Wax Cylinder Site
When my gizmo-loving brother Jeff and I were in our early teens, we were in nerd heaven as owners of an ancient cylinder-recording machine. My mother worked for a radio station in those days, and when cleaning house, the station had found some antique Dictaphone recording equipment which consisted of a machine for recording and playing back cylinders, and another machine for erasing them for reuse. These machines were beautiful sculptures of chrome and black metal, with belts and twirling parts. Mom saved them from the scrap heap; I imagine if Jeff and I hadn't eventually taken them apart and used the bits for other projects, they would be worth some money on eBay by now. Before we wrecked the poor things, we had a great deal of fun with them, singing and talking and playing it all back. This was in the late 50s or early 60s; I wish we had some of those recordings now, not to mention the actual contraptions.
Sound quality was surprisingly good. The recording and playback process was electric only in that a motor turned the sleeve holding the cylinder. There were no electronics involved; no amplifier. The second machine was nothing but a scraper which scraped a layer off the cylinder to remove your message and make it ready to receive a new one. Initially developed for office use, in the late 1800s cylinder recorders became most popular for reproducing entertainments.
Which brings me to this episode's main focus. For a while now I have been listening madly to the weirdest and most thrilling collection of old recordings I have ever come across online, all digitized from the wax cylinders which came on the market in the late 1800s and early 1900s. These recordings can be listened to as streaming QuickTime files or downloaded as MP3s or WAVs. The superbly organized and user-friendly site is the work of the Cylinder Preservation and Digitization Project of the Department of Special Collections, Donald C. Davidson Library, University of California, Santa Barbara. The main URL is:
http://cylinders.library.ucsb.edu/index.php
From this page you can search the collection, or browse through its various categories. There is a great short history of the cylinder recording industry, and other useful areas all well written and presented.
The astonishing collection contains humorous recitations, home recordings (including such things as two minutes of a crying baby circa 1892), ethnic jokes, fiddle tunes, Hawaiian music, jazz, language instruction, anthems, operas, polkas, Vaudeville bits, instrumental solos, songs about transportation, prohibition, marches, hymns, songs grouped by states, and so on. I don't really need to go into detail about this site; it does a much better job of describing itself than I can do here. But I have to say that it is like visiting a parallel universe, where the themes and melodies and instruments are often in some unexpected ways very much the same as those of today, but also hauntingly different.
Here are a few almost random examples from these archives:
--A strange lilting song called Sweet Cider Time When You Were Mine, released in 1916 and sung by Joseph A. Phillips:
I close my eyes and wander;
In dreams I go back yonder
It seems I'm with you still, by the mill
Where they made sweet cider,
I made sweet love to you
-- A song composed and sung by "Vernon Dalhart and Company" called Doin' the Best I Can, released in 1925:
...I fell in love with a pretty girl,
But she didn't seem to care
I gave her an electric fan
And she gave me the air...
--A 1926 folky sounding song called The Wild and Reckless Hobo, sung by Cowen Powers with guitar:
Standing on the platform,
A-smoking a cheap cigar
Waiting for that eastbound train
To board that empty car
My pocketbook is empty,
My heart is filled with pain
10,000 miles away from home
Bumming an old freight train
--Lots of real odd songs like the 1910 Nix on the Glow Worm Lena, performed by the very popular Billy Murray:
In a boarding house
Lived Lena Straus
Who owned a concertina
She knew one song
That she played all wrong
But that didn't worry Lena
When she rose each day
She commenced to play
And the borders [???]
That was strong enough
That was really tough
When Miss Lena played the Glow Worm
When she started in to play
The borders all would yell, HEY,
NIX on the Glow Worm Lena, Lena
Play something else on the concertina...
In 1904 Billy Murray also recorded this one, called Ain't it funny what a difference just a few hours can make?:
Ain't it funny what a difference
Just a few hours make
In the morning I'm so tired
I'm nearly dead
But as day goes into night
I begin to feel all right
Just about the time
I ought to go to bed
As a business man
I know I'd make an awful hit
If they'd let me work
When I am wide awake
If some system could be found
Just to turn the time around
Ain't it funny what a difference
Just a few hours make
There are Irving Berlin songs (I think the bloke came over with Columbus) like Cohen Owes Me Ninety-Seven Dollars, Grizzly Bear, Call Me Up Some Rainy Afternoon, I Want To Go Back To Michigan, and, of course, more.
There are amazing breathless Dixieland-like recordings by the Frisco Jazz Band. There are hundreds of odd and marvelous instrumental pieces, like the absolutely cartoony Auntie Skinner's Chicken Dinner Medley by Sisty and Seitz's Banjo Orchestra, which sounds like a banjo accompanied by a clothes dryer full of wood blocks and cowbells. Oh, this is a wonderful, wonderful collection. Please, have a listen. And rest assured that you will find no nerdy cylinders from the 1950s Berryman brothers basement collection.
Here's the URL one more time:
http://cylinders.library.ucsb.edu/index.php