Voices in Wax – The Preservation of 19th Century Indian Recordings

Below is a paper I wrote for an American Indian Studies class at California State University - Long Beach on the preservation of Native American Wax Cylinder Recordings.  Preserving old audio recordings is something that I'm very interested in.  If you are a nerd like me, I hope you enjoy!

                    Voices in Wax – The Preservation of 19th Century Indian Recording

            One of the Native American artifacts that exist that many people are unaware of and have largely not been given the proper care and attention they deserve are the hours of field recordings that early anthropologists created in the late 1800s and early 1900s using the Edison Wax Cylinder recorder.  This device, created by inventor Thomas Edison in 1889, allowed for the first time in human history the ability to record and playback the human voice.  This was considered an invaluable asset to early anthropologists such as John P. Harrington and Alfred Kroeber who wanted to use the device to record languages, songs and other audio aspects of American Indian life.  Because of the interest in preserving the rapid shrinking culture of Native Americans around the turn of the Twentieth Century, there are literally thousands of Edison cylinders that have stories, songs, and other audio artifacts of Native American cultures, but unfortunately due to budgetary issues and general neglect, many of the original recordings from the late 1800s and early 1900s have been destroyed due to improper storage.  Because of this, important history is being erased and our society as a whole suffers because of this short sightedness. This leads to the important questions of why so many people do not realize the invaluable knowledge contained in these fragile wax cylinders and what resources and technology are available today to help begin the process of restoring and transferring them to digital sources so that can be shared with not only the greater academic community, but the public at large?     

An 1890 issue of Nature magazine contains an excerpt from one anthropologist named J. Walter Fewkes that marveled over the ability in which the Edison machine had been able to assist with recording native languages for posterity. “The present state of perfection of the Edison phonograph led me to attempt some experiments with it on our New England Indians, as a means of preserving languages which are rapidly becoming extinct” (Fewkes 560).  Many other anthropologist of the time also shared this interest in recording Native American languages and songs before they vanished due to rapid assimilation.  One of the most famous instances of an anthropologist using the Edison Talking Machine to record the voices of Native Americans is when anthropologist Alfred Kroeber recorded the voice and songs of a man named Ishi. 

By the turn of the century, most of the native Indian cultures that once flourished in California had been wiped out by settlers and only a handful of survivors lived in the wilderness, carefully evading white men while continuing to live as they had done for centuries.  However, by 1911, the lone surviving member of the Yahi tribe was found hiding in a barn, weak from starvation and unable to communicate with the white men who had found him.  This man, who later became to be known as Ishi, was brought to the University of California at Berkeley to be studied as the last living wild Indian.  Although, he was initially treated more like a zoological oddity rather than a human being, Ishi became at peace with his new surroundings and wanted to share his knowledge with the people who were studying him, including the famous anthropologist Alfred Kroeber who kept very detailed records of Ishi’s life, including voice recordings created using the Edison Talking Machine.  “Ishi was a determined singer and story –teller, who was recorded on 148 wax cylinders, totaling about five hours and 41 minutes. All were made in the San Francisco museum between September 1911 and April 1914” (Jacknis 1). Once I learned Ishi, created many recordings of traditional Yahi songs and stories in his native language when he lived in San Francisco, I became fascinated by not only the techniques that were used to create the recordings, but also wanted to know what had happened to the original one hundred and eleven-year-old recordings themselves. Unfortunately, many of Kroeber’s 2,746 recordings, including the recordings of Ishi, had not been stored properly and many had become unplayable due to general neglect and even though still physically held by the University of California – Berkeley, become largely forgotten in the storage rooms on the campus.

This general neglect is a recurring theme for other recordings from this time period as well, including the collection of recordings from the famous anthropologist John P. Harrington.  “Harrington counts among the most prolific producers of ethnological sound recordings of the first half of the twentieth century.  Working with approximately thirty tribes, Harrington and his field assistants made more than 1,300 sound recordings between 1912 and 1941” (Glenn 357).  Although these recordings still exist today, they are spread across three main repositories, the Smithsonian Institution’s National Anthropological Archives (NAA), the Archives of Folk Culture of the Library of Congress, and the Motion Picture, Sound, and Video Branch of the National Archives.  The condition of these recordings vary from very poor to completely unplayable and many ironically because too much care was given to preserve them by Harrington himself.  Beginning in the 1930s, Harrington began using aluminum discs instead of wax cylinders to record with, but even though the aluminum wasn’t as prone to breakage as the cylinders were, they were damaged by the way they were stored. “Corrosion has developed on many of them, also certain discs were outfitted with jackets in the form of very large envelopes made of kraft paper and glue.  The glue, combined with poor storage locations–at times, for example, in the sheds and basements of friends-was the cause of damage, since the glue bled through the paper onto the discs. As a result, some recordings have a broad strip of white corrosion running completely across them, and the grooves underneath have been destroyed.  Others have only small amounts of corrosion and can be played, though a rhythmic click tells of the damage” (Glenn 359).

            Beginning in the late 1970s, there was an interest in gathering the materials that remained and rerecord them onto tape.  “In 1979, the Federal Cylinder Project got underway.  The project, aimed at re-recording cylinders in federal agencies, operated through the Library of Congress and was undertaken in cooperation with several organizations (Glenn 360).  While this project helped to clean and catalog many of the recordings, the nature of the tape medium, which is prone to decay and breakage almost as much as the wax cylinders they were meant to replace as well as the number of organization that held on to the actual recordings, still made it difficult for researchers to have access to these important recordings in one centralized location.  It wasn’t until the digital revolution of the 1990s did a real breakthrough occur that is beginning to have an impact on the preservation, repair, and availability of these important recordings.  This program is called I.R.E.N.E.

            I.R.E.N.E. stands for Image, Reconstruct, Erase Noise, Etc. It was created at the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab in 2002 by Vitally Fadeyev and Carl Haber.  These scientists used a laser based imaging system that was used for physics experiments and began to scan records with them. “They discovered that this method (optical metrology) could be used to measure the grooves in vinyl discs, wax cylinders, dictation discs, and a wide variety of other historical media” (Zastrow 1).  The first record they scanned was a 1950 recording of   Goodnight, Irene and this is where the system got its name.  “Now, without even having to touch the audio relic, and risk the pressure of a stylus damaging the record, an image of the groove pattern can be made and the sound extracted using computer software.  Broken discs and cylinder records can be temporarily reassembled to capture an image and then processed into an audio file” (Zastrow 1). By using optical scanning methods, these scientists can now reconstruct and repair wax cylinders and aluminum discs from early anthropologist like Kroeber and Harrington that were once unplayable and transfer the contents to digital formats such as .wav files and mp3s, which are much easier to catalog and share with students and researchers than physical audio formats such as cassettes and compact discs.  Once the transfer of the recordings has been completed, they are uploaded to websites such as the California Language Archive and the Smithsonian Institute that specializes in Native American cultural preservation.

While you won’t find these recordings in record shops like Amoeba Music in Hollywood or Fingerprints in Long Beach, it is interesting to know that on a NASA space probe approximately 14.5 billion miles away from the Earth, there is a golden record that has the sounds and greetings from the people of our planet and among the representations of our cultures, there is a recording of a sacred chant by the Navajo tribe.  I believe it is because of preservation efforts like I.R.E.N.E, that the songs and stories from so many years ago will continue to not only exist, but breathe as living artifacts of not only the cultures they represent, but the actual individuals, like Ishi, who recorded them. Because when you hear these recordings, you aren’t just hearing words and stories retold by others, you are hearing the actual people from the 1800s themselves speaking from the past and sharing their knowledge to help guide us into the future.

                                                           Works Cited

Fewkes, J. “On the Use of the Edison Phonograph in the Preservation of the Languages of the American Indians”. Nature 41, 560 (1890).

Glenn, James. “The Sound Recordings of John P. Harrington: A Report on Their Disposition and State of Preservation”, National Anthropological Archives Smithsonian Institution, www.jstor.org/stable/30028216. Accessed 26 Apr. 2022

Jacknis, Ira. Cylinder Recordings of Ishi - Home | Library of Congress. www.loc.gov/static/programs/national-recording-preservation-board/documents/IshiCylinderRecordings.pdf.

Zastrow, Jan. “Voices from the Crypt: Irene Preserves ‘Groovy’ Audio from the Past” Information Today, Inc., May 2018, www.infotoday.com/cilmag/may18/Zastrow--Voices-from-the-Crypt-IRENE-Preserves-Groovy-Audio-From-the-Past.shtml.