In 1992, a recording engineer at the Library of Congress was cataloguing a collection of wax cylinders when she discovered something extraordinary: a field recording made in 1900 of a Passamaquoddy man from Maine singing traditional songs. The cylinder was fragile, decayed, nearly unplayable. But with painstaking effort, the audio was extracted and digitised. A voice that had been silent for nearly a century spoke again.
That story captures something essential about the relationship between music, memory, and technology. But the deeper story of musical preservation in the digital age is inseparable from the history of Black music, and from the history of who has had the power to decide which voices are worth saving.
What We Stand to Lose And What Was Never Saved
Music is among the most ephemeral of art forms. A painting can hang on a wall for five hundred years. A cathedral can stand for a thousand. But music exists in time, it happens, and then it is over, leaving nothing behind unless someone captured it.
The twentieth century was, by historical standards, remarkably good at capturing music. But the archive it built was not neutral. The commercial recording industry focused its resources on music it expected to sell, which meant music it expected white audiences to buy. The field recording tradition, ethnomusicologists venturing into communities to document “folk” and “world” music, often captured Black and indigenous music with more interest in its academic novelty than its cultural context, and stored that music in institutions controlled by white scholars and universities far from the communities that made it.
The blues singers who recorded for Paramount, Vocalion, and other “race record” labels in the 1920s and 1930s did so in conditions that stripped them of ownership and credit. Many of those recordings are now historic documents, the only surviving evidence of those musicians’ genius. But the chain of custody from recording to archive often ran through systems that benefited from Black creativity while giving little back to Black communities.
This is the backdrop against which digital preservation must be understood: not simply a technical challenge of saving old recordings, but a political and cultural question about whose voices history has chosen to keep.
The Blues, Jazz, and the Archive They Built
Despite the systemic inequities in how Black music was documented, the archival record of African American musical traditions is, in some areas, extraordinary, because Black communities fought to create it.
The music of the Great Migration, the movement of millions of Black Americans from the rural South to Northern cities between the 1910s and 1970s, produced jazz, blues, gospel, soul, R&B, and eventually rock and roll and hip-hop. This music was the soundtrack of one of the most significant demographic and cultural shifts in American history. Institutions like the Smithsonian’s Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage, the Hogan Jazz Archive at Tulane, and the Blues Foundation have worked to preserve elements of this record.
But the most important preservation work has often been done within Black communities themselves: churches that maintained gospel traditions across generations; jazz clubs where musicians passed techniques directly from player to player; barbershops and beauty salons where records were played and musical knowledge circulated. This informal, communal preservation is invisible in most institutional archives, but it is what has kept Black musical traditions alive.
Alan Lomax, Complicated Legacy
No discussion of Black music preservation can ignore the figure of Alan Lomax, the white American folklorist who, from the 1930s onward, made thousands of field recordings of Black musicians across the American South and Caribbean, including sessions with Leadbelly, Muddy Waters, and Jelly Roll Morton for the Library of Congress.
Lomax’s recordings are invaluable. Without them, we would have no audio record of many musicians whose influence on American music is incalculable. But the ethical dimensions of his work are contested. He operated from a position of institutional authority and cultural distance. He made decisions about who to record, how to frame what he recorded, and how to archive and interpret it that reflected his own perspective, not the perspectives of the communities he documented. Royalties and credits were not always fairly distributed. The power dynamic between the white archivist and the Black musicians was rarely acknowledged.
These tensions matter because they are not simply historical. They recur wherever preservation work happens at a distance from the communities being preserved. Digital archives do not automatically correct these power imbalances, they can replicate them at scale.
Hip-Hop and the Self-Archiving Tradition
Black music communities have always understood the importance of preserving their own history, even when institutions did not. Hip-hop offers perhaps the most vivid recent example of this instinct.
From its earliest days in the South Bronx, hip-hop created its own archival practices. DJs preserved records that mainstream stores had deleted. Breakdancers filmed their sessions on VHS tapes that circulated in communities for years before the internet existed. Graffiti writers photographed murals before they were buffed. Zines and mix tapes documented scenes that music journalism ignored.
The Cornell Hip Hop Collection, now holding over 10,000 items, began because hip-hop scholars and community members lobbied for institutional recognition of the archive that communities had already built. The Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture dedicates significant space to hip-hop history, including DJ equipment, album art, and oral history recordings. These institutions are essential, but they are possible because hip-hop communities first understood their own history as worth saving.
Digital Resurrection: Power and Risk
Preservation shades into something more contested when it moves from archive to performance. The ability to reconstruct voices using AI has created new possibilities for bringing deceased Black artists into the present, possibilities that carry both genuine value and serious risks.
The 2012 “hologram” of Tupac Shakur at Coachella sparked a debate that has only intensified. Since then, digital reconstructions of deceased Black artists, Tupac again in various projects, Notorious B.I.G., Aaliyah, Nipsey Hussle, have been proposed, developed, or used in ways that raise profound questions about consent, cultural ownership, and commercial exploitation.
In 2023, when Kendrick Lamar’s The Heart Part 5 used deepfake technology to morph Lamar’s face into the faces of several prominent Black men, it was a deliberate artistic statement, the artist maintaining control of the technology and using it to make a point about identity, accountability, and the Black male gaze. The contrast with a record label or technology company generating posthumous performances of deceased Black artists without meaningful consent from estates or communities is stark.
The question is not whether AI should be used in relation to Black artistic legacy, it is who controls that use, and who benefits. When the family of a deceased artist partners with technology to complete an unfinished work, that is one thing. When a corporation generates new “content” using a dead artist’s likeness to drive platform engagement, that is another.
Community Voice and Repatriation
Some of the most important work in musical preservation is happening not in corporate archives but in communities working to reclaim their own sonic heritage. The African American community’s relationship with its musical archive involves not just preservation but repatriation, recovering recordings, royalties, and cultural authority that were taken without consent.
Digital tools are making this possible in new ways. Projects that allow communities to annotate their own recordings, adding cultural context, correcting ethnographic misinterpretations, reconnecting sounds with the communities that made them, represent a fundamentally different model of preservation than the traditional archive. They treat communities as archivists of their own history, not just subjects of someone else’s documentation.
Passing the Torch
Ultimately, preservation is not just about technology, it is about intention, community, and power. The grandmother who teaches her grandchildren the spirituals she learned from her own grandmother is doing preservation work. The DJ who digs in crates for forgotten funk singles is doing preservation work. The oral historian who records the stories of aging musicians before they are lost is doing preservation work.
Technology gives us better tools to capture, store, and share music across time. But the decision about which voices are worth remembering, and who gets to make that decision, is a fundamentally human and political question. In the digital age, with its enormous capacity for both preservation and erasure, Black musical heritage deserves not just to be stored, but to be understood, returned to its communities, and allowed to speak on its own terms.
The past is not silent. It is waiting to be heard, if we choose to listen.
The law will catch up, eventually. In the meantime, the music keeps playing, and the rules are being written in the air.
