Suddenly showing "hello" screen

This question is about my old 4s which has not been active via carrier or even wifi in quite a long time. I mainly use it as a plug and play device because it's got a ton of music on it. Used it sometime last week and then the other day I plugged it in to charge it before I used it. When I hit the home button instead of my unlock screen it was showing the "hello" screen and a msg to turn off airplane mode (which is where it stays) to activate it! All I've done is tried a hard reset, and right before the hello screen popped up I could see my lock screen backround for a split second so I think I'm still in there somewhere! This phone has never been used with iTunes and to my knowledge iCloud only has my new iPhone backup in it. I've been using it for music for over a year! I have no idea why this would have happened since the phone hasn't been touched since i last used it. Is there any way to get past this and access my content? There's nothing of huge importance on there but it's got a ton of music and is really convenient. Farthest I can get is to where it tells me to connect to wifi or plug into iTunes, but I don't have wifi here and I don't use iTunes because it's a space sucking, memory eating monster that's primarily designed to make sure that you can only use what Apple says you can use ...

Sorry for rambling.... help?