The Country Music Hall of Fame® and Museum has added the British Archive of Country Music (BACM) to its collection, which consists of more than 50,000 historic sound recordings, as well as books, periodicals, videotapes, photographs and more. The acquisition and transport of the collection from England was made possible through a gift from the Tyson Family Foundation.
The BACM collection was housed in Dover, England, and compiled by the late British collector Dave Barnes over a span of more than seven decades. Barnes established the nonprofit archive in 1987 to catalog and preserve thousands of country music recordings and more. The collection is a trove of country music history assembled from a British vantage point, containing many recordings and information files about country musicians from Canada, Australia, the U.K. and Europe, as well as U.S. recordings. Upon Barnes’ death in 2020, his family collaborated with the museum on the acquisition of the BACM with support from the Tyson Family Foundation.
With the addition of the BACM collection, the museum’s archive now encompasses more than 250,000 sound recordings, including phonograph cylinders, disc records, tapes, CDs and digital files, ranking it among the world’s largest collections of country music recordings.
“We are thankful to the Barnes family and the Tyson Family Foundation for helping bring this enormous and important collection to the museum’s archives,” said Kyle Young, CEO of the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum. “The British Archive of Country Music speaks to the international influence of country music. We’re honored to preserve the collection and continue BACM’s legacy of making this music available to researchers and scholars across the world.”
“My father Don Tyson was a huge, lifelong fan of country music, as well as many other forms of music,” said John H. Tyson, Chairman of the Board of Tyson Foods, Inc. “He passed that love of music on to his children and grandchildren as well. When we learned of the British Archive of Country Music, we immediately knew it was a treasure that should be located in posterity at the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum. We are pleased to have been able to work with Mr. Barnes’ son, Alan, and the team at the museum to make this a reality. My son, John Randal and daughter Olivia and I are delighted to have made this collection available so that future generations of country music fans can continue to enjoy this music as Mr. Barnes did years ago as he was putting the archive together.”
