A massive collection of Hootie & the Blowfish memorabilia will now live at a very fitting location: the University of South Carolina Libraries. The members of Hootie first met at UofSC and founded the band there.
The memorabilia has been donated by longtime fan Rick Noble, who’s been collecting Hootie stuff — CDs, t-shirts, ticket stubs, posters, banners, golf balls and more — since he listened to his daughter’s copy of the band’s 1993 EP, Kootchypop.
“I really liked the band and the music. I liked the way they handled themselves. I liked the fact that it was UofSC where they met,” Noble says in a statement.
Noble first met the band in 1995 when they agreed to do a benefit concert for an event he was organizing, and they started giving him merch. The rest, he said, “was just a treasure hunt.”
You can see some of the collection on the school’s Instagram: It includes more than 500 CDs, 45 t-shirts, 65 banners and 60 magazines.
“The support of fans like Rick Noble over the past 30 years is what allowed the dreams we had as South Carolina students to become reality on stages across the world,” Hootie frontman Darius Rucker says in a statement.
He adds, “It’s such a special, full-circle moment to see his collection come home to the UofSC library and we couldn’t be more thankful to him for supporting both our band and our university.”
Meanwhile, UofSC Libraries Dean Tom McNally says, “Hootie & the Blowfish have always been really special to the university and definitely have supported the university. “So, what better place for their collection to be?”
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