In 1980, Norman Ross, president of Clearwater Publishing in New York, a firm that was primarily a publisher of
microfilms and reference books, proposed to publish the series on the then-new
VHS and
Betamax formats. Ross's company, whose name was eponymous with the nonprofit organization founded by Seeger and the boat at the center of the organization's efforts to clean the Hudson River, was not affiliated with the organization. (Ross had named his publishing company Clearwater in honor of Seeger.) However, when Ross began having the 2" broadcast masters copied onto 3/4" cassettes to be used as dubmasters, it became clear that the studio tapes had badly deteriorated while in the vault. A local video studio, Devlin, reported that the surface of the tapes was flaking off, which had damaged their equipment and resulted in copies that were of very poor quality. Devlin resigned from the job. Another studio in New York examined one of the tapes and reported that it could be rescued by passing it through a chemical bath several times and then transferring the image to new media. However, they estimated that the 2" tapes would only survive one such pass, and the cost would be $19,500 for the 39 shows, a sum that was far too costly for either Ross or the original producers to justify at that point. On the other hand, the loss of all 39 shows would have been a great tragedy, given the unique qualities of the series. At the suggestion of Manny Kirchheimer, an independent film maker whose wife Gloria was an editor at Clearwater Publishing, the decision was made to seek a grant for the work and a proposal was prepared under the aegis of The Woody Guthrie Foundation, whose director, Harold Leventhal, was also Pete Seeger's manager. The proposal was submitted to the National Endowment for the Arts, where Bess Lomax Hawes (sister of the folklorist
Alan Lomax), who had sung with Seeger and Woody Guthrie, among others, as a member of the Almanac Singers, was one of the key people involved in making the decision. Thus the grant was awarded, the tapes were processed and two new sets were created: 1" tapes that went back into the vault and 3/4" videocassettes that became the dubmasters for Clearwater Publishing, which then proceeded to offer copies of the series for sale. The Johnny Cash/June Carter episode, however, was withheld at the request of Pete Seeger, because Johnny Cash was heavily on drugs during his appearance. Because Clearwater's marketing efforts were primarily directed to libraries, sales were sparse through the '80s and '90s, especially prior to the advent of the Internet, and only a few thousand cassettes were sold in total. However, a number of libraries acquired the complete (38 shows) collection, including University of Wisconsin-Madison, University of Pennsylvania, Ohio State University, National University (available only to National University faculty in San Diego), and the Tokyo Folklore Center. During this period Sun Video, owned by
Caspar Weinberger, Jr., offered a small selection of the shows to the general public. In 2003 Ross, having sold both Clearwater Publishing and his subsequent firm, Norman Ross Publishing, withdrew from the agreement. A subsequent agreement with
Shanachie Records, negotiated by Rubinstein, resulted in 12 of the shows becoming available on 6 DVDs in 2005. • Johnny Cash and June Carter / Roscoe Holcomb with Jean Redpath • The Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem / The Mamou String Band • The Stanley Brothers with Cousin Emmy / Doc Watson with Clint Howard and Fred Price • The New Lost City Ramblers / The Greenbriar Boys • Judy Collins / Elizabeth Cotten • Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee / Mississippi John Hurt However the remaining 27 were no longer available for sale. Two episodes, featuring Tommy Makem, and Cash & Carter respectively, were available on Netflix' streaming service as of December 2011. Sholom Rubinstein died a few years later. In September 2015 archivist and librarian Karl-Rainer Blumenthal announced that he had uploaded copies of 10 available episodes to the
Internet Archive. His blog post, with streaming players for the videos, originally included a footnote stating that "The show has been in the public domain since the 1990s"; he has since edited his comment, noting that he "cannot confidently characterize the copyright status of this work". ==Episode list==