When complete, the collection will contain recordings by more than 2,300 performers spanning more than a hundred years including Ma Rainey, Lead Belly, Mahalia Jackson, Alberta Hunter, Tampa Red, William Bunk Johnson, Duke Ellington, Sophie Tucker, Joe Turner, T-Bone Walker, Sarah Vaughn, Cripple Clarence Lofton, Big Joe Williams, Memphis Jug Band, Roosevelt Sykes, Dizzy Gillespie, Chicago River Kings, Muddy Waters, Skip James, Blind Willie McTell, Lonnie Johnson, Alberta Jones, Johnny Shines, and Memphis Minnie, and more.

This first release offers access to over 16,000 track from Document Records--the worlds largest collection of rare and vintage blues, jazz, gospel, spiritual, boogie-woogie, and country recordings. From the earliest recordings of Afro-American music made in the late 19th century (including the Fisk Jubilee Singers, recorded at the turn of the century for Victor Records) to performances of the mid-1970s, in most instances the full recorded works of each artist are presented.

Eventually, African American Song will also deliver online access to the Alan Lomax Collection, a set of international field recordings by folklorist Alan Lomax from the 1930s through the 1960s, including the Jelly Roll Morton series (complete Library of Congress recordings), the Lead Belly series, and great artists and ensembles such as Son House, Sweet Honey in the Rock, Bob Marley and the Wailers, Irma Thomas, Bessie Jones, Etta Baker, and the Georgia Sea Island Singers.

Penn's subscription currently includes all the available collections:

• the Arts & Sciences Collection I, II, III, IV and the complement
• the Business Collection
• the Ecology & Botany Collection
• the General Science Collection
• the Language and Literature Collection
• the Music Collection

Access to journals from JSTOR is restricted to current Penn faculty, staff and students.

Printing from the JSTOR database requires downloading a helper application called JPrint.
Holdings: active

One can search the database by: author, keyword in title and/or abstract, adviser, university code, date, degree. Boolean operators allow for combinations of fields.
Holdings: Indexing 1861-present, abstracts 1980-present, full-text PDF for most Penn dissertations from 1997 to the present.

ACCESSING DRAM: To access DRAM, either select "Log In" from the main page or go directly to an album or track. You'll be presented with a "Where Are You From" page. You should see "University of Pennsylvania". If you don't, contact us.

You'll see a gray button at the top of the page. Select this and then several white "Shibboleth" pages may float by or you may need to click them (depending on what browser or type of computer you are using). You should then be able to stream.

USING DRAM: You must have QuickTime 6.5.2 or higher in order to access DRAM smoothly - although some users report it works best with QuickTime 7.0 (particularly if you're on a PC). If QuickTime is associated with iTunes, you may run into difficulty and may need to disassociate the two. Additional troubleshooting instructions for QuickTime are at: http://dram.nyu.edu/dram/_html/about/troubleshooting.html

RIGHTS: You will see also for some items that the rights have not been cleared (for example, http://dram.nyu.edu/dram/Identifier/80249). In some cases, it looks like you can play the track but then it will skip through. The "play" button is supposed to be grayed out. The is working to clear all rights. If you need any of these tracks, please contact the Electronic Acquisitions Department and we'll work with to get the tracks for you.