“The Great 78 Project will help today’s diverse student body engage with their histories through the many recordings of underrepresented communities in these collections. This collection is truly a time machine for culturally sensitive millennials.”
— Rick Prelinger, Associate Professor, Film & Digital Media, UC Santa Cruz
Primary metadata for each digitized recording is keyed in from the physical disc itself, and project participants are working to enhance this metadata with information about languages, genres and dates. In addition to thousands of recordings in English, we’ve digitized songs in many languages, including:
Volunteers from the ARChive of Contemporary Music are determining genres and while you would expect things like Swing and Big Band, we’ve also found:
- Yodeling
- Ragtime
- Novelty and Comedy
- Hillbilly
- Accordion, Harmonica, Ukelele and Marimba
- Polka
- Hawaiian
- Rumba, Mambo and Cha Cha Cha
- Gospel and Religious
- Circus and Vaudeville
Or you can browse through the collection by decade or year:
Sugar Foot Stomp
Original Dixieland One Step
Jingle Bell Boogie
永度春宵 (Yǒng dù chūnxiāo)
Fireman’s Lament
Dixieland March
Chop Suey Mambo
Alone At Last
Bugle Boy March
Samba Music About a Chemical