University of New Hampshire math professor Kevin Short and tortured pop singer Amy Winehouse probably don't have a lot in common. She's probably never taught college-level calculus, and he's probably never been called a "filthy-mouthed, down-to-earth diva" by the British press.

But they share at least one thing: They both won Grammy Awards on Sunday night.

Short won a Grammy for his role in restoring a 1949 bootleg of a Woody Guthrie concert. He worked with other audio-restoration specialists to use algorithms to correct sound imperfections in the decades-old recording. The bootleg, one of only three live recordings of the Dust Bowl Balladeer and the only public one, was recorded in 1949 by a then-college student on a wire, a long-outdated medium.

Fifty-two years later, it ended up on the doorstep of the Woody Guthrie Archives in New York. It took archivists eight months to find the technology to transfer the wire recording to a computer and 17 hours to actually complete the transfer. A few years later, they decided to release it to the public.

The resulting album, The Live Wire, won Best Historical Album.

It's competition included such albums as Actionable Offenses: Indecent Phonograph Recordings from the 1890s and People Take Warning! Murder Ballads and Disaster Songs 1913-1938.

MELANIE ASMAR