Hip-hop archive preserves history of a Boston sound

Pacey Foster (left) and Dana Scott, then hip-hop director at WMBR, in the radio station's music library at MIT in 2012. The station's "Lecco's Lemma" program played hip-hop in the 1980s.John Blanding

Re “On the 50th anniversary of hip-hop, a look back at Boston’s forgotten rap history”: I was surprised that the work of Pacey Foster, a professor at the University of Massachusetts Boston, wasn’t mentioned in Dart Adams’s Nov. 12 Ideas piece. He has been working to digitize and preserve the history of Boston hip-hop, launching the Massachusetts Hip-Hop Archive in 2016 at the University Archives and Special Collections at UMass Boston’s Healey Library. There you can listen to artist demos and recordings of “Lecco’s Lemma” radio programs. Foster was even featured in a Globe article in 2012.

As a student of Foster’s last year, I saw firsthand his passion for the subject, and I think many readers would appreciate being able to listen to some of the artists mentioned in the article.

Max Halbert

Marblehead