Cylinder Preservation and Digitization Project

While looking for stuff of interest on Sophie Tucker I found the most amazing thing: The Cylinder Preservation and Digitization Project at UC Santa Barbara. They have MP3s/bit-wavs available of old cylinder recordings of music, humor, speeches, dialect songs (warning: they're offensive), hymns, and many other things I haven't even looked at yet. If you like music from the teens and twenties this is a great site for lesser known recordings that may not have made it to CD. There's also information on the history of cylinder recordings, their project specifically, as well as "cylinder radio" which plays recordings from their collection.

I highly recommend glancing at their links page which has a list of web-accessible early recording collections at other libraries and universities.

A few sites of interest:
History of the Edison Cylinder Phonograph
Ethnographic Wax Cylinders at the British Library Sound Archive
Library of Congress American Memory Project