#autry center

[scoutregalia]

The Autry Center

A graphically written Emancipation Proclamation

Crazy mineral prospecting map

In the many years we've lived in Los Angeles, we've never been to the Autry Center in Griffith Park.  On the Smithsonian Museum Day this year, we finally checked it out.  A real treat with lots of great work from the Southwest and well curated rotating exhibits. Highly recommend it!

[dinosaurdiscs]

Images from "Spanish Songs of Old California", part of a fascinating collection of folk music scholarship by Charles Lummis of Mexican and Spanish musicians in California around the turn of the 20th Century.

The collection is held at the Braun Research Library of the Autry Center of the American West. It holds more than 900 wax cylinder recordings, mostly of Mexican and Native American musicians, but (curiously) extending to some rare operatic recordings taken by Gianni Bettini. 

Audio preservation work has been ongoing since aluminum transcriptions were taken by Yale University in the 1930s, but the most recent digital transfers were done by members of the California Antique Phonograph Society. 12 of these digital transfers can be heard on the "Spanish Songs..." page, and a little more context about this process is available in a 2010 blog post titled "Sounds from a Technological May-December Romance" (love this image).

Finding this collection was exciting for me for two reasons. First and foremost, that this collection, and these recordings exist, but also, it's surprising, encouraging and kind of heartwarming to see this kind of collaboration between two quite different 'cultural heritage organizations' (a research library and collectors' society).