Thornton Hagert
Thornton 'Tony' Hagert was a musician and musicologist who founded the Vernacular Music Research archive. An album which he produced for the Smithsonian Institution was nominated for two Grammy Awards.Hagert was born in Philadelphia, the second of three children of Henry Hagert, a designer and artist, and his wife Eleanor Fischer, a model and graphic designer. His great-grandfather, Henry Schell Hagert, was a poet and district attorney in Philadelphia, and his grandfather was an artist. Hagert attended Friends Select School and Episcopal Academy, and graduated from Central High School in 1947. He studied music at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia and the Pius X School of Liturgical Music in New York. He began studying at the University of Pennsylvania, but was drafted into the army during the Korean War. After leaving the army, he graduated from George Washington University with a business degree, and then worked for the US Department of Agriculture in the Rural Electrification Authority and loans department.Music and musicology
Hagert played in jazz bands on weekends in the Washington area. He also produced and wrote liner notes for albums of historical music, including Classic Rags and Ragtime Songs and. He worked for the Rockefeller Foundation on the Recorded Anthology of American Music released for the United States Bicentennial in 1976, writing in the notes to the album ''Come And Trip It, 78' records, and other media featuring American music and dance from the early 19th century to the 1960s. The Archive consists of about 125,000 items of printed music, 75,000 items of recorded music, 5,500 books and 2,000 periodicals on New World Vernacular music, dance, and related topics.