Radio Podcast #8 — 1900

02/15/21 • 0 min

A journey through the history of recorded sound with James and Sean. This time we reach the 1900s, and hear Arthur Collins, Vess L Ossman, Arthur Pryor, and other stars of the late Victorian era. We even have a recording of Franz Joseph I of Austria & Hungary, made on a piece of wire. Join us as we travel back in time to a forgotten land of sound.

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1932

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Half a decade ago the United States was in the midst of an explosion in recorded music on a scale not heard before or since. The inception of that revolution - a change in recording technology allowing studios and record labels to spring up everywhere and anywhere - took a couple of years to filter through. In the same way, the death of that same revolution, the collapse of the recording industry at the start of the great depression and the closure of those studios and labels, also took a couple of years to fully filter through. Now we have arrived at 1932 and it's all over. The wide variety of roots music, whether labelled country, blues or folk, is no longer being recorded, with the exception of a few of the biggest stars. Likewise, recorded jazz is now the preserve of the biggest bandleaders, or as backing groups for the resurgent movie business.

So why then is this mix one of the longest so far? The answer comes down more to the process of putting the thing together than the qualities of the year itself. With less to choose from in the USA, my attentions shifted to the rest of the world, and it turned out that there was plenty out there. We start out on our trip in the Caribbean, where Calypso and other forms of music are now being recorded professionally and regularly for the first time, thanks to people like record-shop owner and entrepreneur Eduardo Sa Gomes in Trinidad.

Then we have a few tangos, first of course from South America, but then also from Eastern Europe, where artists like Jean Moscopol were blending this new music with traditional local flavours like klezmer and rembetika.

The UK has a greater representation in this mix than in any since 1907 (or maybe even 1888) - while the economic situation was nearly as bad here as in the USA, a couple of powerful record companies as well as the BBC ensured that music recording was actually experiencing something of a boom. The UK records here - including the marvelously sinister version of "The Teddy Bear's Picnic" and Noel Coward's "Mad Dogs and Englishmen" - are easily a match for anything made in the 20s.

All of this also seems to be the case for France, for whom 1932 seems to be a key year on compilations. Next we explore Arabic music, from Tunisia to Iraq, and India, where truly otherworldly traditional musics are being properly recorded for the first time.

It's always been my intention to show the whole world in these mixes, but this last half-decade the music from the USA has understandably overwhelmed in its quality and variety. Let's take this brief lull to appreciate that there was a whole world out there, much of it telling stories about the 1930s which are lost in the great narratives of the depression and the buildup to the next war.

Tracklist

0:00:30 The Philadelphia Orchestra, Conducted By Leopold Stokowski - Schoenberg's Gurre-Lieder (Excerpt) 0:03:34 The Three Keys - Jig Time William Butler Yeats - Introduction (Excerpt) 0:05:52 Cab Calloway And His Orchestra - Reefer Man Jewel Robbery (Excerpt) 0:08:50 The Mills Brothers - Old Man Of The Mountain John Barrymore - Clip from A Bill of Divorcement 0:10:38 Duke Ellington And His Famous Orchestra - It Don't Mean A Thing (If It Ain't Got That Swing) 0:12:28

Next Episode

1933

One of the most successful theatrical productions of the 1890s was a touring spectacle called "The South Before The War." Here is how it was originally advertised.

Those of use who knew the “Souf befo’ the Wah,” as the children of Ham put it, and who know what plantation life really was [like] before our great internecine struggle, and such of us as have not had our opinions colored by the Harriet Beecher Stowe class of literature, but can recall the happy days and pleasant nights spent by the darkies in the cotton fields and cane brakes, will have an opportunity of seeing and living over again those happy times at–theatre by witnessing the inimitable performance given by Whallen and Martell’s big South before the War company.

From our lofty vantage point it's easy to be appalled by this description. With our 130 years' worth of hindsight, the debate is no longer about whether this show was right or wrong, but about exactly what mix of self-delusion and cynical self-interest went into it. In truth, the main difference between then and now is that we have learned not to say the quiet part loud. Nostalgia has its claws in us more than ever, from strictly-playlisted hits radio stations, to the obsessive sequeling and rebooting of movies and TV series, to politicians telling us they will make our countries "great again" - a phrase which is itself recycled from recentish history

Nostalgia is, almost by definition, a warm, comfortable thing. Life can be very stressful, and if people want to escape that by diving into a nostalgic pool filled with their best memories, then who can really blame them? It would seem pretty churlish to insist on shocking them out of their reverie with a difficult truth, they are surely in no mood to be lectured. The problem comes when this occasional retreat becomes an addiction, when it spills out of our personal lives into the world in general, and taints the way we see not just the past, but the present.

So far these mixes have concerned years which are generally beyond all living memory, and in 1933 this seems to have shifted profoundly. From a modern vantage point we are now in the lead-up to the Second World War, a time which still looms very large in British culture, and it is becoming difficult to find any kind of popular history which covers the time from any other perspective. In the real USA of 1933, the nostalgia industry is creating itself. These may be the darkest days of the great depression, but they are also the heady heights of the golden age of Hollywood. According to the artefacts I've gathered here, this was a nation as addicted to escapism as any other. The style and glamour of films and music this year are so sparklingly positive that at a glance there is no depression, no looming war, but a world in the full bloom of peace and prosperity.

Under the surface, though, there is a certain sadness lurking. This hedonistic escapism leaves open the question of - from what exactly are they escaping? Fred & Ginger's relationship to music is an all-in, devotional ritual. Tex Ritter sings a tribute to whisky, Bessie Smith prefers a pigfoot and a bottle of beer. Al Bowlly compares his love to a decadent, unhealthy indulgence. For Ethel Waters, her disappointing love-life presents itself as stormy weather to be endured. Everywhere people are jumping head-first into pleasures and obsessions, and it's left to a handful of country and blues singers to deal with the troubles of the world as it is now. Jimmy Rodgers is in the depths of despair, and Lightnin' Washington is, literally, a prisoner working on a chain gang in Texas, during the dust bowl.

So here's a year-long chunk of the past, then, a place whic...