Sound of the 1800 and 1900's

I listened to Captain Pearl R. Nye's "Life on the Ohio and Erie Canal." The track I listened to was called "Take a Trip on the Canal if You Want to Have Fun: part 1." I think to get the full expereince of the old recording technology I would need to heard a song with some instrumentals in it. Finding a song that had some instrumentals was quite a task, so settled for this song which is all vocals. It started off with just with a bunch of static playing. I was not sure if it was working but found that all of the songs start this way. I noticed that the song has pretty poor quality being that the static goes throughout the entire song. The one thing I think is interesting is that there is no retakes. When Captain Nye makes a mistake he pauses and then starts singing again. In todays music you obviously would not have that. I would imagine this was something that was common when they were using this old recording system.