Pygmies, POWs and Philadelphians – excavating black recording pioneers in Europe

Recordings on phonograph cylinders, gramophone discs and films, with both still and moving images, featured people of African descent in Europe from the earliest years of the recording industry to immediately after the First World War (the era of acoustic recordings technology prior to the invention of the microphone).
Present in Europe for two thousand years or more, the contribution of pioneering personalities on the modern mass media has not been noticed. Recognition is overdue. Music, spoken word or dance, from all styles, categories, languages and natal lands provide a lost but rich resource. Although many artefacts may be lost forever, an effort is made to trace, describe and re-issue the surviving evidence from archives around the world.
The vast majority of the sound recordings will be made available for the first time and allows new insights in black entertainment, the prehistory of jazz, the colonial context, and African languages and cultures of the past millennium.

From Africans come recordings of African languages and folk tales, religious music on both African and European models, and recordings of the popular music of the 1920s. From African-Americans comes an aural kaleidoscope of entertainers and music from the last days of minstrelsy through ragtime and music hall artists to string bands, spirituals, and the early days of jazz in Europe, including the earliest examples of stride piano and rhythm scat singing, and some of the first records made anywhere of African-American folk music practices. Also documented is the involvement of those born in Europe of African descent in the wider culture of the African diaspora.