Located in a wing of the UC Santa Barbara Library, about a quarter mile from the Pacific Ocean, the university’s collection of early music is the most extensive on the West Coast. Descend in an elevator a few stories underground with David Seubert, curator for the Performing Arts Collection at UC Santa Barbara Library, into the Cylinder Audio Archive, a windowless, climate-controlled storage facility purpose-built to hold wax cylinders and 78-rpm records and, after adjusting to the 10-degree temperature drop, a temple of sound awaits.
Say what you want about the millions of digital songs stored in the cloud and awaiting your Spotify spin. Strolling through the rows of shelving units, each packed with cylinder recordings, overwhelms the imagination. Writer Nick Tosches described listening to ancient minstrelsy songs on these formats as visiting a realm “where dead voices gather,” and you can almost sense the ghosts inside these vessels.
They’ll ferry you to a realm long gone: to Mexico City circa 1904, where the baritone voice of Rafael Herrera Robinson bellows as if born once again; to the 1908 campaign trail, where then-candidate William Howard Taft discusses the plight of Black Americans four decades after the Civil War’s end; or to 1909, when the United States Everlasting Indestructible Cylinders company dropped “Temptation Rag,” a hot little number by Fred Van Eps and Albert Benzler.
Under Seubert’s guidance, 10,000 of these cylinders have been digitized and made available for streaming and download — for free — at the archive’s online portal: there are string quartets, spirituals, musical theater and humorous recitations; Mexican corridos from 120 years ago; whistling songs, yodels, zarzuelas and minstrel music; polkas, sermons, waltzes, marches and rags.
Among the most important repositories of wax cylinder recordings in America, the archive under Seubert’s leadership has saved countless recordings from trash bins. Until the coronavirus shuttered the UCSB library, each month its archivists posted hundreds of otherwise unheard acoustic recordings from the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Seubert pulls from a drawer a priceless early 1900s cylinder, part of a collection of Mexican and Cuban recordings originally assembled before the Mexican Revolution. It’s housed among drawers containing the earliest mariachi recordings (by Jalisco group Cuarteto Coculense), the crucial guitar playing of Octaviano Yañez, Afro-Cuban group Orquesta de Pablo Valenzuela and other music that the Edison Phonograph Co. recorded in Cuba, Puerto Rico and Mexico.