Arthur Collins, "The Goose-Bone Man" (1905). From the Cylinder Preservation and Digitization Project at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
For a long time I thought that close attention should be paid to the first years of recording technology, since it is only in very early recordings that we find captured the sort of things people were singing, saying, and doing quite naturally before they started singing, saying, and doing things self-consciously in front of, and for the sake of, recording devices. Most of the cylinders here show however just how far early commercial music was from ethnographic field recording. It was contrived, affected, and stuffed into available genres, many of which were, like this one, based on embarrassing racial stereotypes. Still, one does get the feeling that there is something that precedes recording technology that is being documented here.