Mort Lindsey scores and papers, 1909-2007, bulk 1942-2007

This collection was processed by Callum Blackmore (GSAS). Finding aid written by Callum Blackmore in August 2023.

The processing of this collection was made possible by a Graduate Internship in Primary Sources from Columbia Libraries.

Upon donation to the Rare Book and Manuscript Library, the collection organized into temporary boxes but retained Lindsey's original filing system - which sorted material into acidic folders, envelopes, and piles of loose pages. To better preserve the collection, the material has been reboxed to accommodate oversized materials and refoldered into acid-free folders. Lindsey's original folders and/or envelopes were discarded, unless they contained information salient to the collection that could not be represented in the folder description. Much of the oversized material was found loose in flat boxes or folded into hollinger boxes: this material has been unfolded and placed in folders and boxes of an appropriate size, although many of these oversized items remain creased or warped from the original conditions of their storage.

There are 16 LPs (14 seven- or ten-inch lacquer LPs and 2 seven-inch commercially produced vinyl LPs) which were originally stored in paper sleeves and scattered about the collection: these materials have been placed in acid-free sleeves and have been stored together in Box 1. These materials are found in Series II and III.

Although many scores are in loose-leaf format, most have been taped together at the edges of each page to minimize page-turning during performance. This tape has been retained. In some cases, Lindsey used double-sided tape to bind his scores and, consequently, many pages tend to become stuck together as the adhesive deteriorates . Care should be taken when handling these materials, and they should be monitored for potential Conservation treatment needs. These documents are largely found in Series I, II, and IV. Some documents have been stapled together; these staples have also been retained. All paper clips were removed by the archivist, but the original order of the materials that were clipped together has been maintained wherever possible. Some material has been removed from rusty ring binders: these binders were then discarded. One box was found to contain mold: this box was bagged and taken to conservation for the mold to be removed before it could be completely surveyed. These materials will be reintegrated into the collection upon the removal of this mold. Additionally, there is some dirt and dust in the collection, and many materials are stained or torn from use. At the folder level, Lindsey generally organized his materials by performer and/or activity: materials that had been enveloped or foldered were generally grouped with material relating to the same performer, concert, film, television show, or album. In this case, the original ordering and foldering of materials has been maintained. Crucially, Lindsey tended to group different types of scores together (parts, conductor scores, published scores, copies, manuscripts, etc.): again, this original facet of the ordering has been maintained, unless the scores grouped together were of different sizes and needed to be housed separately. However, a large number of materials were simply kept loose within the collection, often piled into flat boxes containing material that bore little thematic or chronological relation. These loose materials - which tended to be oversized - have been reorganized into folders, which have then been grouped by collaborator and/or activity at the box level. Where the type of activity was not clear but the collaborator was, then the material has been grouped according to collaborator, and vice versa. If neither collaborator nor activity was clear, then the materials have been housed with other materials of similar format in Series IV. Moreover, folders containing similar or equivalent materials were often found separate from each other within Lindsey's organizational scheme. In some cases, where materials were originally foldered separately but clearly belong to the same set (i.e., parts, duplicate copies of lead sheets, etc.), these folders have been combined into a single folder (maintaining the original groupings of the material within the folder). In other cases, folders relating to the same collaborator and/or same kind of activity have been grouped together at the box level. A number of sketches have been grouped together in this way; although song sketches are foldered separately to instrumental sketches, following Lindsey's own (loosely applied) ordering and some sketches have been left interspersed with other finished material. Arrangements for The Judy Garland Show, originally housed across various folders, have been foldered together in Series I, but maintaining the ordering of their original groupings within the foldering.

To aid preservation, oversized materials (largely found in Series I, II and IV) have been stored separately, arranged by size and then according to performer and/or activity. In some cases, oversized materials were originally stored alongside thematically related regular-sized materials (i.e., a 19x12.5 concert score folded around the letter-sized instrumental parts for the same piece). In this case, the materials have been stored separately in the physical arrangement of the collection but described together within the same series in the container list.

Most of the lead sheets in Series III were originally organized into folders according to lyricist; however, some folders contained songs by the different lyricists that appeared to originate from the same time period (i.e., 1953) and others contained a mix of songs from a range of lyricists, spanning multiple years of Lindsey's career. For ease of reference, all lead sheets in Series III have been arranged according to lyricist (the organizational system most prevalent in Lindsey's original ordering). Lindsey kept some lyric sheets for his original songs separate from the sheet music; however, generally, he kept his lyric sheets interleaved among the sheet music, alongside the lead sheets for the songs they correspond to. This original ordering was maintained in processing.

The collection is generally described in aggregate at the folder level. For scores of arrangements in Series I and VI, the names of the original songs have been recorded but not the names of the original composers or lyricists. For the scores from The Judy Garland Show in Subseries I.1, the names of songs, episodes, and performers have been described in aggregate at the folder level but on an item level. The names of each game show cue for the scores in Subseries I.2 have generally not been recorded; however, the folder descriptions contain a representative sample of these names. In Series II, the cue names for the film scores have largely been documented in the folder description. In Series III, the names of Lindsey's original songs and their lyricists have been recorded in the folder description. In Series I and IV, if a folder contains a range of published music by other composers, these items have been described in aggregate at the folder level.