November 1, 2001
CD planned for old recordings
Representatives of the Confederated Tribes of Coos, Siuslaw and Lower Umpqua from Coos Bay, Ore. traveled to campus this week to witness and participate in the re-dubbing of old recordings of ancestral songs and oral literature.
The recordings were made by the late Melville Jacobs, a UW professor of anthropology and linguistics, who used a vintage Ediphone wax cylinder recorder to make them in the early 1930s. Jacobs, who died in 1971, had made the recordings as part of his field studies of the tribes, and donated them along with his field notes and other papers to the University Archives, said Gary Lundell, reference specialist in the Manuscripts, Special Collections and University Archives Division of University Libraries.
“The tribes consider these recordings to be an important part of their heritage, so this was a special event for them,” Lundell said. “They want to use the recordings in an interactive exhibit they plan, and for further study of their language.”
The actual dubbing was done by Glenn Sage, a Portland-based specialist in the preservation of early recorded sounds who has done similar work with wax cylinders in the Library of Congress and numerous other collections nationwide. Sage maintains a Web site describing wax cylinder recordings at http://www.tinfoil.com.
The dubbing involves a digital transfer of the recordings on the wax cylinders through several intermediate steps before producing a compact disk, Lundell said. The cylinders themselves haven’t been played for years, so the transfer process will make them more available to the public. The University Archives will have a copy of the CD, as will the Ethnomusicology Archives.
