Header Graphic
Dirty-South Blues Harp forum: wail on! > OT:PHILADELPHIA COMPANY DIGITIZES 25,000 OLD 78s
OT:PHILADELPHIA COMPANY DIGITIZES 25,000 OLD 78s
Login  |  Register
Page: 1

The Iceman
3320 posts
Aug 16, 2017
4:45 AM
PHILADELPHIA COMPANY DIGITIZES 25,000 OLD 78s FOR FREE DOWNLOADS

Newsworks reported August 11, 2017 that 25,000 songs recorded onto 78RPM records in the early 20th century have been released online, for free. They are the first batch of an estimate 400,000-piece virtual record collection to be made available by the Internet Archive, from gospel by the Tuskegee Institute Sings, to opera recorded in Italy, to novelty tunes by Spike Jones, to hot - though obscure - jazz. The task of digitizing all of those old records is happening at George Blood Audio LP, an audio preservation company located in Chestnut Hill, Philadelphia.

Mr Blood has been quietly preserving America's musical heritage, one 78 at a time. Funding for the project is coming from the Internet Archive, a San Francisco-based digital library run by Brewster Kahle, who is also archiving hundreds of thousands of books and millions of web pages.

The plan is: if you build it, they will come with their own records.

"The whole project is intended to be a community effort," said Blood. "Brewster is putting forth the funds through the Internet Archive to create this reference collection to have critical mass - to have enough that everyone wants to join in. So far there are 75,000 sides that have been contributed, outside of what we have done."

All the tens of thousands of songs, and growing, are available online at The Great 78 Project.

https://archive.org/details/78rpm


EDIT: I just went to the site, clicked on Spike Jones and hit "play all". Am in nostalgic heaven. Grew up on this stuff when I was 6 years old....love the sound of the crackly needle in groove, too.
----------
The Iceman

Last Edited by The Iceman on Aug 16, 2017 9:16 AM
Bass410man
159 posts
Aug 16, 2017
6:43 PM
That site is amazing, thanks for the link.
AppalachiaBlues
42 posts
Aug 21, 2017
7:00 AM
Great stuff here. Thanks Iceman for sharing! I went in briefly last night to sample some of the Robert Johnson and Leadbelly material. Tasty! I'll dive in deeper when I have more time...


Post a Message



(8192 Characters Left)


Modern Blues Harmonica supports

§The Jazz Foundation of America

and

§The Innocence Project

 

 

 

ADAM GUSSOW is an official endorser for HOHNER HARMONICAS