(1/2) The Rise and Fall of Paramount Records, Vol. 1 (1917–1932) (Third Man Records and Revenant Records) and the Bladensburg High School Video Jukebox (1959bhsmustangs.com/VideoJukebox.htm). The Paramount set calls itself a “cabinet of wonder,” and it is. You pay your money, a large, elegant wooden box arrives in the mail, and you open it. You stick a thumb drive into your computer, and one of eight hundred songs, the most recent dating to 1927—volume two will appear later this year—begins to play. You finger a set of LPs, marveling at the labels. You glance through a big paperback discographical history. You pry open a heavy, clothbound volume and begin to follow the story of how a Wisconsin chair company figured out it could make money producing cheap records for people to play on its expensive phonograph cabinets, and how, after clueless executives set about anything with a pulse, a visionary African American producer and opera follower named Mayo Williams began to move the label into what was called race music—and then you begin to page through dozens and dozens of advertisements so daring, and at times so odd, you can’t believe the music will live up to them. Such as one for Ethel Waters’s 1922 “That Da Da Strain” (“It will shake you, it will make you, really go insane,” wrote a couple of Tin Pan Alley tunesmiths, eager to get a dance-craze tune on the market even if they had to name it after a European art movement): “The Only Genuine Colored Record. Others Are Only Passing for Colored.” The price is $400, which, compared to the recent Clash Sound System ($249.99 list) or Bob Dylan’s Complete Album Collection, Vol. 1 ($279.98), is not so much a bargain as a gift.

But there are all kinds of wonder cabinets, and the Bladensburg High School Video Jukebox—from the class of ’59, culled from YouTube, also featuring just about eight hundred songs, not counting full-length oldies shows and countless more embedded videos—is free. You click the button that lets each selection “drop the coin right into the slot,” as Chuck Berry put it, and then you have no idea where to begin, so you hit, say, Dion and the Belmonts’ “I Wonder Why—THEN”—a 1958 TV clip with dance moves so complex they might have taken months to work out—and then the same song “NOW,” from an oldies show, Dion and, let’s say, two of the Belmonts, with hats or scarves hiding their bald heads, and singing with a soul, a yearning, an accumulation of decades of disappointments that the kids three decades before never would have believed, and with vocal dynamics you...