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Music in American history is rich and varied, including
everything from marches to waltzes, from ragtime to rap. Music available
online for historical research is also diverse, ranging from written music
and sheet music covers to interviews with musicians and sound recordings.
Due to copyright restrictions, music before the early twentieth century
is most widely available. This list is intended as a brief overview to
the two most common music resources available on the Web, Sheet Music
and Sound Recordings, providing links to some of the largest collections
as well as a glimpse at the diversity of materials available online. Many
other collections can be found in History
Matters.
Sheet Music
African-American Sheet Music, 1850-1920, Brown University and
Library of Congress American Memory
memory.loc.gov/ammem/award97/rpbhtml/aasmhome.html
More than 1,000 pieces of sheet music composed by and about African
Americans, ranging chronologically from antebellum minstrel shows to early
twentieth-century African-American musical comedies. Includes works by
renowned black composers and lyricists, such as James A. Bland, Will Marion
Cook, Bert Williams, George Walker, Jesse A. Shipp, James Weldon Johnson,
and Eubie Blake. “Development of an African-American Musical Theatre,
1865-1910” provides a chronological overview of the emergence of
African-American performers and musical troupes. In addition, sheet music
can be studied to examine racial depictions, visually and in lyrics; styles
of music, such as ragtime, jazz, and spirituals; and topics including
gender relations, urbanization, and wars. Much of the material is disturbing
due to its heavy dependence on racial caricatures; however, students can
gain insight into racial attitudes through an informed use of this site.
America Singing: 19th-Century Song Sheets, Library of Congress
American Memory
http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/amsshtml/amsshome.html
Before the phonograph, America learned the latest music fads from
printed song sheets. These single printed sheets, often beautifully illustrated,
included only lyrics and were sung to familiar tunes like “Yankee
Doodle.” The lyrics and illustrations on these song sheets offer
a unique perspective on the political, social, and cultural life of the
time. This collection offers 4,291 song sheets, spanning the years from
1800 through the 1880s, but primarily from 1850 to 1870. Each item offers
an image of the song sheet, publication and repository information, and
a transcription of the lyrics. The site is keyword searchable and can
be browsed by subject, title, composer name, and publisher.
The Lester S. Levy Collection of Sheet Music, Johns Hopkins University
http://levysheetmusic.mse.jhu.edu/
Scanned images of more than 18,000 pieces of sheet music, including
covers published prior to 1923, and cataloging for an additional 11,000
items not in the public domain. While the collection, compiled by an American
musicologist, covers the period 1780-1980, it focuses on nineteenth-century
popular music, especially songs relating to military conflicts, presidents,
romance, transportation, and the minstrel stage. Users may search for
songs on hundreds of topics such as drinking, smoking, fraternal orders,
the circus, and death, or look for composers, song titles, or other catalog
record data.
Nineteenth-Century California Sheet Music, Mary Kay Duggan, University
of California, Berkeley
http://www.sims.berkeley.edu/~mkduggan/neh.html
More than 1,800 scanned images of sheet music published in California
between 1852 and 1900. Includes more than 800 illustrated covers, 45 audio
selections, seven video clips of singers, and a handful of programs, posters,
playbills, periodicals, catalogs, broadsheets, books on music, and maps.
More than 350 items contain advertising.
“We’ll Sing to Abe Our Song”: Sheet Music about
Lincoln, Emancipation, and the Civil War, Library of Congress American
Memory
http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/scsmhtml/scsmhome.html
More than 200 sheet music compositions representing President Abraham
Lincoln and the Civil War in popular music from the 1860 presidential
campaign to the centenary of Lincoln’s birth in 1909. The digital
archive includes campaign jingles, war songs, compositions about emancipation,
funeral marches, and commemorative songs. Each piece of music is accompanied
by an image of the sheet music cover and notes on the full song title,
name of composer(s), date composed, and a transcription of the lyrics.
Sound Recordings
California Gold: Northern California Folk Music from the Thirties,
Library of Congress American Memory
http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/afccchtml/cowhome.html
Features 35 hours of folk and popular music sound recordings from
several European, Slavic, Middle Eastern, and English- and Spanish-speaking
communities. The Work Projects Administration California Folk Music Project
collected these 817 songs in Northern California between 1938 and 1940,
representing 12 languages and 185 musicians. The collection also includes
168 photographs, 45 instrument sketches, and numerous written documents,
including ethnographic field reports and notes, song transcriptions, published
articles, and project correspondence. Organized by folk music collector
Sidney Robertson Cowell, this was one of the earliest ethnographic field
projects to document folk and popular music of such diverse origin in
one region. In addition to folk music of indigenous and immigrant groups,
the collection includes popular songs from the Gold Rush and Barbary Coast
eras, medicine show tunes, and ragtime numbers.
Dismuke’s Virtual Talking Machine
http://www.dismuke.org/
More than 225 music selections from a private collector’s 78
rpm recordings produced between 1900 and 1940. Music is organized according
to type of recording: acoustical (pre-1925) and electrical. Includes music
in a variety of styles;ragtime, opera, jazz, classical, marching band,
and swing. Listings provide information on vocalist, band, and soloist,
and include annotations of a few sentences each. “Dismuke’s
Hit of the Week” updated weekly with one to three new audio selections,
also offers explanatory material of 100 to 300 words in length.
Hispano Music and Culture from the Northern Rio Grande, Library
of Congress American Memory
http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/rghtml/rghome.html
This ethnographic field collection documents the religious and secular
music of Spanish-speaking people from rural Northern New Mexico and Southern
Colorado. It features the audio recordings and transcriptions of more
than 100 songs that Juan Bautista Rael of Stanford University recorded
during a 1940 research trip. Recordings include alabados (hymns), folk
dramas, wedding songs, and dance tunes. Descriptive information about
the title, performers, genre, instrumentation, location and date of recording,
and any other brief (10-25 words) notes about the music accompanies each
tune.
Max Hunter Folk Song Collection, Southwest Missouri State University
http://maxhunter.missouristate.edu/
Audio files and song transcriptions of more than 1,000 songs recorded
in the Ozark Mountains of Missouri and Arkansas between 1956 and 1976
by Max Hunter, a traveling salesman. Includes lyrics for all songs; musical
notations for many songs with annotations providing information on how
singers phrased certain notes; listings of the name of the singer and
recording location and date; and links to variant versions or similar
songs. No information is offered for composer or lyricist. Users may listen
in three formats: RealPlayer, AIFF, and in some cases MIDI.
The Red Hot Jazz Archive: A History of Jazz before 1930, Scott
Alexander
http://www.redhotjazz.com/
This comprehensive site offers biographical information, photographs,
and audio and video files for more than 200 jazz bands and musicians active
from 1895 to 1929. It includes more than 200 sound files of jazz recordings
by well-known artists, such as Louis Armstrong, Sidney Bechet, and Django
Reinhardt, and by dozens of less well-known musicians.
Southern Mosaic: The John and Ruby Lomax 1939 Southern States
Recording Trip, American Memory Library of Congress
http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/lohtml/lohome.html
In 1939, John A. Lomax and his wife Ruby Terrill Lomax embarked on
a 6500-mile journey through the American South. They recorded more than
700 folk tunes by more than 300 performers during their trip. Music genres
represented include ballads, blues, children's songs, cowboy songs, field
hollers, lullabies, spirituals, and work songs. Each recording includes
a brief (50-75 word) description and history of the tune and lists musical
features, instrumentation, performers, place, and date of recording. Images
and transcripts of the Lomaxes’s field notes contain lists of song
titles and performers. There are also more than 70 images of dust jackets
and 50 letters to and from the Lomaxes regarding their trip.
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