In more than 50 years, CU Boulder has collected more than 1,400 boxes of Glenn Miller and jazz era archives.
BOULDER, Colo. — Glenn Miller, a big band musician of the early 20th century, only had a brief stint at the University of Colorado Boulder, but CU historians said his impact on the world of music makes them proud to have had a Buff like him.
“He was already a big name by the time he got to CU,” said CU-Boulder lead archivist Megan Friedel.
Miller spent three semesters at CU-Boulder in 1923. Between being a “celebrity” of the time and being on tour, Friedel said Miller dropped out to focus on music.
Still, a former educator at the university wanted to preserve the legacy of Miller’s career at CU and in turn, began collecting artifacts.
“The collection has photographs, audio recordings, scrapbooks, artifacts,” Friedel said. “There’s materials in the collection that just documents how popular Glenn Miller was.”
Friedel said the collection began in the late 1960s, before becoming 1,400 boxes of artifacts today.
“This was presented to Glenn by ‘Song Hits Mag’ for the hit song ‘Chattanooga Choo Choo’ in 1942,” Friedel said while touching an old trophy. “And there’s also materials that date to his time at CU. He met his wife, Helen, while at CU, and this was the fraternity pin he gave to Helen.”
Friedel said she’s been archiving for more than two decades and still finds new ways to interact with history.
“I mean, he’s actually touched this,” Friedel said as she held Miller’s engraved cigarette lighter. “That’s incredible.”
Friedel doesn’t want to be the only one to appreciate the vast collection of Miller’s history. That’s why the university is using donor funding to hire an archivist for two years to go through the thousands of articles of material.
“We’ve had this collection for a number of years, but haven’t been able to really dig into it because of the size and the fact that it’s so vast, it requires one person, and we haven’t had the resource to do this,” Friedel said. “We’ve got this funding now to devote someone to the Glenn Miller collection for the first time ever. So when hired, they’ll be doing this work to go through everything that’s here, organize it in a way that’s understandable for researchers, they’ll create a comprehensive guide to the collection, re-box everything and make it available in a way it has not ever been before.”
CU Boulder was unable to disclose the amount donated to the project.
The archivist will also be responsible for digitizing a large portion of audio recordings of Miller and other jazz performances of the time.
“If you could listen to all of this it’d be like stepping back in time and being in the big band era of American music,” Friedel said. “This is probably one of the treasures of this collection, all these audio recordings.”
Friedel hopes she’s able to share what she’s enjoyed about the collection in her early research.
“That’s what I really want to bring to light,” Friedel said. “The little details about his family history, how he became the person he was and the person that he became in American music history and legacy. When you start to dig into Glenn Miller as the person, I think that’s where the magic really happens.”
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