Honking Duck - Listen to Old Time Music from 78s

November 5, 2007 5:35 AM

Hill Billie Blues by Uncle Dave Macon and his Fruit Jar Drinkers is under 1924 at Honking Duck. You could search that by title as well. Or you can look up by Artist as in Al Hopkins & His Buckle Busters.
Need I mention all are in RealAudio ? Hate Realplayer ? Well, as noted before, fight the power and use Real Alternative aka Media Player Classic instead. It's not exactly my favorite style of interface but they certainly do afford a large selection.
posted by y2karl (5 comments total)

"Sorry, we don't have that file."
posted by ewwgene at 6:25 AM on November 5, 2007

Is it really? Well, gosh, that's fantastic. A large selection.
posted by tellurian at 6:46 AM on November 5, 2007

"Sorry, we don't have that file."
"Sorry, we don't have that file."
"Sorry, we don't have that file."

Obviously that duck honked once too often and somebody shot it.
posted by PeterMcDermott at 7:10 AM on November 5, 2007

Actually, the old Honking Duck site was taken down for a year or so back around 2000 (???) due to copyright conflicts, before it turned out that most of the recordings had already passed into the public domain. The old version of the site mentioned that the material was digitalized from stacks of cassette tapes of old-time music. That would make sense - I used to fiddle in the old-time scene and cassettes were passed around endlessly to share hard-to-find material. (Cassettes - for most of you - were a form of sound recording used in the mid 20th century....)

Da Costa Woltze' Southern Broadcasters had the entire NY string band scene enthralled with their scratchy old 78 RPM sound to the extent that Major Pat Conte's Cane Brake Rattlers used to perform on stage with a microphone pointed at a camping stove set up to fry eggs during the performance.
posted by zaelic at 8:05 AM on November 5, 2007

Well, here is the current page, for what it's worth. It can be searched but there is no index.
posted by y2karl at 9:08 AM on November 5, 2007