Talk About . . . Pop Music

Loyal reader Ceci sent me an article from Sunday's New York Times that I missed. It's all about recorded cylinders from the turn of the last century. These are some of the first commercially available sound recordings, from back before electronic recording existed. For years this material's been lost to all but the most dedicated researchers and collectors, but now it's available to all through the magic of the Internet. The Cylinder Preservation and Digitization Project from the library at the University of California, Santa Barbara, has put the content of more than 6,000 cylinders online. They apparently encompass everything from opera to spoken word to vaudeville performances.

I don't know if they'll be included here (and I have no idea if I could even find them if they are), but I remember hearing a couple of cylinders way back when I was in fifth grade. I don't know why--maybe it was the study of sound in science class or something--but somebody brought in an old cylinder player and played a couple of cylinders. One was "Turkey in the Straw," and the other was a song I didn't know. I should've realized then and there that I was fated to be a pop culture maven. The person who owned the cylinders introduced the second one by saying, "This expresses the ever-popular sentiment, 'I Love My Wife.'" At all of ten years old, I immediately thought of the then-current Elliott Gould movie of the same name. Now that I'm older, I'm not sure that was the proper reference. A quick search at the site shows that they have two recordings of "I Love My Wife, But oh You Kid." There are also four of "Turkey in the Straw".

I haven't had time to download or listen to anything, but it looks like there's an awful lot of fascinating stuff that's for all intents and purposes been lost for decades. Read the NYTimes piece, go search the Website, and discover your own buried treasure.