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 (6 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

Hmm. I've been using HonkingDuck for years. A few years back I ripped and converted a stack of the early hillbilly stuff there to mp3s. One problem is that a lot of it was recorded in a *very* low tech way -- basically they cued up the old 78s and recorded them into a microphone. Nice if you want to preserve the low-tech aura of the originals by adding to already distorted and scratchy records with even more distortion, but hard to use for much and difficult to listen to. On the other hand, they had stuff that hasn't been easy to get -- at one point at least they had all the Sarah Baumgartner stuff, including things not on the Rounder reissue, for example.

I figured it would have disappeared. Seems like it sort of has. But thanks for the reminder to check back on it.
posted by spitbull at 7:31 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