The NRR Project #15: Bert Williams and George Walker’s Victor releases

Victor recordings

Bert Williams and George Walker

Oct.-Nov. 1901; 1906

11 of 14 extant

  

The most masterful overview of the remarkable lives and careers of Bert Wheeler and George Walker can be found here, in a masterful,meticulous, and entertaining three-part examination by Jas Obrecht. For those unwilling to read his great non-fiction, here’s a summary.

The cakewalk was discussed by me previously here; and in thisentry from my National Film Project, I recently touched on the contributions Williams made. The important thing to remember is that these were the first African-American superstars. Their 1903 musical comedy “In Dahomey” was a hit, running for two years, and the first written and performed by African-Americans on Broadway.

Walker and Williams’ relations with the culture are complicated. On one hand, one of their gigs starting off was playing African villagers in animal skins; they were routinely rousted, robbed, and abused by white gangs as they traveled in vaudeville. Williams wore blackface, and both men housed their onstage personas in the racist stereotypes of the day – Williams as Jim Crow, the simpleton/stooge, and Wheeler as Zip Coon, the straight/con man who takes advantage of him.

Williams (left) and Wheeler in character, "In Dahomey."

Their immense popularity eventually gave them the power to move the needle a little bit. They had income and leverage, and they tried different media platforms. Ten of the 11 recordings they made were set down in 1901; four of them are from their hit Broadway show “Sons of Ham” the previous year. (“Pretty Desdamone” was a one-off in April of 1906; Walker didn’t like how his voice recorded and refused to do more.)

Some of the surviving selections are the typical ethnic “coon” or “darkie” songs of the day, sentimental tripe that paints the average African-American as a shambling comic figure. However, little gems such as the comic “(When It’s) All Going Out and Nothing Coming In” and the fanciful “In My Castle on the Nile” are charming and catchy. Despite Walker’s trepidations, his voice comes through cleanly n these recordings. However, Williams has an edge on him; he is much better able to project his persona and attitude through the medium. No wonder Walker took a pass. You can feel the energy and interplay on these discs, and get a sense of how appealing these two performers were.

In 1909, Walker began to suffer from the symptoms of syphilis. Two years later, he was dead, at the age of 38 or 39. Williams went on to even greater fame as a solo act, with song hits such as “Nobody” and “When the Moon Shines on the Moonshine.” He died young himself, at 47, in 1922.

The achievements of Walker and Williams are impressive. Practically forgotten today, they were the first African-American superstars.

The National Recording Registry Project tracks one writer’s expedition through all the recordings in the National Recording Registry in chronological order. Up next: ‘Canzone del Porter.'

WALKER/WHEELER RECORDINGS

1.      (When It’s) All Going Out and Nothing Coming In

2.      The Phrenologist Coon (From “Sons of Ham”)

3.      She’s Getting More Like the White Folks Every Day (From “Sons of Ham”)

4.      Good Afternoon, Mr. Jenkins (From “Sons of Ham”)

5.      In My Castle on the Nile

6.      I Don’t Like That Face You Wear

7.      Good Morning Carrie

8.      My Little Zulu Babe (From “Sons of Ham”)

9.      Her Name’s Miss Dinah Fair

10.  Junie

11.  Pretty Desdamone (1906)

Blowing up Grandma; or, the best Fourth ever

It looked something like this.

It wasn’t on purpose. We did not intend to blow her up. We loved Grandma, even though she wasn’t Nice Grandma. (Nice Grandma gave us candy and ice cream and Mountain Dew, the last of which she didn’t know was chock-full of caffeine. She couldn’t understand what was getting us ‘all whipped up.’)

Mean Grandma chain-smoked Pall Malls and pulled recalcitrant snakes that she found in her flower gardens in half with her bare hands. My sister woke up late one morning, and Mean Grandma made her eat pork chops for breakfast, a trauma that took her years from which to recover. Nobody messed with Mean Grandma.

We bloodthirsty devil-children loved fireworks. As soon as the seasonal entertainment-munitions tents were pitched by the roadside, we begged to be hauled to them. There our parents would fume as we ran crazily around the enclosure, evaluating the various Zebras, Black Cats, sparklers, snakes, smoke bombs, ground spinners, and Strobing Comet Candles, both on a per-piece basis and as weighed against the huge combo packages we could go in on together and divvy up later.

The hierarchy of fireworks was proportional to the danger they posed. Sparklers, snakes, and smoke bombs were for babies. Fountains and spinners were more our speed. We longed to dash back and forth from the middle of the street in front of our ranch house, wielding a smoldering punk just like the dads wielded their glowing cigarette butts in the night, lighting fuses and backpedaling, over and over again. Zippers were the best; they lit, spun, and then leaped into the air, increasing the odds of becoming lodged into our foreheads, and consequently more beloved.

The arsenal of choice consisted of masses of crisp, crackly packagings of pop-bottle rockets, so-called as they were cylinders of gunpowder stuck to long, thin sticks that were placed in soda-pop bottles and ignited. These could be launched for weeks before and after July 4; they were used for cross-yard wars, or shot at innocent younger siblings and other helpless animals.

We yearned to be driven north from Denver to nearby Wyoming, where explosives laws were lax and the “good stuff” could be gotten, beckoning just beyond that arbitrary, windswept border. There were the fabled M-80s. When we could get these high-powered explosives, we would use them to shoot coffee and pop cans into the sky, out in the fields and fields of unfinished suburban developments that surrounded us. We muttered darkly of one day blowing the lock on the local A & W and guzzling all the root beer we could.

The ultimate goal was, of course, to get the biggest, most beautiful, longest-lived fountain. We worked out way up to a grand finale, then hiked over the hill to see the city shoot off the big show. The year this happened, I believe I finally had a driver’s license, and had been saving my money from working at Taco Time. One afternoon, we ran up to wicked Cheyenne.

Now, I don’t remember seeing the words “mortar,” “aerial shell,” or “artillery” on the suspiciously large piece de resistance we splurged on. We set it out in line with the other pyrotechnical treats, all curated and choreographed to a nonce.

Grandma was none too sprightly by then. She was going on 80, and her reptile-dismembering day were behind her. Still, we exercised a respect tinged with fear. She insisted on being seating in a lawn chair at the end of the driveway, nearest the street, to not miss a second of the festivities.

The show progressed to the Big Finish. We set the monster out on the asphalt, and I lit the fuse. We stepped back briskly and lightly.

Then the most amazing bass CHUFF came out of the device, like it had just shat out a locomotive at top speed; like it was the Kaiser’s Paris Gun, flinging a quarter-ton into the air.

“RUN!” I yelled, and we turned as one, bolting up the driveway. Halfway to the front door, a deafening explosion rattled the area, a fantastic electric-blue burst that froze everything forever for that one second, us, the trees, the cars, our shadows that burst into life in front of us. Haloed in cobalt.

Only 50 feet above, like an enormous azure time-lapse dandelion, the obviously commercial-grade pineapple bloomed. The sparks lashed down at the surrounding roofs and ricocheted back into the sky.

The neighborhood was very quiet, save for the hysterical dogs. We peered nervously through the front door’s tiny diamond-shaped window. Then --

“Where’s Grandma?”

It would be great to pretend that she was sitting there, face comically smudged and smoke ascending from her hair. No. She was still sitting precisely as as she when we had abandoned her. She was just pissed.

She didn’t go with us to see the big fireworks display that year, either. She said she was tired.

The NRR Project #13: Scott Joplin’s ragtime piano rolls

Ragtime piano rolls

Scott Joplin

1916

Seven recordings

  

One of the most cumbersome, expensive, and unique playback systems invented was the player piano. The idea of a full-sized instrument that could reproduce the playing of a human was in the air for decades, but remained unperfected until 1895. After that, it became enormously popular for a time, creating an industry that would last until the advent of electrical audio recordings in the mid-1920s improved sound playback on disc enormously, at a far more cost-effective rate.

The player piano works pneumatically; that is, through compressed air. Holes poked in a roll of paper correspond to notes played on the piano. When a hole is “read” by the mechanism, it shoots a burst of compressed air at the lever action that forces the proper key to be struck. Sounds complicated? It only took about 20 years to iron out the problems inherent in the technology.

A typical piano roll.

Once the technical aspects were figured out, the player piano became a familiar part of the culture of the period. Whether buying new rolls for the home machine, or plunking nickels into machines set up in bars and restaurants, customers spent freely on the device. Commercial customers found that, after the initial capital outlay for the machine, the cost of buying new rolls and maintaining the player were cheaper than hiring live performers – no doubt causing a wave of technology-related unemployment.

The novelty of the player piano, with its magically moving keys pressed as though by invisible fingers, was a draw, as was its consistency. (Some prominent players who grew during this 30-year span, 1895-1925, describe learning how to play by slowing down the mechanism’s action and aping the keystrokes, just as English blues players of the 1960s learned by slowing down American records and working out the chord changes.)

A short list of noted performers who “cut” piano-transcriptions includes Rachmaninoff, Gershwin, Percy Granger, Fats Waller, Jelly Roll Morton, and James P. Johnson. These invaluable records teach us much about the players’ techniques. One of the most prominent names to record piano rolls was, of course, the greatest ragtime music composer, Scott Joplin.

 Joplin was an African-American Texan, born in the wake of the Civil War. He quickly mastered the parameters of the ragtime song (see my earlier entry on ragtime here), and by 1899 had his first hit, the familiar “Maple Leaf Rag.” Joplin gave the wild, upbeat, syncopated genre dignity by introducing complex chording and the symmetries of classical compositions. Joplin was not shooting sorely for popularity; he was a serious composer who produced more lyrical pieces such as the sublime “Solitude” and the opera Treemonisha, which went unproduced until 1975.

Joplin’s day in the sun was short-lived. He faced the typical bias against African-Americans at the time; it was fine for them to serve as entertainers and figures of fun, but white society did not accept their expressions of higher aspirations. Joplin was famous, but solely because of his rags. Joplin probably consented to record these seven rolls he did in 1916 just to make some quick cash.

Joplin’s name on these rolls was a draw for the public. Unfortunately, only one of the seven piano rolls, his second take on “Maple Leaf Rag,” seems to reflect his genuine playing, a stuttering, uncoordinated effort that speaks to his advanced stage of suffering from tertiary syphilis. The other six were edited and “corrected” by the staff arranger at the recording company, William Axtmann. Joplin would die the following year from his condition, at the age of 49.

The Joplin revival began in 1971, when Joshua Rifkin recorded a selection of his work, which received a Grammy nomination. Prominent musicologist Gunther Schuller orchestrated and produced Joplin’s Red Back Book for a 12-piece ensemble in 1973, and won a Grammy doing it. Then, of course, Marvin Hamlisch’s use of Joplin in his soundtrack for the film The Sting the same year opened the floodgates for Joplin’s rediscovery.

The player piano remained significant for only one other American composer – the amazing and still under-regarded Conlon Nancarrow (1912-1997). An expatriate in Mexico due to his left-wing leanings, Nancarrow was fascinated by the possibilities the player piano gave an ambitious composer. Eventually, he purchased the equipment needed to make rolls himself, and did so from 1947 on.

Nancarrow cutting a roll.

Nancarrow recognized that the player piano could reproduce compositions impossible for one or even two keyboardists to perform. He could pile line after melodic line on top of each other, as well as multiple independent rhythms. The results, fortunately preserved, are exciting explosions of color, harmonics, and sound patterns.

The National Recording Registry Project tracks one writer’s expedition through all the recordings in the National Recording Registry in chronological order. Up next: Williams and Walker’s Victor recordings.

The NRR Project #14: Mapleson cylinder recordings of the Metropolitan Opera

Lionel Mapleson and his enormous recording horn, used to record Metropolitan Opera excerpts live from the catwalks above the stage.

Cylinder recordings of the Metropolitan Opera

Lionel Mapleson

1900-1903

135 cylinders

  

On March 21, 1900, Metropolitan Opera librarian Lionel Mapleson purchased a gramophone for his personal use. Being an intelligent and curious man, he soon started using it to record operatic performance. The result is the first “live from the Met” recordings, long before the live Saturday radio matinees from thence started in 1931.

Opera was seen as the most legitimate form of high culture at the time. This led to incredible snobbishness at the opera house, in contrast to the art form's former status as a populist entertainment over the course of the 19th century. The explosion of vernacular culture, and the technology to spread it, meant that the designation of value by a cultural elite was no longer needed, or heeded. Soon opera became a bugbear, something to be mocked by comedians. Opera in America wouldd not enjoy an upswing again until the 1980s.

Over three frenzied years, from 1901 through 1903, Mapleson experimented with recording techniques. Initial recordings were made from the prompter’s box downstage center, but Mapleson soon crafted an enormous recording horn to more efficiently gather the sound, and began recording from above, in the theater’s fly space.

The results range from pretty fair to nearly incomprehensible, and include performances from key opera singers such as Emma Calve, Nellie Melba, Jean and Edouard De Reszke, Fritzi Scheff, Pol Plancon, and Ernestine Schumann-Heink. These were names that inspired the same kind of fervent fan-worship today’s opera greats do, and the excerpts are invaluable in terms of getting a sense of the weight and timbre of these historic voices.

There recordings don’t shed much new light on the art form itself – opera has maintained a consistency of approach that makes many productions ever-current (or ever-outdated, if you prefer). But there’s something a little livelier about these cylinders – instead of the close-confined acoustics of the recording studio of the day, and the tinny accompaniment of a few instruments, the listener can hear and feel the broader resonance of the stage and the increased weight and texture of the orchestra’s contributions.

Plus, there is something about working live that adds a soupcon of vivacity to the enterprise. Recordings could be made over and over again until they were “right,” but these on-the-fly snatches have much more immediacy.

These recordings can be found her and there online, and there are some recordings which excerpt the collection. The definitive assembly of tracks, with copious notes, can be found at the Rodgers and Hammerstein Collection of Recorded Sound at the Lincoln Center Library – see the program notes here.

The National Recording Registry Project tracks one writer’s expedition through all the recordings in the National Recording Registry in chronological order. Up next: Scott Joplin’s ragtime piano rolls.

The NRR Project #12: 'Honolulu Cake Walk'

Honolulu Cake Walk

Vess Ossman

1898 (11/10/1899)

Approx. 3:00

“Honolulu Cake Walk” is a prime example of the conscious and not-so-conscious cross-pollinating cultural traditions of black and white in the America of the day.

The clear, ringing tones of the banjo were perfect for acoustic recordings, and banjoist Sylvester Louis “Vess” Ossman, “the King of the Banjo,” was one of the most popular recorded musicians of the day. He toured the United States and England, performing for both president and king. Over a 30-year career, he tracked an immense number of tunes, working as a soloist, accompanist, and a member of acoustic trios (his Ossman-Dudley Trio’s biggest hit was “St. Louis Tickle”). He adroitly performed his own transcriptions as well, as most ragtime was written for solo piano.

This particular recording, again, is not easily available. Interested listeners will have to, as I did, listen to what they can of Ossman’s recordings, and cross-reference them with more contemporary recordings of “Cake Walk.” Ossman’s style is crisp and articulate; he employs the classical plucking style, which emphasizes his rhythmic precision. It’s bright, ringing, confident music, infused with the cocky spirit of ragtime.

Vess Ossman

 Ragtime emerged in 1896, when black entertainer Ernest Hogan penned sheet music in the style that had been floating around the black vernacular music scene for a while. Finally somebody had put some swing into American song. After over a century of aping European music, here was something homemade with a new dynamic. That rough naïve energy peculiar to America emerged with a sound that made the hips shake. The phenomenon leaped the color barrier, and soon white artists like Ossman and his primary rival, Fred Van Eps, were playing it too.

Ragtime, of course, propelled dancing, as did most social music of the time. The cake walk originated in competitive dances held on slave plantations. Slaves competed via dancing and strutting to win a large cake, thus the name. This was picked up, again, by white culture, and transmitted through cakewalks performed at minstrel shows.

What white people of the time probably didn’t get was that they were being mocked. Many times, the slaves would dress in cast-off finery, and in the cakewalk they would parody the stiff, inexpressive carriage and manners of their Caucasian masters. It amused the white folks, but they were the butt of the joke. Finally, the cakewalk moved offstage and became part of the repertoire of dances of the day, along with waltzes, polkas, quadrilles, and two-steps.

The racist associations with the cakewalk and with ragtime music remained strong – Ossman recorded tunes such as “A Coon Band Contest,” “Jolly Darkies,” and “Ethiopian Mardi Gras.” “Honolulu Cake Walk” is another title designed to captivate the potential sheet-music buyer with a whiff of the exotic, that romanticizing of the Other that’s so embedded in white culture of the day.

So, why pick “Honolulu Cake Walk” when other Ossman recordings, hits such as his “Yankee Doodle,” “Cocoanut Dance,” and “A Hot time on the Levee” were more popular and easier to hear? Don’t know. But – the first baby step toward the funky happens here.

The National Recording Registry Project tracks one writer’s expedition through all the recordings in the National Recording Registry in chronological order. Up next: Cylinder recordings of the Metropolitan Opera.

‘The Comedians’ a definitive overview

The Comedians: Drunks, Thieves, Scoundrels, and the History of American Comedy

Kliph Nesteroff

2015

Grove Press

Dammit. Dammit dammit dammit!

Did you ever think, “I’m going to write a book about ________.” You go to the bookstore or to the library the next day, and there it is. Somebody else wrote it while you were out screwing around. Dammit.

“The Comedians” is an incredibly strong work, highly readable, and immensely informative. This is a perfect general-interest overview of the history of American comedy – standup and its offshoots – from the turn of last century to 2011. Kliph Nesteroff somehow compresses this elephantine subject into a compelling 300-some pages without losing either focus on significant detail or a global perspective of the evolution of the style, substance, and business of comedy, along with its permutations through all the mediums we’ve leapt through over the last century.

The author dives right in, describing the late-19^th-century American construction of the theatrical “circuits” or chains that would offer performers contracts. The expansion of the continental railroad system meant that it was now cost-effective (if not incredibly uncomfortable and maddening) to tour the country with an act, and hope to climb the ladder of vaudeville respectability to play the Palace in New York City, the heart of the entertainment industry at the time.

In addition to citing such big early names as Eddie Cantor, Jack Benny, W.C. Fields, and the Marx Brothers, Nesteroff digs deep into the files and points out significant figures often overlooked – Frank Fay, Ted Healy, Rusty Warren, Ray Bourbon, Jean Carroll, and tons of others. He takes us through vaudeville’s decline, and the successive ascensions of radio, film, television, and digital humor. He illustrates the importance of nightclubs, strip joints, Las Vegas, and the gaping maw of cable TV in the evolution of the art form.

Did I say art form? Yes. Talking about your penis in a spotlight for money doesn’t sound like a skill, but it is. Nesteroff is, like me, a former standup, and it expertly informs his work. He knows what it’s like to stand in the back of the room until 1:30 a.m. to do your five minutes. For free. Six nights a week. He’s seen the depressing interiors of green rooms and comedy condos, where the talent is kept corralled, live livestock with attitudes and bad haircuts. His adept analysis is energized by his lean, clear prose. Another great lesson from standup – have something to say, say it, and move on. This lesson Nesteroff mastered long ago. There is a component of entertainment, of showing some leg, as it were, in writing for money that is mostly absent from academic writing.

Here’s a few glimpses of what the writer captures: W.C. Fields saying of his career, “I would never have gone through with it if I had known what it was going to be like . . . mental torture is too high a price to pay for anything”; Fred Allen, saying of a proposed statue to Milton Berle, “It will be the first time people  shit on a statue”; to Lenny Bruce performing naked; to Richard Pryor asking a Vegas crowd, “What the fuck am I doing here?” and walking, then changing comedy forever.

Best of all, Nesteroff constructs a chain of linkages between the comedy generations. For the first time in print that I know of, you can trace the influences (and, OK, outright thievery) of comedy approaches and structures that provide a kind of Hegelian progression, a passing of the torch, albeit between disturbed, transgressive, misanthropic misfits. For the first time, Nesteroff exposes a continuity. Comedy has a plot, and its performers high and low, big- and small-time, have molded it.

Anyone who likes to laugh will enjoy this look backstage .Any past or present member of the siblinghood of yockmeisters will recognize that nothing much has changed over the century. Anyone contemplating going on stage and telling jokes should read it first. 

Post-Trump: Three Candidates Who Could Save the Republican Party

Andy Griffith as Lonesome Rhodes in 'A Face in the Crowd' (Kazan, 1957) - a chilling foreshdowing of Donald Trump's rise. 

Let's face it -- Trump is not going to make it to November. He is nuts, not that this ever stopped a candidate before; but his relentless egocentrism dooms him as a "team player" who could unite the party and coordinate its efforts in a time when the Grand Old Party desperately needs it.It's like watching "All the King's Men" on fast-forward.



Despite my rabid liberalism, I come from a long line of political Neanderthals. One grandfather was evidently the only person in his Nebraska county who voted for Goldwater. So, in some kind of echo of a way, I am sad about the party.

So, here's what will happen. Either Trump will go nutso on-air like Andy Griffith in "A Face in the Crowd" --



or the powers that be will have him incapacitated, as it does with anyone who threatens the power structure.

So, who can the party draft at this late date? Surely none of the whores who endorsed Trump. All other prospective candidates have demonstrated their unelectability. So who can they get? Here are some ideas:

1. Abraham Lincoln. Upside: First Republican president, freed the slaves, won the Civil War. Great approval ratings. Big box-office draw. Downside: Dead, but then so was Reagan from 1984 on.

2. Bernie Sanders. I know this is counter-intuitive -- stay with me. Upside: Good Hilary competitor, good name recognition right now. Downside: a Socialist. Hey, if you can work with Trump, surely you can make a deal with Bernie. Just get high and make a deal with Bernie.

3. Styrofoam peanuts. Upside: Protects fragile objects, fun to play with, not racist. Downside: Inert material; collects static and clings to you, much like Trump.

I am open to more suggestions; obviously all inhabitants of Linnean classification system are eligible.