Where can I find recordings of early American popular music?
It depends what genre you’re looking for Mostly, I’m looking for mainstream American popular music, songs such as After the Ball, In the Good Old Summertime, Bird in a Gilded Cage, On the Banks of the Wabash, Shine on Harvest Moon, Alexander’s Ragtime Band, etc. I’m aware of — but had forgotten — many of the options suggested so far. Surely there must be some vast repository of mp3s that people have ripped from old phonographs. I have a couple of sites bookmarked, but their selection is rather poor.
“Folk” as a label has become too diluted to mean anything and often gets confused with folk rock and singer-songwriter material. That’s why, along with other folklorists, I prefer ‘traditional’ to refer to songs and tunes that carry cultural meaning and that are learned and taught outside the processes of commercial recording. It is a narrower term than “folk, and is thus more specific. “Folk” as a label for all types of social behavior (dance, art, literature, humor) has been problematic from its inception in the late 19th century and continues to be so – especially now that so-called “folk” material can be produced expressly for commercial consumption (for instance, calling John Gorka or Shawn Colvin a ‘folk singer’). It excludes nothing (you can argue, for instance, that British punk and hip-hop are folk musics) and so is not terribly useful. Even the people we call paragons of ‘folk’ — Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie — performed commercially and sang a mixture of traditional songs and
