NRR Project: “The Churkendoose”
Composed by Alec Wilder; lyrics by Ben Ross Berenberg
Performed by Ray Bolger
Recorded 1947
An amusing and sweet children’s record I’d never heard of. Read Holly Van Leuven’s essay on it at the National Recording Registry.
The National Recording Registry Project tracks one writer’s expedition through all the recordings in the National Recording Registry in chronological order. Next time: Four Saints in Three Acts.”
NRR Project: “Call It Stormy Monday (But Tuesday’s Just
as Bad)”
Composed by T-Bone Walker
Performed by T-Bone Walker, Lloyd C. Glenn, Bumps Myers,
Teddy Buckner, Arthur Edwards, Oscar Lee Bradley
Recorded Sept. 14, 1947
2:25
T-Bone Walker was a phenomenon. Read Brian Bader’s essay on him at the National Recording Registry.
He was not the first to use the electric guitar. That honor goes to Chicagoan George Barnes, who played one his brother invented in 1931, when he was only 10 years old. Five years later, Walker was playing one in L.A. Oddly, he started off in the jazz scene there as a singer and dancer. By 1940, he was recording on electric guitar with his own small combos.
Composed and performed by himself, “Stormy Monday” is a blues standard. Walker’s cool, precise approach would influence immensely B.B. King and others.
The National Recording Registry Project tracks one writer’s expedition through all the recordings in the National Recording Registry in chronological order. Next time: “The Churkendoose.”
NRR Project: “Blue Moon of Kentucky”
Composed by Bill Monroe
Performed by Bill Monroe and his Blue Grass Boys
Recorded 1947
2:06
First, read Richard D. Smith’s essay and Ricky Skaggs’ essayat the National Recording Registry. They are enthusiastic and comprehensive.
I can only approach this musical giant with awe. I mean, the guy invented bluegrass. Who else has birthed a genre?
Bill Monroe (1911-1996) got the mandolin because he was the youngest, and it was the least-valued instrument in the house. He quickly became a master of it, and began to create his own brand of music – based in old-time “hillbilly music” but fusing the best elements of blues and folk as well, melding into a new, soulful and expressive sound that proved incredibly popular.
By 1939, he was appearing on the Grand Ole Opry radio show regularly. He had a national platform for the performance of his unique craft. Bluegrass could be break-neck fast, or in this case heart-breakingly slow; it featured intertwining vocal harmonies, and bravura soloing. His enthusiastic, deeply felt intensity translated into the music and vitalized it, fascinating a generation on the radio. Soon aspiring groups in the same genre began to proliferate, creating bluegrass for further, ever-expanding mutations, fusing with jazz, avant-garde, and jam genres.
Monroe became a living legend. At least two dozen prominent bluegrass performers did time with Bill, in one way or another. His influence is still pervasive.
“Blue Moon of Kentucky” is charmingly simple, instantly memorable. In 3/4time it swings gently, meanwhile sending out a sad and forlorn “high lonesome” sound that is essential to the genre. It’s a lover’s lament, and states its case plainly. Love is gone, and the singer appeals to the heavens. The End. Its heartfelt sincerity sells it. This elemental song became a hit for Elvis Presley. Monroe re-recorded it afterwards in order to break into a similar 4/4 time passage a la Elvis. It remains his greatest achievement.
The National Recording Registry Project tracks one writer’s expedition through all the recordings in the National Recording Registry in chronological order. Next time: “Call It Stormy Monday.”
NRR Project: Mass in B-minor
Composed by Johann Sebastian Bach
Performed by Robert Shaw and the Robert Shaw Chorale
Recorded 1947
2 hours, 12 min.
This enormous work is a landmark in Western music, and Robert Shaw’s direction of this recording is rightly regarded as a landmark as well. Shaw’s comprehension of the text and his ability to evoke a vital and energized performance from any given ensemble is unparalleled.
First, read Nick Jones’ excellent essay on this piece at the National Recording Registry here. My comments can only reiterate his observations.
This was the ultimate expression of Bach’s prowess in vocal music, the summation of everything he had learned during his career. Compiled partly from previous compositions, this immense 27-movement piece runs for over two hours (its first use in an actual mass, in 2025, ran over three hours). Oddly for Bach, a staunch Lutheran, this work is in the form of a Catholic Mass.
The composer completed it near the end of his life, in the period 1748-1749, and never heard the piece performed in its entirety. In fact, the first complete performance did not take place until 1859. There were recordings of the Mass before Shaw’s, but his is considered definitive. Shaw studied the score, imposed its original instrumentation (previous incarnations were over-orchestrated) and stuck strictly to an orthodox interpretation of it. The result was issued as a 17-disc 78 r.p.m. record set.
Bach alternates large choral set-pieces with smaller solos, ensembles, and orchestral passages. To those with the time to listen to it in its entirety, it’s an out-of-body experience. Bach distills his religious experience into musical terms, and the soaring vocal lines transport the listener to a heavenly space. It feels like Bach is expressing through his music his view on God, life, reality, and everything.
The National Recording Registry Project tracks one writer’s expedition through all the recordings in the National Recording Registry in chronological order. Next time: Bill Monroe performs “Blue Moon of Kentucky.”
NRR Project: “Sinews of Peace” (aka “Iron Curtain”)
speech
Written and delivered by Winston Churchill
Recorded March 6, 1946
46 min.
This speech marks the beginning of the Cold War between the Soviet Union and America and its allies.
World War II was not yet over a year when this speech was made. The United States, Britain, France, and the Soviet Union had formed a “Grand Alliance” to defeat Hitler’s Germany. Yet almost as soon as peace was declared, the USSR began to expand its sphere of influence, imposing political control on those territories it took over in the final months of fighting. Poland, Germany, Hungary, Yugoslavia, Romania, Bulgaria, Albania, and Czechoslovakia were all targeted. Russia had fought the Nazis the longest, and had suffered the most grievous losses, in the war. Now they were looking for security and influence.
Among the Allies, former British prime minister Winston Churchill was the first to observe and comment on this perceived danger. He identified the Soviet Union as the primary threat to peace and security. Therefore, he proposed an American/European alliance that would oppose the Russians. As America was presently the only country with an atomic bomb, he felt that the U.S. was the most powerful nation in the world, and the primary caretaker of freedom. He felt it necessary to urge the U.S. to impose a policy of “containment” of the Soviet threat.
Churchill, a strong anti-Communist, was invited to speak at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, which he did on March 5, 1946. A condition of his making the speech was the presence of U.S. President Harry S. Truman, who attended. In front of a crowd of 1,500, Chruchill made a 45-minute speech that outlined the issue and warned of coming trouble with Russia.
Churchill was blunt, avowing that he would “try to make sure with what strength I have that what has gained with so much sacrifice and suffering shall be preserved for the future glory and safety of mankind.” He identified what he saw as the two major dangers remaining to the world: “war and tyranny.”
He proposed the creation of a United Nations fighting force to keep the peace. He also proposed the close cooperation of America and England in military matters. He then addressed tyranny, stating, “We cannot be blind to the fact that the liberties enjoyed by individual citizens throughout the United States and throughout the British Empire are not valid in a considerable number of countries, some of which are very powerful. In these States control is enforced upon the common people by various kinds of all-embracing police governments to a degree which is overwhelming and contrary to every principle of democracy. The power of the State is exercised without restraint, either by dictators or by compact oligarchies operating through a privileged party and a political police force.” He was referring obliquely to the Soviets and their minions.
While professing to admire and respect the Soviets, Churchill nonetheless made this statement:
“From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic an iron curtain has descended across the Continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe. Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest and Sofia, all these famous cities and the populations around them lie in what I must call the Soviet sphere, and all are subject in one form or another, not only to Soviet influence but to a very high and, in some cases, increasing measure of control from Moscow.”
Despite his politic expressions, Churchill clearly named the USSR as the new opponent of the friends of freedom. “Except in the British Commonwealth and in the United States where Communism is in its infancy, the Communist parties or fifth columns constitute a growing challenge and peril to Christian civilization.”
Churchill’s proposal was to face the Soviets with military preparedness, admonishing the crowd that the only thing Stalin respected was strength. And so the terms of the future conflict, which lasted 42 years, until the dissolution of the Soviet Union, were set.
The National Recording Registry Project tracks one writer’s expedition through all the recordings in the National Recording Registry in chronological order. Next time: Robert Shaw leads a performance of Bach’s B-minor Mass.
NRR Project: “U.S. Highball (A Musical Account of a
Transcontinental Hobo Trip)”
Composed by Harry Partch
Performed by the Gate 5 Ensemble
Recorded 1946
25:20
Harry Partch changed how I think about music.
When I was 12 or so, I checked out the album The World of Harry Partch from the Denver Public Library. It was in the Classical Music section.
I didn’t understand it. The manic drumming, the unharmonic melodies, the bizarre sounds, the comic lyrics. Finally I heard “Eight Hitchhiker Inscriptions from a Highway Railing at Barstow” and fell in love.
Partch is sui generis; there is no one following in his steps. In this he is like other bizarre composers I love, such as Ives, Satie, Moondog, Terry Riley, Frank Zappa, Steve Reich, and John Luther Adams. All iconoclasts, creating strange sound-objects that are hair-raising in their audaciousness and intensity, their just plain weirdness.
Harry Partch (1901-1974) made his own music. Literally. An aspiring composer, he kept rejecting the educational experiences music schools offered to him. He was searching for a sound that reflected the dense, complex, a-harmonic music he heard in the world, coming from machines, nature, and the mouths of those around him. In 1930, he burned all his compositions to date in a pot-bellied stove.
He devised a new scale, with 43 notes to it. He based his compositions on just intonation, a form of notation used in ancient Greece and Medieval times. No instruments of the day could accommodate his method of composing.
So he made his own instruments. The Chromelodeon, the Kithara, the Bloboy, Zymo-Xyl, Quadrangularis Reversum and more were tuned to Partch’s special frequencies.
But Partch was strapped for cash. He traveled as a hobo across the West. He could rarely assemble the instruments, the people, and the sheer time it took to teach his music. He lived on short-term grants and university appearances. Very few believed in his utterly new and confusing music. It featured percussion-grounded bursts of sounds and swooping, meandering melodic lines, clashing chords that sound like mistakes.
But when you pull back, you see that Partch is creating complex sound fields against which his musical gestures play themselves out. His narratives, whether self-written or taken from Chinese poetry, are acerbically voiced. His sound is wild, freewheeling, warm, expansive, open to the sky. His compositions have a tough, lean spirit. It’s hypnotic, engaging.
His “U.S. Highball: (A Musical Account of a Transcontinental Hobo Trip)” is exactly that – taken from his notebooks kept during his transcontinental hobo trip. Wisps of narrative, bits of conversations, the recitation of sign verbiage, pieces of advice, warnings from cops, pepper the music, sung, intoned. Marimbas play, harps strum, the percussion clatters on. We are on a train, plunging through Wyoming (“Stay out of Denver”). Partch captures a vernacular experience in a method uniquely suited to it.
The National Recording Registry Project tracks one writer’s expedition through all the recordings in the National Recording Registry in chronological order. Next time: Winston Churchill’s “Iron Curtain” speech.
NRR Project: “Jole Blon”
Performed by Harry Choates
Recorded July 17, 1946
2:45
Again, I must defer to the National Recording Registry for its explanatory essay by Ryan Brasseaux, which you can read here.
This recording represents the breakthrough of Cajun music into the mainstream. Surprisingly popular, it ran high in the sales charts when it was released. It’s a typical love song, sorrowing over a lost woman. The lyrics:
Jolie blon, regardez donc quoi t'as fait
(Pretty blonde, look at what you've done)
Tu m'as quitte pour t'en aller
(You left me to go away)
Pour T'en aller avec un autre, oui, que moi
(To go away with another, instead of me)
Quel espoir et quel avenir, mais, moi, je vais avoir?
(What hope and what future am I going to have?)
Jolie blon, tu m'as laisse, moi tout seul
(Pretty blonde, you've left me all alone)
Pour t'en aller chez ta famille
(To go back to your family)
Si t'aurais pas ecoute tos les conseils de les autres
(If you had not listened to the advice of the others)
Tu serait ici-t-avec moi aujourd 'hui
(You would be here with me today)
Jolie blon, tu croyais il y avait just toi
(Pretty blonde, you thought there was just you)
Il y a pas just toi dans le pays pour moi aimer
(There is not just you in this land to love me)
Je peux trouver just une autre jolie blonde
(I can find another pretty blonde)
Bon Dieu sait, moi, j'ai un tas
(Good God knows, I have a lot)
The National Recording
Registry Project tracks one writer’s expedition through all the recordings in
the National Recording Registry in chronological order. Next time: Harry Partch’s U.S. Highball.
NRR Project: “The Churkendoose” Composed by Alec Wilder; lyrics by Ben Ross Berenberg Performed by Ray Bolger Recorded 1947 An amu...
