Internet Research Sites
Basinstreet.com
Dr. Karl Koenig, Ph.D, provides incredibly detailed research on the evolution of early jazz in New Orleans, and the musicians who developed it and carried the sounds throughout the United States. Discusses persons, places, styles, and geographical settings. The site doesn’t discriminate between famous New Orleans jazz musicians and obscure ones. Styles of music that fed into the evolution of jazz, such as blues and ragtime, are discussed. A ton of material. Not for the faint-hearted!
Discography of American Historical Recordings
DAHR is a database of over 400,000 master recordings made by American record companies during the 78 rpm era. It includes audio streaming of more than 70,000 recordings, available free of charge.
Doctor Jazz
Apparently, this website hasn’t been updated since 2022. No matter. It remains an incredible source of information on Jelly Roll Morton, his associates, and his times. Sometimes hard to navigate because of the layout and amount of material, but definitely worth your time and patience. A great starting point for research on Morton.
Jazz Age 1920s
One of the handful of websites devoted to real research about jazz and pop singers and musicians of the 1920s. Some great articles! The “Jazz Age pages feature accurate, original-research bios of some of the lesser known personalities of the era. Numerous rare, high-quality photographs and audio files are distributed throughout the website.”
Old Time Blues
This is a website “founded in 2015 by writer and folklore collector R.C. Montgomery with a mission to preserve and chronicle the music within the grooves of decades old 78 RPM records, and bring their sounds to the ears of a new generation of listener, as a sort of digital archive ….” The site is more than a digital resource of old blues and blue-related sounds, however. There is well-grounded historical research to document the posted 78s.
RagPiano.com
Bill Edwards is a ragtime pianist who has been performing and recording–and even writing his own ragtime pieces–for over forty years. His website has outgrown the boundaries of pure ragtime, and more properly is described as a detailed examination of the music, composers, and performers of the “ragtime era”. The amount of time and research that have gone into this site is phenomenal!
Songobiography–A Musical Memoir
Elijah Wald is a respected music historian, plus Blues and folk music performer. He has published acclaimed books on subjects ranging from Robert Johnson to Bob Dylan to “Narco-Corridos”. He has even done an instructional DVD on playing guitar a la the great Bahamian musician, Joseph Spence. A part of Wald’s website is “Songobiography”, where he researches the histories of a variety of old songs. If, for instance, you want to know how Mamie Desdunes lost her two fingers check out Mamie’s Blues. Want to learn the story behind Mississippi John Hurt’s Louis Collins, check out “Songobiography”. Wald does real research.
Elijah Wald website: https://www.elijahwald.com
Songobiography: https://www.elijahwald.com/songblog/
Wirz’ American Music
Stefan Wirz has bundled into his website an incredible amount of information about old-time music, mainly Blues, that can help navigate an artist’s life and record releases, both original 78s and later LP and CD reissues. It’s both a remarkable undertaking and a wonderfully helpful biographical/discographical guide. Explains Wirz, “this is a very subjective choice of musicians whose music I like to listen to. As you will find out, it’s a wild mixture of black and white, acoustic and electric, rural and urban, silent and loud, female and male, guitar- and piano-oriented, conservative and progressive music, partially of european, mostly of US-american origin. The only selection criterion was my personal taste, so all I have to offer as a principle of classification is the alphabet.”
