Dalhart recorded for many labels under many pseudonyms, and his massive discography defies easy characterization.

On 29 June 1888, an excerpt from Handel’s Israel in Egypt was captured on wax cylinder at London’s Crystal Palace

In 1901, a traveling researcher recorded some Chinese opera, and accidentally made music history.

Before digital circuitry was cheap, Nissan used little vinyl records to make cars talk.

Incredible! Listen to Gustave Eiffel's voice and discover the history of how it was recorded.

Mr. Sivan's Speaking Watch with the Edison Phonograph inside...

It's beautiful, it's compact, it's electric, it's unique and it's almost 100 years old. One of the more beautiful phonographs to look at, the Kutzmann is a little-known brand.

Thomas Edison invented the Phonograph in 1877: a handy tabletop device that could play music for a small group of listeners. By 1915 the phonograph (now with a small “p” as a generic name) was a moderately pricey luxury—an average working man could buy a good model with a month’s wages.  Reported in Scientific American, November 6, 1915

Photographer Art Kane took the most wonderful photograph in jazz history, featuring 57 of the best jazz musicians ever: A Great Day In Harlem.

Looking for some good Halloween records to search out for your holiday listening?  Why not start with this list of Teens and Twenties Halloween Records!

The question of which sound was the first ever to be recorded seems to have a pretty straightforward answer. It was captured in Paris by Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville in the late 1850s, nearly two decades before Alexander Graham Bell’s first telephone call (1876) or Thomas Edison’s phonograph (1877).  But it turns out that, while the answer is clear, the question is complicated.

BBC Radio 3 Late Junction’s Verity Sharp and the co-founder of Finders Keepers Records, Andy Votel, disappeared into the BBC Archives in search of obscure vinyl recordings and rare oddities. They found a surprising, tiny delight…

When college student and roots music fan Lance Ledbetter grew frustrated at the near impossibility of buying 78 rpm gospel records from the 1920s and '30s, he began to ponder a question: What would it take to reissue those old tunes and put them in stores?

Among the wax cylinders in UC Berkeley’s Hearst Museum of Anthropology are songs and spoken-word recordings in 78 indigenous languages of California.

Nora Bayes was one of the most famous entertainers of the early 20th century, and after her death from cancer in 1928 at age 48, fans flocked to her Manhattan townhouse as she was carried out in a silver coffin.

Rolling Stone magazine includes his old recordings in its list of ‘15 Great Albums You Probably Didn’t Hear in 2017’

When Thomas Edison died in 1931, he held more than 1,000 patents in the United States alone. He was credited with inventing, or significantly advancing, electric lighting, storage batteries, the motion picture camera, the phonograph and even cement making—among many other things.

For Twain, the lure of the talking machine wore off fast.

Inside a private museum of old gramophone records and players  tucked away in Kerala's Kottayam district.

Phonograph. Gramophone. Graphophone.  In the popular mind there is considerable misapprehension and confusion regarding the correct designation of talking machines.  Several learned and esteemed gentlement assist in solving this confusing issue of today

'Two Trains Runnin'' fuses the story of the Mississippi Burning murders with the search for Son House and Skip James

On Thursday (10/19) and Friday (10/20) this week, Cornell University will celebrate the 40th anniversary of the Voyager Golden Record, the gold phonograph records launched into space in 1977 as a message to extraterrestrials.   All events are free and the public is invited.

Flood of popular melodies is set loose in London court to horror of attaches and delight of spectators! Diary describes nightly din, arousing neighbors...

How and why the great invention has disapointed its backers. The failure due to defects that are real enough, but may be overcome. The instrument virtually a toy yet, but with a tremendous future.

Collecting records might be a notoriously expensive endeavour, but right now hundreds of thousands of records are waiting to be played for free at awe-inspiring listening stations around the world.  These library sound archives have records ranging from oratorial opera vocal tubes created in 1901, to comprehensive catalogues of original Motown pressings and field recordings of Polynesian tribes from the 1950s.

Here are five of the most extensive – and eclectic – record libraries across the globe, with architecture credentials that match their collections.

More than forty-five thousand talking machines are in use in the United States alone, and the demand for them is so great that the factories are working night and day. The phonograph is constantly being put to new and unique uses.

A century ago, a recording of the startlingly novel “Livery Stable Blues” helped launch a new genre of music unknown to most of the rest of the United States.

Only the most prestigious pupils could enroll in The Philadelphia Phonograph School of Languages for Parrots, which in 1903 was said to be “the only institution of its kind in the world.” It boasted over 100 feathered graduates that “could pronounce all kinds of sentences and phrases” and speak three different languages (English, French, and German).

A Long Island consumer electronics company, Innovative Technology, is rebranding its nostalgia turntable line after acquiring the historic Victrola trademark for a six-figure sum, the company’s owner says.

A few years after the founding of the earliest record player companies like Pathé by the Pathé Brothers in France in 1896, the Gramophone and Typewriter Company by William Owen in the UK in 1900, and the Victor Talking Machine Company by Eldridge R. Johnson in the US in 1901, Shanghai became the target for this new entertainment.

For over half a century, dedicated fans have dreamed of a permanent museum and archive to preserve the memory of the world-famous Bix Beiderbecke and his music.  The long-planned Bix Beiderbecke Museum and Archive opened to the public on Monday, July 24, 2017, in its new home at the River Music Experience in Bix’s hometown of Davenport, Iowa.

Since we recently experienced the full solar eclipse on August 21, let's take a look back at how this celestial phenomenon affected the great American innovator of the Gilded Age.

The Discography of American Historical Recordings (DAHR) is a database of master recordings made by American record companies during the 78rpm era. It is part of the American Discography Project (ADP)—an initiative of the University of California, Santa Barbara and the Packard Humanities Institute that is edited by a team of researchers based at the UCSB Library. These files are now available for download and provided free for personal use.

To the question “When were recordings invented?”, we might be tempted to answer “1877” – the year when Thomas A Edison was first able to record and playback sound with a phonograph. But what if we think of recordings not as mere carriers of sound, but as commodities that can be bought and sold, as artefacts capable of capturing and embodying values and emotions; of defining a generation, a country or a social class? The story then becomes one that unfolds over three decades and is full of many layers and ramifications.

Brian Gorrell spent most of his career teaching music to children, including directing the Henry Clay High School Band in the 1970s. But for the past two decades, he has sold, repaired and collected their ancestors’ mechanical music machines.

Adam Savage tells the story behind American Epic, the culmination of a two-decade-long project to reassemble a one-of-a-kind 1920s recording system and the exhausting restoration of hundreds of the era’s forgotten musical works.

A giant pile of forgotten 78rpm records is now online.

A group over at the Internet Archive finally released their ambitious project. It’s being dubbed The Great 78 RPM Project!, and its mission is to post a vast digital collection of 78rpm records online. Currently, you can access and download over 30,000 records and cylinder recordings.