Arnold Shaw Papers (MS-00432)

Music composer, arranger, author, and music historian Arnold Shaw, birth name Sokolof, was born in Brooklyn, New York on June 28, 1909. He received his BA in English literature from the City College of New York in 1929 and his MA from Columbia University in New York City in 1931. He pursued further studies in American Literature at New York University. His personal interest in songwriting led him to pursue a career in the popular music publishing field, where he served as an administrator for a variety of publishing houses that included Leeds, Hill and Range, and Edward B. Marks.

During his publishing house career, Shaw began what became a long and prolific writing career. His music reviews, liner notes and articles number in the hundreds and he authored fourteen books, some of which have been translated into as many as eleven different languages. Twice winner of the ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award in 1968 and 1979, Shaw was also posthumously inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame for his book "Honkers and Shouters: The Golden Years of Rhythm and Blues." He is recorded in "Who’s Who in America," "Who’s Who in the World," and in "Groves and Baker's Biographical Dictionary of Musicians." One of his most popular books, "The Street that Never Slept: New York’s Fabled 52nd Street" is a documentation of the two blocks of jazz clubs that presented virtually the who's who of the jazz world during the roughly two decades of their existence. His books of rock and soul music, as well as his biographies of Frank Sinatra and Harry Belafonte are also significant contributions to popular music history. Shaw's last two books were "The Jazz Age: Popular Music in the 1920s" and "Let’s Dance: Popular Music of the 1930s."

After 16 years of running three large publishing companies, Shaw retired to spend his time composing music and writing books about music. He moved to the West Coast, shuttling between Los Angeles, California and Las Vegas, Nevada before finally settling in Las Vegas in 1968.

In 1979 Shaw proposed the creation of a music literature course titled "History of Rock Music," that he would teach on a part-time basis for the University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV) Music Department. His proposal was accepted and he began teaching the course in the fall of 1980. His purpose was to see how students perceived popular music and the sociological implication of those perceptions.

During the ensuing years, Shaw created an event which would be held intermittently throughout the school year known as a "Rap with the Artist." The purpose of these rap sessions was to create a vehicle by which popular music stars could interact with university students, both through lectures and discussions. The sessions were recorded and added to the interviews of popular music stars that Shaw recorded in the process of authoring his many books.

The UNLV Special Collections Department has over 900 hours of these tapes. The creation of this tape archive was the official beginning of the Popular Music Research Center at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas College of Arts and Letters. After Arnold Shaw's death in 1989, the Center was named for him.