Before records were flat, they were tubes. Thomas Edison's phonograph, first demonstrated in 1877, recorded sound as a groove cut into the surface of a rotating cylinder, and for the best part of thirty years that was how recorded music was sold. You slid the cylinder onto a tapered mandrel, lowered a stylus onto it, and it played for two minutes — roughly the length of a song, which is a large part of why popular songs are still about that long.
Cylinders lost to the flat disc in the 1910s and Edison stopped making them in 1929. Everything in this catalog was cut in the years between: the earliest here dates from 1899, the latest from 1928.
The filters on the catalog use the names Edison used, which are less obvious now than they were then:
The cylinders themselves are a private collection, catalogued here one at a time. 205 of the 273 have a transfer you can play in the browser.
124 of the records credit the UCSB Cylinder Audio Archive, whose digitisation programme has put tens of thousands of these recordings into the public domain; where a transfer came from them, the record page says so and links back to the original. The rest were transferred from the collection directly.
134 of the recordings have a transcript, and on those with audio the text follows along as it plays. These were produced by an AI speech-to-text model, not by a person, and they have not been checked line by line. The source is hundred-year-old audio recorded acoustically onto wax — no microphone, just a horn — and then played back off a surface that has been wearing down for a century. Expect misheard words, and expect the occasional line that was never sung at all: models of this kind will invent plausible text rather than return nothing when the audio defeats them.
They are published anyway because a rough transcript makes a recording searchable, and searchable is the difference between an archive you can use and one you can only browse. Trust your ears over the text.
The search box matches titles, artists, descriptions and catalogue numbers as you type. It also searches the transcripts — the actual words on the record — and those results appear underneath, in their own section, with the matching phrase shown in context. If you half-remember a line from a monologue or a chorus, that is the place it will turn up.
Take it. Use it for anything — a video, a lesson, a record, a piece of research, something commercial. All we ask is a credit.
The reason to be plain about this: a great deal of what is here exists because the UCSB Cylinder Audio Archive put their digitisation into the public domain for anyone to use, and it would be a poor way to repay that to lock our own work up behind a stricter door than the one we walked through.
The artist notes are written from published sources, each cited and linked on the record page so a claim can be checked rather than taken on faith. The portraits are separate: every one is a public-domain image from Wikimedia Commons, credited where it appears, and its own status travels with it rather than falling under the licence above.
Spotted something wrong — a misattributed artist, a wrong year, a transcript that has gone badly astray? cylinder-info@ericmcc.com.