A treasure trove of rare sounds

Dip into the British Library's online sound archive, part of which has been made accessible to the public. You can browse through more than 23,000 items (of the 1,000,000 or so the archive holds in total), which include everything from calypso, to children's skipping songs,ballads, blues, and - magically - the sound of a storm in a valley, with a blackbird singing in the background.

Image source: Indian Games and Dances with Native Songs by Alice C. Fletcher, Project Gutenberg library.