'Llewyn Davis' Concert to Benefit Recording Preservation When Town Hall agreed to host a fund-raiser for the National Recording Preservation Foundation on Sunday, its executive director, Lawrence Zucker, was thinking about 22 boxes of old recordings sitting in a warehouse in New Jersey. The boxes were only recently moved from the theater's basement on 43rd Street to the warehouse, and no one knows for sure what audio treasures they contain, Mr. Zucker said. A quick survey showed that about half of the tapes are performances given at the theater since the mid-1960s and recorded by David Smith, the longtime engineer at Town Hall who owned Triton Sound and died in a 2007 traffic accident. Many of the remainder are tapes of "America's Town Meeting of the Air," a public-affairs radio program broadcast live from the theater from 1935 to 1956. This trove was beginning to deteriorate in the damp and dust, but Town Hall, a nonprofit supported by donations, lacked the resources to properly catalog it, much less transfer the material to digital media and store the originals in a refrigerated place, Mr. Zucker said. Estimates for the work are above $1 million. "We anticipate there are going to be a lot of expenses," he said. We haven't begun to do the fund-raising. The Town Hall tapes are just one of scores of audio archives around the country rotting in warehouses or in danger of being tossed out by record labels, performance spaces, radio stations and media companies who are either unaware of their cultural value or unable to pay for their upkeep, said Gerald Seligman, the executive director of the National Recording Preservation Foundation. The benefit concert on Sunday at 7:30 p.m. - "Another Day, Another Time: Celebrating the Music of "Inside Llewyn Davis"" - represents a melding of commercial and philathropic interests. One of the foundation's board members, and a keen preservation advocate, is T Bone Burnett, the well-known producer of Americana recordings who teamed up with Ethan and Joel Coen to create the soundtrack for the film "Inside Llewyn Davis." That film follows a destitute folksinger around Greenwich Village in the early 1960s and will be screened next week at the New York Film Festival. To promote the soundtrack, which Nonesuch Records will release on Nov. 12, the Coen Brothers set about organizing a concert around the time of the film festival. The last soundtrack they did with Mr. Burnett, "O Brother Where Art Thou?" in 2000, became a runaway best-seller and won a Grammy for Album of the Year. But Mr. Burnett persuaded all the parties involved to turn the event into a benefit for his favorite cause, recruiting many musicians he has worked with in the past. The concert lineup not only features the actor Oscar Isaac, who plays the folk-singing protagonist in the film, but is anchored by heavyweight performers like Joan Baez and Jack White. Mr. White is also also a fervent preservationist and a member of the foundation's board. The lineup features a long list of young artists influenced by the 1960s folk revival: Marcus Mumford, the Avett Brothers, Punch Brothers, Rhiannon Giddens of the Carolina Chocolate Drops, Lake Street Dive, Colin Meloy of the Decemberists, Milk Carton Kids and Conor Oberst of Bright Eyes. Mr. Burnett said all the artists have agreed to donate their time to raise money for preservation. One reason is that most of them can trace their influences back to seminal collections of 78s from the 1920s and 1930s that somehow survived the mass recycling of recording to make shellac for World War II warships. These collections, made by people like Samuel Charters and Harry Smith, saved old country blues and folk songs for the generation that revived them in the 1960s. Congress created the foundation when it passed when it passed the National Recording Preservation Act in 2000. That law directed the Library of Congress to establish a board to study the nation's audio archives and to make a registry of recordings. The board worked for a decade on a lengthy report on how to protect the tapes. Once the report was done, in 2010, the foundation was formed to begin raising money for preservation, which will be matched by Congress. The foundation's governing board includes Mr. Burnett and Mr. White, as well as Bruce Lundvall, the former head of the Blue Note Label Group, and Bob Santinelli, who runs the Grammy Museum in Los Angeles. Mr. Seligman said the foundation will distribute money to radio stations, museums, universities, private collectors and venues like Town Hall to help pay for preserving and making digital copies of historic recordings. Just in the New York area, some of the archives that could use help are an oral history project at the Port Washington Public Library and a rare collection of interviews with baseball players from the Negro leagues done by the public television station WLIW, he said. But the foundation is still in its infancy. Budget cuts in Washington have tied up federal funds. Earlier this year, Jack White donated $200,000 to allow Mr. Seligman to rent an office, distribute a couple of grants and begin fundraising trips. The Town Hall event is the first concert organized to benefit the group. "We are getting off the ground," he said.