạc đỏ ("Red Music"). Thank you Nguyễn Tuấn Huy for providing precise Vietnamese titles, with diacritics and capitalizations and information from his collection from Voice of Vietnam (VOV) on the website bcdcnt.net ("Bài ca đi cùng năm tháng - Timeless Songs"). (2)

For other translations: thanks to Stanislava Sebkova for the Czech transcription and other language assistance. Thanks to Eric Silberberg, Ignacia Morales Reyes and Joel Garcia for transcriptions and Spanish translations. Eric Silberberg, a graduate student in Library and Information Science at CUNY Queens College, was an instructor and researcher at the Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla (BUAP), Tehuacán, teaching history, audio production and research methods. Ignacia Morales Reyes is a professor of history in the political science department at BUAP, Tehuacán, a member of the Asociación de Historiadores Latinoamericanistas Europeos, with an MA in history from the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM). Joel Garcia is a high-school history instructor and a UCLA graduate in History with a minor in Chicano Studies. Thanks to Ramón Vázquez Lamboy for transcribing and translating Puerto Rican lyrics. Thanks Ruvar Laro Vivily for Polish translations.

Family & friends

Thanks to family & friends for helping out: Ruvani de Silva (Oxford), Daniel Laqua (UNN), Ivan Polancec (UCL), Paul Shirley (UCL), Ben Wolfe, Alex & Tricia Brummer, Gabriel Brummer, Seth Shulman, Rebecca Shulman-Herz, Leonard Magrill.

Want to add to the archive? See Contribute.