The earliest known ‘country’ recording has been found. The singer? A Black man.

John Levin had no idea what he’d stumbled upon at first. About 10 years ago, the collector paid about $100 for a box of wax cylinders at an auction in Pennsylvania coal country. Those cylinders – the oldest commercial medium of recorded music – sat in his house for years until Levin put one of the unlabeled, decaying brown tubes onto his custom player and heard an old country song. Like 133 years old.

Levin immediately knew what he had.

“A true unicorn,” he said.

In the world of early recordings, unicorns are cylinders that are reputed to exist but that have never been found. A session with cornetist Buddy Bolden, say, or a monologue from Mark Twain. What Levin heard coming out of his player was another name on his undiscovered list, New Orleans performer Louis Vasnier. The unlabeled cylinder he’d bought contained Vasnier singing and braying his way through “Thompson’s Old Gray Mule,” a song later recorded by hillbilly masters Uncle Dave Macon and Riley Puckett.

This month, Archeophone, a specialty label devoted to restoring recordings dating back to the 19th century, released a 45-rpm record of the 1891 performance. Label co-founder Rich Martin’s research on Vasnier comes with a revelation: The oldest country recording in existence was recorded by a Black man.

“It might be the most important thing we’ve ever put out,” said Meagan Hennessey, his wife and co-producer.

That’s saying something. Archeophone, founded in 1998, is a tiny label known for its impressive discoveries. Six years ago, Martin and Hennessy released another Levin find, a song by Charles Asbury determined to be the oldest existing banjo recording. Like Vasnier, Asbury was Black.

Martin wants to revisit the complicated relationship country music has had with race. Credit and record deals have typically been hard to come by for Black musicians. It took until 2000 for the Country Music Hall of Fame to induct its first Black artist, Charley Pride, and only two others have joined him. (There are 155 members in total.)

“Black artists by and large, who were the ones who performed and recorded, get wiped out of the picture because they say, ‘Well, it’s not really country,’ ” Martin said. “So ours is partly a project of reclamation.”

Rhiannon Giddens, the musician and historian whose banjo playing opens Beyoncé’s No. 1 country-chart hit “Texas Hold ’Em,” said she wasn’t surprised by Martin’s discovery. But she’s also not a normal listener. Her research has shown that there’s often a difference between who created music and who is credited with that creation. Country music, she notes, is merely a marketing tool invented to help sell records. Early in the 20th century, recording companies created the term “race records” to compartmentalize the sound and try to attract Black listeners to buy certain songs. (Vasnier was advertised as “The only Colored comedian who can do it.”) In reality, country, blues, folk and bluegrass are intertwined in American culture and the Black experience.

“We shouldn’t have to do this at all,” Giddens said. “Like, this should have been part of the story all along. But fine, we spend the energy doing it because you see what’s happening right now in the United States, the divisions and how even a discussion of whether Beyoncé is allowed to make country music becomes a political part of a political agenda.”

Vasnier’s story fits right in with the mission of Archeophone, which Martin and Hennessey run out of their home in Champaign, Illinois. They seek to uncover and share the real history of recorded sound.

Martin relies on collectors like Levin who recognize how delicate and rare some of the cylinders can be. Levin has more than 3,000 in his California home, and he’s eventually giving them to the University of California at Santa Barbara. The sound file Martin mastered was drawn from a special player that Levin built. He sells these units for anywhere from $25,000 to $40,000, depending on the components.

“I treat these things, they’re like polar bears or the California condor,” Levin said. “If they’re not brought in from the wild, they’re basically getting destroyed. Every 10 or 20 years, they go from one private collector to another and they’re soft wax. You drop them from one half inch on a table and they shatter.”

Archeophone does more than release the music. Martin and Hennessey are committed to book-length liner notes packed with new research. Their pressings are small, typically under 1,000 copies a release, but their work has been recognized. Archeophone won a 2006 Grammy for “Lost Sounds: Blacks and the Birth of the Recording Industry, 1891-1922” and was just nominated for two for “Centennial,” a set devoted to King Oliver’s 1923 recordings. And it is on CD 3 of that box – featuring songs that influenced Oliver’s protégé, Louis Armstrong – that you’ll find Vasnier’s recording.

But Martin and Hennessey felt that highlighting the discovery was important and that the song might get lost in the four-CD set. Which is why they’ve released “Thompson’s Old Gray Mule” this month as a 45-rpm record.

Martin’s extensive liner notes draw on historical census documents and cylinder catalogues to tell the story of Vasnier and the Louisiana Phonograph Co., one of many outfits that seized on Thomas Edison’s sound-capturing invention in the late 19th century.

Louis J. Vasnier Jr. was born in 1858 and grew up in New Orleans, the son of a house carpenter, Ben, and his wife, Louise. Sometime in the 1880s, he started singing publicly. By 1891, he was recording parody sermons for the phonograph company that were advertised as “humorous” and “characteristic Negro delineations … of a dusky style of pulpit oratory that is rapidly passing away.” One of these, “Adam and Eve and de Winter Apple,” is the B-side of the Vasnier 45.

With home players not available until the late 1890s, Vasnier performances would have been heard on the wax cylinders installed in coin-operated jukeboxes. Martin’s research found that the Louisiana Phonograph Co. had the most profitable machine in the country, a player in a drugstore on the corner of Canal and Chartres streets in New Orleans that earned $1,420.80 over three months during the summer of 1891.

Martin’s research found that Vasnier’s musical performances were advertised with banjo accompaniment, but “Thompson’s Old Gray Mule,” a song written by Thomas P. Westendorf in 1884 (as “Old Thompson’s Mule”), features a piano. The song opens with Vasnier naming the title and record company before the music starts and he sings the story of the farmer’s mule. The sound will take some getting used to for anyone expecting the fidelity of modern recordings, but the singer’s voice is powerful and cuts through the technological limitations of the medium. The highlight of the song has to be the chorus, where Vasnier delivers a comic, snorting re-creation of the donkey delivering “eh-aws.”

“It’s very declamatory, very ebullient,” Giddens said. “Like, he’s clearly a performer. This is not somebody who wandered off the street and was like, ‘I’ve been hoeing the rows on my farm and I’m just singing a ditty.’ ”

But is it country?

“It’s goes back to, ‘What is a country song?’ ” she said. “The idea of country music was made up to sell records. The reason we’re talking about it today is because of the way the history has been written. So we have to talk about the fact that Vasnier was Black and that this is something that Black people played and that you have all of this segregation going on. We have to talk about it because it hasn’t been talked about, not because in of itself it is unusual that a Black man would be singing a song about an old gray mule.”