Ethnographic wax cylinders

Long description:

Recordings in this collection can be played by anyone.

Music, songs and speech from around the world, captured between 1898 and 1915.

These recordings can be played by everybody Due to copyright restrictions the recordings featured here are only freely available as streaming audio files. They are not available to download. If you wish to obtain a copy of any recording featured here, please send an email to sound-archive@bl.uk to request further information.

The British Library Sound Archive holds more than three thousand wax cylinders. They feature rare early recordings from around the world: Africa, South Asia, Australia and the Pacific Islands, China, Eastern Europe and South America, as well as the more familiar sounds of England and Scotland. The collections were originally held by Cambridge University Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, the Royal Anthropological Institute, and the English Folk Dance and Song Society. Many of the cylinders are accompanied by field notes that add greatly to their research value.

Invented by Thomas Edison in 1877, the phonograph - or wax cylinder recorder - remained in use as the most popular portable recording device for some sixty years. The first anthropologist to deploy the new apparatus in the field was the American, Jesse Walter Fewkes. He enthusiastically recommended collecting native stories "on those magic cylinders of wax where they are indelibly fixed forever" to Cambridge professor, Alfred Cort Haddon. In 1898, Haddon led an anthropological expedition to the Torres Straits, which lie between Australia and New Guinea. This year-long expedition marked the start of British field recording and produced the earliest wax cylinders in our collection.

In the years that followed, Northcote Whitridge Thomas made recordings in Nigeria and Sierra Leone, accounting for almost a third of the collection. Alice Werner recorded music and speech in Kenya and Tanzania, while Edgar Thurston and Alfred Henry Fox Strangways captured the sounds of the Indian subcontinent. Captain Robert Sutherland Rattray worked among the Ashanti people of Ghana, who called him 'Kantankye' - he of the Big Hat.

This selection of around 300 recordings features items from the collections made by Haddon, Northcott Thomas, Fox Strangways and pioneering recordists from the English Folk Dance and Song Society.

Anthropologist, Northcote Whitridge Thomas (1868-1936) was appointed by the British Colonial Office to research the customs of people living under colonial rule in West Africa. His fieldwork was carried out between 1909 and 1916. Although little is now known of him - he was not attached to any university - he made a huge contribution to anthropology. His methodology, with its attention to detail, is considered ahead of his time. His reports on the Edo and Ibo cultures of Nigeria, and on the Time (or Themne) in Sierra Leone are particularly thorough. He details laws and customs within ethnic groups, and includes dictionaries and proverbs. He also added maps outlining the boundaries of ethnic territories. Besides the more than 700 wax cylinders recorded during his fieldwork, Thomas also took thousands of photographs, now in the Cambridge Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. Many of his recordings are accompanied by transcriptions and translations. Those selected here were made during his first expedition in the Edo region of Nigeria from 1909 to 1910.

Fox Strangways had studied music at Oxford and Berlin before leaving a career as a teacher to embark on a field trip to India in 1910. He set out to record a wide variety of musical styles across a large area of India. In all he made over forty wax cylinders. Each begins with a reference tone to ensure the recording could be played back at the correct pitch, even though the recording speed of the hand-turned cylinders may have varied. The highlights include a number of extraordinarily complex songs from Jhelum in Pakistan, pipe music from Allahabad and some very beautiful lullabies, sung by a schoolmistress in Tanjore.

In his book on 'The Music of Hindostan', Fox Strangways gives an insight into the joys and sorrows of field recording on wax cylinders: Tribesmen from the Himalayas "said they could not sing in the daytime because they were thinking about their work, so we had a very merry evening in a hot tent from nine o'clock to past midnight. There was great competition to sing into the phonograph and have their performance given back to them; but unfortunately only one phonogram has survived the railway journey."

The English Folk Dance and Song Society collection, held at British Library on their behalf, is divided into three parts: the Lucy Broadwood collection of Scottish recordings; the Welsh Collection; and the Cecil Sharp and Vaughan Williams collection of English folk songs. Lucy Ethelred Broadwood (1836-1929) was the great grand-daughter of harpsichord and piano manufacturer, John Broadwood. The recordings she made, around 1908, are mainly songs sung by Dr Farquhar MacRae. They have survived in very good condition - possibly because the greater interest taken in English folk songs meant the Scottish wax cylinders were less heavily researched and consequently less damaged by repeated playing. It is not certain who made the English recordings, though Cecil Sharp was definitely involved. Some are thought to have been recorded by Ralph Vaughan Williams, but it is more likely that he only transcribed them. English folk song had a profound influence on Vaughan Williams' music.

Further information on the British Library's ethnographic wax cylinder collections.

These recordings provide a fascinating review of the era of spoken word audio that preceded the advent of long-playing records and tapes.

All recordings on this site are governed by licence agreements.