In those days music was recorded on wax cylinders, the precursors of the disk record. Some of these survived in collections and museums and can still be listened to today.

Read the complete article and listen to the old songs

Excerpt from the web page:

Vintage Christmas Wax: Revisited

Last year I posted a series of entries entitled "Vintage
Christmas Wax" which most folks were pretty happy about. Alas,
several of the old links have expired. Rather than have everyone
search for the active links, I decided to compile the remaining
links into one simple post. So, once again, here is a collection
of vintage wax recordings from the early 1900s through the late
1930s (my favorite continues to be Eddie Cantor). Many of these
fantastic transfers are from The Antique Christmas Lights
Museum. Others were sourced from The Cylinder Preservation &
Digitization Project, Canada's Virtual Gramaphone, the Library &
Archives Canada, The Library of Congress, The Edison National
Historic Site, and the Internet Archive. Happy Holidays!!! Some
of the files may take some time to load. NOTE: To the best of my
knowledge, these files are in the public domain. For any
restrictions on their usage, please refer to the websites
mentioned above as they may have more specific disclaimers. ...

Read the complete article and listen to the old songs

When you can't click on the songs and hear them, right-click on
one, save the target to disk and play the MP3 file from your
disk.