Arts Playlist: Delaware Music History Archive

By Martin Matheny

Published May 29, 2026 at 11:27 AM EDT

Newspaper clipping with headline "Stone Balloon hosts all-ages ska blowout" — In 1998, Reel Big Fish and Spring-Heeled Jack headlined an all-ages ska show at Stone Balloon in Newark.

Delaware sometimes seems to live in the cultural shadow cast by our neighbors - places like Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Washington DC. And, sometimes the state gets a certain reputation - small, boring, the kind of place where nothing happens.

But Paul Campagna and Chris Haug are pushing back on that with a new and growing project - the Delaware Music History Archive. It's an ambitious undertaking, involving thousands of newspaper clippings and hundreds of concert flyers and photos tracking more than eight decades of the state's surprisingly rich musical history. And that collection is growing every day.

On this week's Arts Playlist, DPM's Martin Matheny learns more about the project, an upcoming talk Chris and Paul are participating in in Dover, and why you shouldn't sleep on the First State's role in American music history.

Arts Playlist: A new music history archive

Listen to the full interview where DPM's Martin Matheny learns more about the Delaware Music History Archive.

Two white bearded men pose smiling wearing baseball caps with a brick wall in the background adorned with a Brazilian flag on the right corner and Pride flag in the left. There's also some framed music memorabilia on the wall.

One of the creators of the Delaware Music History Archive will talk about the project, its work, and the state’s musical heritage in Dover next week, June 6th.

Paul Campagna says the project emerged from a longtime friendship with his co-curator Chris Haug.

In 1992, pioneering hip-hop duo Gangstarr visited Delaware State University and stopped by the campus radio station.

“Chris and I grew up together,” Campagna says. “We met when I was 14, he was 13. We were going to see punk shows in Delaware.”

Over the years, the two stayed close, even as Campagna moved to California, then to Brooklyn. During the pandemic, Haug began posting flyers from shows in the First State to his Instagram account. That was part of the creative spark that eventually led to the Delaware Music History Archive. Since its launch, the archive has grown rapidly.

“We've documented over 3,000 shows already at over 500 venues,” Campagna says. “We've tracked more than 600 Delaware artists so far.”

Campagna and Haug are both major music fans and record collectors with a love for a wide array of genres. That’s reflected in the archives’ scope, which covers everything except classical music.

“I feel like we're in a nice position to really have a pretty broad scope of the musical ecosystem,” Campagna says. “That's what drives us is to find ways to tell as diverse of a story as we can, but also utilize our personal connections to dive super deep.”

The two combine their love of all kinds of music with an approach that fuses audience friendliness with intellectual rigor, Campagna explains.

The Count Basie Orchestra played the Rosedale Ballroom in 1941, one of many appearances in the First State.

“The paradigm is that middle point between academia and nostalgia,” he says. “‘Edutainment’ is the way that we think about this - what is that middle thing where it's got the rigor on the academic side and the things that we build are trying to build more like exhibits, interactive, fun learning.”

Creating the project, and keeping it growing requires a lot of research.

“We spend a lot of time in the newspaper archives,” Campagna says. “We're in the libraries, we're in social media, we're texting all the time. We've got like dedicated group chats with somebody's old band.”

In 1981, James Taylor hit the stage at UD.

They also lean heavily on other music fans in the First State for posters, flyers, set lists, and leads on shows they may not know about.

On June 6, Campagna will be in Dover for a talk at the Old State House called “Capturing Delaware’s Music Scene: from Ella Fitzgerald to Public Enemy,” where he’ll be joined by Tamara Burks, a historian who has done extensive research into Rosedale Beach, an African American resort in southern Delaware, which from the 1930s through the 1960s drew world-famous acts to the First State.

“Very excited to be presenting with her and just sharing our approaches to how we gather data and how we share our collections,” Campagna says. “And then Tamara talking about her work on Rosedale Beach and the amazing music - and very hard to document music - that was happening there.”

Looking to the future, Campagna and Haug are planning an event in Wilmington in August as they continue to expand the archive and work on their second mini-documentary.

Delaware Public Media's arts coverage is made possible, in part, by support from the Delaware Division of the Arts, a state agency dedicated to nurturing and supporting the arts in Delaware, in partnership with the National Endowment for the Arts.