Giving voice to Apollo’s history

Columbia University and the Apollo Theater Foundation plan to create an oral history of the famed Harlem theater that launched the careers of Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan, Stevie Wonder, Smokey Robinson and other music legends.

The Apollo Theater Oral History Project will feature interviews with performers as well as cultural figures and politicians who helped make Harlem one of the nation’s most vibrant communities.

Planned as part of the landmark theater’s 75th anniversary in 2009, the project is scheduled to be completed in 2010 and will include an online component. The audio and video archive will be housed at Columbia and open to the public a year later.