Harvey Ferguson Mixtape Collection
A dance music lover’s dream, 60 mixtapes capture the sound of gay nightlife in New Orleans.
Harvey Ferguson (1948–2021) was a native of Pittsburgh raised in New York who retired to Houston in the 2000s. He served in the US army as a demolitions expert in the 1960s and ’70s and became a train engineer in New York following his military discharge. Throughout his life he was an active union member and a patron of LGBT bars and dance clubs, including a number of venues in New Orleans. Along the he way he began collecting mixtapes made by DJs at these clubs, and HNOC is now home to 60 of them.
New Orleans DJs represented in the collection include Bear DJ Roy and DJ Tony Beverage. Many of the mixes were made for events during Southern Decadence, Mardi Gras, Independence Day, and, in the case of one tape recorded live by Doug Bryson at the Decatur Street watering hole Jewel’s, an all-you-can-drink “beer bust” event. A small portion of the collection includes tapes from clubs and bars in Houston and, potentially, San Francisco. One example is a tape from Mark Hebert, former house DJ of the Houston gay bar Ripcord. Nearly all of the cassette tapes are accompanied by J-cards and plastic cases, with custom-printed or handwritten labels. The information present on each item varies, from custom cover art and detailed track lists to simplified labels only detailing the genre of music or name and date of the event associated with the mixtape. Occasionally, creator information, such as DJ name and location, is included.
The collection begins chronologically, with the bulk of the tapes spanning 1993–99. The tapes cover a broad swath of dance music, including disco, house, industrial, techno, pop, R&B, and more. One tape named “High Energy for ’85” (2021.0253.45), recorded by DJ Teddy the Scorpion, includes the synthpop hit “Why?” by Bronski Beat followed by a disco remix of the “Hallelujah” chorus from Handel’s Messiah. An outlier is a recording titled “Rockette 1974” (2021.0253.44), which captures a rehearsal of the famed Radio City dance troupe.
The quality of the tapes is remarkable, and HNOC has preserved the sound by digitizing them. Because of copyright concerns, full audio cannot be streamed online in the catalog, but dance music lovers and researchers can listen onsite at the Williams Research Center.
By Aimee Everrett, curator
Collection Highlights
Dive into the Collection’s holdings with image-rich previews of treasures from New Orleans history.
Related Stories
When Praying the Gay Away Didn’t Work, He Turned to Activism
In an excerpt from his new memoir, activist Larry Bagneris recounts how his adolescent struggle to shed his homosexuality led to a political awakening and a lifelong purpose.
The Gay Panic That Brought the LGBTQ Rights Movement to New Orleans
Anita Bryant’s 1977 crusade against homosexuality sparked a nationwide movement, prompting the first gay rights demonstration in New Orleans history.
Related Collection Highlights
Mario Dipietrantonio Collection
In the early 1980s a small group of friends came together at the Golden Lantern to form a community-minded drag group known as the Demented Women.
Dorothea “Torchy” Wilde Papers
HNOC expands its LGBTQ+ holdings with the papers of a nightlife fixture who chronicled the Quarter’s denizens.
Andrée Loisel Collection
After contracting HIV in 1988, a New Orleans–born artist and musician returned home to become one of the earliest public faces of the AIDS crisis.
Related Books
Subscribe to Our Newsletter
