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Transcription: [00:20:05]
[[inaudible talking]]

[00:20:11]
{SPEAKER name="Dorothy Lee"}
Good afternoon. Welcome to the Federal Cylinder Project workshop. My name is Dorothy Lee and I work for the American Folklife Center of the Library of Congress in what's called the Federal Cylinder Project; which is a project designed to preserve and catalogue and duplicate and return tape copies of cylinders of mostly American Indian Music to American Indian communities.

[00:20:37]
Umm, for those of you who are sort of unsure of what a cylinder player is, there's one sitting in the forefront of this large photograph behind me.

[00:20:48]
Singers would, as you can see these are two Omaha singers singing into a horn in 1905, the person operating the machine is a historian named Melvin Gilmore and on the end of that horn attached to that horn is a little diaphragm sort of like the little vibrating membrane in a kazoo and attached to that is a little needle and as you sing, the sound waves are amplified through that cone and recorded onto one of these things, which is a wax cylinder.

[00:21:19]
This is a late model wax cylinder from the 1930s, uh it's a six inch cylinder, these are the long playing variety

[00:21:32]
and these are the short variety these are the early ones. Um, the sound quality of these cylinders is not very good and the moment what we're trying to do is duplicate these cylinders and filter them just a little bit and um so that people can listen to them. The cylinders were recorded between around 1890 and the 1940s and they were recorded by anthropologists and folklorists and ethnomusicologists who went out to the field.

[00:22:05]
Umm they were afraid, these scholars were afraid that American Indian music was going to disappear very quickly that American Indian culture in fact was going to disappear very quickly and so they recorded almost frantically.

[00:22:17]
They-there are about 7,000 cylinders in the Library of Congress of American Indian music alone umm and this is only one of numerous collections of American Indian music on cylinder throughout the United States.

[00:22:30]
There are thousands of cylinders elsewhere. Umm, for scholars and anthropologists they were meant to be a resource, a research tool, umm sort of museum preservation of culture, but what they have turned out to be for American Indian communities especially is a kind of family album. In one sense that is their people recorded on these cylinders, umm who are-who died in the 1920s and 1930s and they're memories for a number of American Indian people.

[00:23:02]
And they also contain an enormous resource of culture um of different kinds for those communities that are trying to preserve and conserve their culture. This is the cultural conservation learning center and what we've been talking about all afternoon and what you'll be hearing for the rest of the afternoon are efforts by a number of people to preserve their culture, to hang onto and enhance and amplify their culture, and for American Indians, these particular songs that have been recorded are particularly important.

[00:23:35]
A number of communities, for example, have lost all of their native speakers so that these songs contain the only records of particular American Indian languages.

[00:23:44]
A number of other communities are trying to preserve language from the few remaining native speakers and we have with us Villiana Hyde who is at the far left uh who has been working on Luiseno culture um preserving Luiseno language and next to her is Louise DeFredo [[?]] who is Gabrieleno and Luiseno um and both of them have been working with me um in listening to some of these cylinders and trying to, to figure out what's on the cylinders um and the sorts of of what we've been trying to do essentially is elicit memories from, from Villiana and see if we can um stimulate some some more songs to come out.

[00:24:28]
I'm going to uh ask the engineer to play um a cylinder recording made in 1904 of a Luiseno peon game song and then I'm gonna ask Villiana if she would be willing to sing um a peon game song. We'll play the cylinder first.

[00:24:49]
[cylinder is played]
[[Villiana sings]]

[00:26:06]

Transcription Notes:
I was not able to add the tilde in Luiseno and Gabrieleno either by using the alt 164 or control tilde.