A dear friend forwarded me this wonderful site of old, old recordings. It has a huge selection of my favorite Sweetheart of the Talking Machine, Ada Jones.
Thrill to her renditons of All She Gets From the Iceman is Ice (1908), Don’t Get Married Any More, Ma (1907), Has Anybody Here Seen Kelly (1910), I Should Worry and Get Wrinkles (1913), O’Brien Is Tryin’ to Learn to Talk Hawaiian (1917) . . . Wait’ll you see me in the iPod commercial!
I would have thought you already knew of archive.org, for the movies, if nothing else.
Nope, it’s newsboys to me. Hell, I just found out my DVD player doesn’t run on kerosene!
. . . It’s got movies? . . .
They’re archiving the entire internet. It’s got everything. Or near enough. I love that place.
(I’ve got O’Brien Is Tryin’ to Learn to Talk Hawaiian on my iRiver jukebox, along with a couple of hundred other selections, so I can play them through my car stereo during my daily commute.)
Sooooo, any other Ada Jones fans out there? I’d like to see Gwen Stefani or Faith Hill sing as good covers of He Lost Her On the Subway, or Chimmie and Maggie at the Hippodrome!
Yes. Lots of PD films inluding features (like “DOA,” “The Man Who Knew Too Much,” “My Man Godfrey,” and “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari”), cartoons (Bugs Bunny, Betty Boop, Superman), movie trailers (just saw one for “Francis”), the Prelinger Archive of ephemeral films (industrial films, school “health” movies), World War II propaganda films (including Capra’s “Why We Fight” series), Universal newsreels, and much else.
Click on “Moving Pictures” at the top of any page.
Well, archive.org’s other charms to one side, anyone else captivated by the fabulous Miss Jones? She was the recording industry’s first female superstar, its female Billy Murray. Wonder why no CDs have been put out of her work? There’s been reissues of Billy Murray, Bert Williams, Nora Bayes, even Jack Norworth! I’m spending my weekend putting these onto cassette.
I applaud anyone who resorts to subterfuge to get stuff the record companies don’t want us to hear. Unfortunately, I’m most interested in jazz and dance music from the 1920s and '30s, most of which is still under copyright despite having next to no commercial value. Having spent the last 15 years in greater NY, I tried to get into the “personalities,” vaudeville stars and such, but to be honest, I found the jazz people much better company…
What suberfuge? The recordings are all public domain.
Umm. Yeah, that’s right, isn’t it? I guess I meant scratching around in dry stuffy places for the sound one loves instead of just shuffling off to Tower Records and consuming it. I wish they were all as eloquent about it as Eve is.
Federal copyright was not extended to sound recordings until 1972. Before then, sound recordings were protected by common law and by state anti-piracy laws, most of which gave no time limits or expiration dates to the protections. The courts have held that the lack of a time limit on these rights means they never expire. So, these recordings are not really in the public domain as long as the owners of their rights can be traced (something that is often difficult). There are many small labels that reissue old recordings without clearing rights, and they usually get away with it because the big record companies that own the rights don’t care about small potatoes. But just a few weeks ago the Naxos company was forced to recall a bunch of reissued opera recordings from the thirties by Capitol/EMI, who owned the rights.
Eve,
While not as large a collection, you may be interested in the cylinder preservation and digitization effort from the UC Santa Barbara Library, Dept. of Special Collections, located at http://cylinders.library.ucsb.edu/.
Some of the recordings are of low quality, but given they are taken from 100 year old recordings, on media that has been through who knows what, that is easily understood.
And they have some interesting stuff. Here is appartently a stream of early 1900’s German comedy recordings (may be time sensitive.)
Anybody know German? Care to translate?
Yes, but Archive.org only hosts PD works (or works that are believed to be PD*). If anyone can show copyright, they pull the work.
*Though there are clearly some violations: Archive.org has thousands of Grateful Dead concerts available. And while the Grateful Dead has given permission, that would only apply to songs they wrote. The Dead covered many other group’s songs (Traffic, the Beatles, Dylan, Kris Kristopherson), and they cannot speak for those artists.
My grandparents used to hold sing-a-longs and two of the tunes we (or rather they since I was so young) used to sing were “Has Anyone Here Seen Kelly?” and “Row, Row, Row”. I hadn’t heard them since I was a very small child (although I seem to remember hearing “Row, Row, Row” on a movie or something - I’m not sure) until I heard Ms. Jones minutes ago.
One thing though, when my grandparents and their (mostly irish) friends sang “Has Anyone Here Seen Kelly?” the final line of the refrain was “…Kelly of the IRA,” not “…Kelly of the Emerald Isle,” as it is on this recording. I don’t imagine anyone knows if there was a version as I remember it.