We may have yet to develop the technology of time travel, but recorded
music comes pretty close. Those who listen to it have experienced how a
song or an album can, in some sense, transport them right back to the
time they first heard it. But older records also have the much stranger
power to conjure up eras we never experienced. You can musically send
yourself as far back as the nineteen-twenties with the above Youtube
playlist of digitized 78 RPM records from the George Blood collection.

George Blood is the head of the audio-visual digitization company
George Blood Audio, which has been participating in the Internet
Archive';s Great 78 Project. "The brainchild of the Archive's founder,
Brewster Kahle, the project is dedicated to the preservation and
discovery of 78rpm records," writes The Vinyl Factory';s Will
Pritchard.

The piece quotes Blood himself as saying that his company has been
digitizing five to six thousand records per month with the ambitious
goal of creating a "reference collection of sound recordings from the
period of approximately 1880 to 1960." He said that five years ago.
Today, the Internet Archive';s George Blood collection contains more
than 385,000 records free to stream and download.

The 78 having been the most popular recorded-music format in the first
few decades of the twentieth century, George Blood L.P. and the Great
78 Project as a whole have had plenty of material to work with. In the
large archive built up so far you';ll find plenty of obscurities - the
Youtube playlist at the top of the post can get you acquainted with the
likes of Eric Whitley and the Green Sisters, Tin Ear Tanner and His
Back Room Boys, and Douglas Venable and His Bar X Ranch Hands - but
also the work of musicians who remain beloved today. For the 78 was the
medium through which many listeners enjoyed the big-band hit of Glenn
Miller, or discovered jazz as performed by legends like Louis
Armstrong and Billie Holiday. To know their music most intimately, one
would perhaps have needed to hear them in the actual nineteen-thirties,
but this is surely the next best thing.

Related content:

How the Internet Archive Has Digitized More than 250,000 78 R.P.M.
Records: See the Painstaking Process Up-Close

Massive Archive of 78RPM Records Now Digitized & Put Online: Stream
78,000 Early 20th Century Records from Around the World

200,000+ Vintage Records Being Digitized & Put Online by the Boston
Public Library

Rare Arabic 78 RPM Records Enter the Public Domain

Download 10,000 of the First Recordings of Music Ever Made, Courtesy of
the University of California-Santa Barbara

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities,
language, and culture. His projects include the Substack
newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema.
Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

https://www.openculture.com/2023/01/stream-385000-vintage-78-rpm-records-at-the-internet-archive.html
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