Imagine your computer as a new Gramophone purchased for family and friends to enjoy in your home parlor. Audition popular recorded selections of the beginning of the 20th century years—band music, novelty tunes, humorous monologues, hits from the season’s new musical theater productions, the latest dance rhythms, and opera arias.
The Library of Congress just announced its National Jukebox project, making historical sound recordings available to the public free of charge. The Jukebox currently includes
more than 10,000 recordings made by the Victor Talking Machine Company between 1901 and 1925. Jukebox content will be increased regularly, with additional Victor recordings and acoustically recorded titles made by other Sony-owned U.S. labels, including Columbia, OKeh, and others.
A slideshow on the site describes the laborious process needed to make Jukebox a reality.
Users can discover and select audio using the following strategies:
Featured Playlist: Early Tin Pan Alley Listen
Featured Artist: Enrico Caruso Listen to Enrico Caruso sing
Featured Genre: Ethnic music: Listen
And here’s a taste of the Victrola Book of the Opera
Imagine the potential for these materials in student media projects. Imagine incorporating these pieces into lessons in music, history, art, English and so much more! Let your Gatsby readers listen to the Jazz Age.
Remember that the Jukebox recordings also include spoken word. Though the Speeches subgenre is not yet large (at 35 items), it currently offers speeches performed by William Jennings Bryan, and Presidents William Howard Taft, Woodrow Wilson, Theodore Roosevelt, and Warren G. Harding.
Share this wonderful resource with classroom teachers today!
About Joyce Valenza
Are the recordings playing for you? They won’t play for me. I don’t know if it’s the Jukebox site or my district filter.
At first I thought this was great. Another source of audio for students to remix & use for synchronization projects. Unfortunately, the USLOC does not allow ANY downloading, only streaming, and misappropriates what appears to be copyright law. Recordings fixed & published before 1923 should now be public domain. A good document I use is here:
http://copyright.cornell.edu/resources/publicdomain.cfm
However, click on any recording prior to 1923, and there is a “rights and access” tab. They state that everything is protected under copyright law, and only appears on the LOC website courtesy usually Sony.
So this resource that has a ton of hard work in to it – not quite as great as I would have hoped.
We STRONGLY believe in 1) obtaining license (permission) to use the media we are using, 2) attribute the media properly (give credit) to those whose works we are building upon. However, the constant restriction of rights is very frustrating, confuses those who are trying to do what is right and just encourages many of our students & staff to throw up their hands and say “who cares.”
Its too bad – this could have been a great resource. I hope they fix it.