Lewis & Clark Honors Albina’s Musical Legacy

On summer nights in the 1960s, music spilled from every corner of the Albina neighborhood, a historically Black community in Northeast Portland. The air vibrated with rhythm and soul as crowds gathered to hear both rising stars and local legends perform. Paul Knauls Sr.’s Cotton Club—“the only nightclub on the West Coast with wall-to-wall soul,” as he described it—was the blueprint for these clubs. Artists like Etta James sang there, along with up-and-coming prodigies such as Calvin Walker.

“There must have been, at the height of it, about 20 jazz clubs, and every night it was popping,” said Walker, board chair and treasurer of the Albina Music Trust. “And where we were situated at the time, nobody thought it was that special of a community. As time progressed, people started liking that neighborhood.”

Yet, as the neighborhood gained interest, it got less affordable. During the 1950s and 1960s, urban renewal policies displaced Black families from their once-thriving, vibrant community. Government officials carved up the neighborhood, demolishing thousands of homes.

Today, the Albina Music Trust (AMT) is working to restore and preserve that spirit that once reigned. It is the only full-service community archive in the country, dedicated to documenting Albina’s Black musical heritage. AMT maintains the Albina Community Archive, home to around 13,000 items from 180 collections, making it Oregon’s largest digital archive documenting Black arts and culture.

Through its partnership with Lewis & Clark, AMT continues to share Albina’s story, thanks to Elaine Hirsch, associate director of Watzek Library. Under Hirsch’s direction, the library team hosted the AMT panel on October 14 as this year’s Johannah Sherrer Memorial Lecture. The goal of the event was to honor AMT’s accomplishments in preserving the cultural legacies of Albina.

A Harmonious Partnership

Five representatives from AMT participated in the Lewis & Clark panel: Paul Knauls Sr., Kenneth W. Berry, Norman Sylvester, Calvin Walker, and Bobby Smith.

When the panelists gathered on campus, it marked another chapter in Lewis & Clark’s developing partnership with its sister organization, the Albina Vision Trust (AVT). Lewis & Clark is partnering with AVT to support the revitalization of the Albina neighborhood. The AMT serves as a cultural ally in that work. Events such as the panel help seed relationships and content for the Albina learning ecosystem that Lewis & Clark and AVT are building.

“Bringing the Albina Music Trust to campus created space for our community to learn directly from those preserving Portland’s Black cultural history,” said Hirsch. “Through our work with the Albina Music Trust and the Albina Vision Trust, we’re furthering our campus understanding of how archives, story, and place come together to shape community.”

Turning Memories into Music History

According to the panelists, they started small: just a group of musicians and community members trying to save their own history.

“We began working in basements and garages, and now we work in slightly nicer basements in garages,” said Bobby Smith, the executive director of AMT.

As the studio gained popularity, musicians brought in thousands of materials, including photography, film, newsprint, radio episodes, reel-to-reels, and cassettes. AMT’s staff then digitizes this material to share it with the musicians, their families, and the public.

“We have been working for a number of years to learn more about the musician community in Albina, and part of that learning is through the media and documentation that exists, as well as the oral history. It’s not just the musicians that are proud of this work, it’s the community,” Smith said in Travel Portland’s film “Portlanders: Preserving Black History With Albina Music Trust,” which screened before the panel event.

Norman Sylvester, also known as “Boogie Cat,” is a member of the Oregon Music Hall of Fame and one of the living legends whose contributions are now permanently housed within the Albina Community Archive.

“We’re standing on the shoulders of giants. We played the music of Muddy Waters and all of the old greats—BB King, Robert Johnson. Through Albina archives, somebody will be standing on our shoulders in the future, playing what we laid down in history. Albina Archives is making all of us a part of history,” Sylvester said.

Letting the Music Play On

As a complement to the panel presentation, Lewis & Clark hosted a two-day aural installation of the music and sounds of the AMT in the EAR Forest. Visitors enjoyed a soulful stroll through the woods at L&C, listening to selections from AMT’s archives.

Visitors discovered that the spirit that filled Albina’s earlier club scene now lives on through the AMT’s work. The legacy of all these musicians isn’t something frozen in time through the archives, but it’s alive, still shaping how Portland sounds and remembers itself. In every digitized tape and song, that same soul plays on.

Albina Partnership Albina Music Trust EAR Forest