1899

02/05/18 • 0 min

MP3 direct download | Itunes | Mixcloud | Feedburner (RSS) | MP3 pack "There probably has never been a sweeter, more naturally musical baritone voice than his... ...Arthur Collins managed invariably to get into the wax the impression of a warm, lovable personality. The unctuous sound of his chuckles in dialect work is unfailingly charming. His negro [sic] heroes usually were in hard luck, but they bore up bravely and saw the funny side of their own misfortunes." - Jim Walsh, in the December 1942 issue of "Hobbies" "No, I'm not the first king of controversy / I am the worst thing since Elvis Presley / To do black music so selfishly / And use it to get myself wealthy / (Heyyy!) There's a concept that works" - Eminem, Without Me The aim of this site is to provide an audio history of sound. The history of the site itself can be traced back to the day I decided to pick a song for every year using rateyourmusic and archive.org, and realised that the first song I found predated the 20th century. It was 'Hello, Ma Baby!', familiar to most people as sung by Michigan J. Frog in the 1955 cartoon One Froggy Evening, but here performed by someone called Arthur Collins, who, according to Wikipedia was the biggest selling recording artist of the 1900s. Who was this man? What sort of music was this? What was this entire era of music, long before the start of the Jazz age and why had I heard nothing about it in three decades of listening? The answers to these questions stretched until they had to be hemmed in by the site in front of you. As described last time, Arthur Collins was "King of the Coon Songs" - then "King of the Ragtime Singers" when people finally started feeling embarrassed about using appalling racial epithets as genre names. Already I'm sure you can see why people treat him as an embarrassment and nothing else, but let's add to that another couple of things; his main singing voice was a racist impression, he used it to propagate lazy and offensive stereotypes by singing songs written by white people to cash in on a boom in black music, and the black musicians he was replacing couldn't get anywhere near a recording contract. It's no wonder that this once-huge star has yet to see a single release on LP or CD. But, as so often in these days, you have to work with what you have. Collins is far from the worst of his kind - unlike with Billy Golden his impression of a black man never seems to be deliberately condescending or mocking, and in the passion he put into his performances always comes across as a genuine enjoyment of the form. Arthur Collins was born in 1864 in Philadelphia, the oldest of ten children. By 17 he was singing at church festivals and concerts, and he soon joined a number of unsuccessful touring companies, and sang in a number of summer operas, eventually giving up showbusiness to study bookkeeping, and later work for a cigar company when he got married in 1895. It wasn't long after that that he received a letter from Edison's National Phonograph Company inviting him to make a trial recording on May 16th, 1898. It was evidently a success. Between 1898 and 1912 he made at least 227 other solo cylinders, 50 Berlinner discs and many collaborations as part of groups like The Peerless Quartet and duets, most usually with Byron G Harlan. Both large, burly tenors, they were once introduced by Billy Murray as the 'Half-Ton Duo.' Collins most popular song was "The Preacher and the Bear," written by George Fairman, and first recorded in 1905. The song was one of the all-time best-sellers, and Collins would go on to record it for virtually every record company in existence. Though his solo career soon seemed to fade away, this recording continued being pressed up until the 1940s. We will be seeing a fair amount of both his solo work and that with Byron G Harlan, including "That Funny Jas Band From Dixieland" - the first ever record to mention Jazz. A serious accident with a trapdoor during one of Edison's 'Test Tone' demonstrations (where a singer would mime to a diamond disc recording before the curtain was raised to reveal the gramophone playing) led to him being out of action for a while, and after a single tentative attempt to get back into the game, he retired to Florida, dying on August 3, 1933, sitting on a bench under his beloved orange trees, with his head on his wife's shoulder. Joe Howard and Ida Emerson were a married couple, and one of the most successful writing partnerships on Tin Pan Alley. Joe had a difficult early life, being raised in gang-era New York, with no mother and a violent alcoholic for a father. He ...

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1898

MP3 direct download | Itunes | Mixcloud | Feedburner (RSS) | MP3 pack "The country is awakening to the real harm these "coon songs" and "rag-time" are doing... It is an evil music that has crept into the homes and hearts of our American people regardless of race, and must be wiped out as other bad and dangerous epidemics have been exterminated. A person once innoculated with the ragtime-fever is like one addicted to strong drink! Ragtime is sycopation gone mad, and its victims, in my opinion, can only be treated successfully like the dog with rabies, namely, with a dose of lead." - Edward Baxter Perry We're finally getting to the point where music is the story rather than the technology used to record it, so that should be a cause for celebration. In reality, though, it's so damn complicated. There is certainly a change in the air, but not only is it unclear what it should be called in 1898, it's not even going to become remotely clear at any point in the future, not until historians start to discuss it in the 1970s, under the general heading of "early days of ragtime." Blues and projo-jazz are for the moment out of the picture. So here's an overview of what we have to deal with in 1898. Minstrel shows The dominant cultural form of 19th Century America, minstrel shows are naturally mainly remembered today for being deeply offensive towards black people. A product of first a slave-owning society, then a society nostalgic for the days of slavery, minstrel shows featured white performers performing as hideous blackface caricatures, who were by turns stupid, lazy, superstitious, and happy-go-lucky. None of this is remotely excusable nowadays, and it would be tempting to consign it all to a dark cupboard, if it weren't for the fact that it also contains most of the popular music that lives on to this day - "Dixie", "Turkey in the Straw", "Camptown Races", "Old Folks at Home" ("Suwanee River") and "My Old Kentucky Home" - the last three of these written by the "father of American music" Stephen Foster. Separating baby and bathwater at this stage is nigh-on impossible - these songs would continue as standards right through to the jazz age, and a ragged version of "Old Folks at Home" appears in this mix. Vaudeville By the end of the 19th century, minstrelry had morphed into Vaudeville. Instead of a highly structured routine, vaudeville had a loose collection of acts - singers and comedians of course, but also dancers, trained animals, magicians, strongmen, female and male impersonators, acrobats, one-act plays , athletes, and celebrity appearances. Singers in blackface were still common, and the musical repertoire has so much in the way of overlap that it may as well be considered the same thing. These days we tend to think of the term "Vaudeville" as referring primarily to the comedy element of the show, but the musical side was if anything more of a draw. Cakewalk The story goes like this - slaves would have dancing competitions where, dressed up in formal wear, they would perform a free-flowing mockery of white society dancing, the best performer winning a cake. How much of this is true, and how much a later invention is a matter of (sometimes furious) debate - but in any case the name stuck, first for a dance, and then for the variety of music that could accompany it. This style of music was also known as... Two-step The musical innovation of cakewalk / two-step was a layer of syncopation slotted into the marching music of the time - an extra level of rhythm playing off and around the main beat. This wasn't a new invention - examples can be found in all kinds of composers - but the bringing of both syncopation and (quite likely African) polyrhythms to the forefront of the music was a fundamental change in focus from the often slow, melody-driven music that dominated the Victorian age. However, these were still primarily considered to be dances rather than musical genres. Ragtime From the early 1890s references start to appear to the "ragging" of music (adding syncopation to existing songs in order to make them suitable for dances) and towards the end of the decade sheet music began to appear with "ragtime" in the title. Initially this seems to have referred only to the syncopated rhythm, but from 1898 onward the name seems to have stuck - only after which a host of other signifiers started to be drawn into the definition, including the "smears" added by soloists - Arthur Pryor's trombone solos in Sousa's band are a great example of t...

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1900

MP3 direct download | Itunes | Mixcloud | Feedburner (RSS) | MP3 pack Is this a new century? Difficult to get agreement on this one, but it's certainly a new decade, and changes are very much in the air; changes that haven't quite filtered through entirely to the mix you're about to hear, but which are about to turn everything upside-down - the beginning of a "music business" or "music industry" in terms which are much more familiar to us than anything seem so far - all due to the kind of duplicitous shenanigans which will also seem typical of the business in the 20th century. The story of the technology so far was a friendly-ish war of two competing standards - Edison's wax cylinders (still the dominant form) and Emile Berliner's flat discs. Born in Hanover in 1851, Berliner emigrated to the USA in 1870 to avoid being drafted for the Franco-Prussian War, and found work for the sometime Edison-affiliated Bell Telephone after inventing an improved telephone transmitter. In the 1880s he developed his disc recording system, which produced playable discs by (probably even earlier than) 1889, when he went into business with Kammer & Reinhardt, a German toy-maker with whom he made 5-inch hard rubber discs, though this venture did not last long. In the early 1890s, Berliner tried to start his first companies - The American Gramophone Company, which failed before issuing a single machine or disc, and the United States Gramophone Company in 1894, which had a slightly more success selling machines and 7-inch hard rubber discs. These were replaced in 1895 by shellac discs, which remained the standard until the 1930s. Through the next few years, production slowly increased, until on September 29th, 1897, his mastering plant in Washington, D.C., burned down, destroying his record manufacturing equipment and masters of recordings. This wasn't the end, though - Berliner managed to resume production within a few months, but in 1898 he was beset by further problems as various companies began to copy his invention. He had already shut down two of these operations when he found that one of his agents, Frank Seaman in New York, was manufacturing identical copies of his Gramophone labelled the 'Zonophone'. He immediately cut off all supplies to the city, but was hit by a lawsuit for breach of contract from Seaman, and in 1900 an injunction was granted, ceasing all operations for the United States Gramophone Company. All attempts to have this injunction lifted were fruitless, and Berlinner eventually quit the business entirely, transferring his assets to Eldridge Johnson, who then launched the hugely successful Victor Talking Machine Company. In 1900, the Gramophone's patent being unenforced, recorded sound is effectively in modern terms "open source" - anyone could open a record company, and many did. In the coming years we will hear recordings from all manner of labels around the world, and when we get to the 1910s the hegemony of the Edison Cylinder and the conservatism it brings with it will be truly cracked open. There are also another couple of interesting developments taking place in 1900. To open the mix we have a recording of Emperor Franz Josef of Austria made on Valdemar Poulsen's telegraphone, a device which recorded sound magnetically on a thin piece of steel wire. The sound produced is remarkably different to the cylinder and disc recordings, and despite being neglected for nearly half a century, magnetic recording will become vitally important after the second world war. Another item to note here is the excerpt from a 1900 production of Cyrano de Bergerac, which is the earliest bit of film dialogue I'm able to use. But more about that soon. Tracks Emperor Franz Joseph - Oldest Magnetic Recording On Poulsen 0:00 Edison Concert Band - Champaign Gallop 0:09 Film Soundtrack - Cyrano de Bergerac 2:11 Edison Grand Concert Band - Mr. Thomas Cat 2:36 Arthur W Haddon - Brown Wax Home Recording Of Talking 4:41 Vess L Ossman - A Coon Band Contest 5:03 Sousa's Band - A Coon Band Contest 7:18 American Quartet - A Night Trip To Buffalo (Excerpt 1) 9:05 Arthur Collins - The Mick Who Threw The Brick 9:26 American Quartet - A Night Trip To Buffalo (Excerpt 2) 10:31 Charles P. Lowe - Brilliant Gallop 11.08 Len Spencer & George Schweinfest - The Arkansaw Traveler (Excerpt 1) 13:15 Will F. Denny - Doing His Duty-Ooty 13:27 Len Spencer & George Schweinfest - The Arkansaw Traveler (Excerpt 2) 15:41 George Schweinfest - Robin Adair 15:54 Len Spencer & George Schweinfest - The Arkansaw Traveler (Excerpt 3) 17:12 Charles D' Almai...