The NRR Project #34: ‘Castles in Europe One-Step’

‘Castles in Europe One-Step’ aka ‘Castle House Rag’

Europe’s Society Orchestra

Composer: James Reese Europe

Recorded February 10, 1914

3:40

  

Here’s an unknown titan of American music for you, someone you should get to know. James Reese Europe was a composer, arranger, and bandleader who busted through all the color lines in his brief life. Eubie Blake called him “the Martin Luther King of music.” Why isn’t he better known?

When Europe was 20, he organized a large organization for black New York musicians called the Clef Club, which not only fielded an expert ensemble but served as union hall, booking agency, and meeting place. The 125-member Clef Club played Carnegie Hall on May 12, 1912, the first black group to do so.

Notably, they played what was recorded as “ragtime, blues, and minstrel songs,” in other words popular vernacular tunes instead of white compositions. American culture was just beginning to edge out from underneath the influence of Europe; “serious” black composers, with the exception of Scott Joplin, imitated the compositional techniques of “serious” white composers, who were aping European styles. “My success had come . . . from a realization of the advantages of sticking to the music of my own people.”

Europe’s decision to value and develop African American music was part of a groundswell of artistic assertion by important black composers. W.C. Handy published his “Memphis Blues” in 1912 as well, exploding a passion for blues in the general public. Jelly Roll Morton was touring the country at this time, working up his own repertoire.

Jazz was in the air, but this was not jazz. Europe headed a “society orchestra,” and that meant dance music. Enter Vernon and Irene Castle.

 Here was an innovative celebrity couple, a ballroom-dancing couple who revolutionized social dancing in America. The two were suave, slender, and stylish, setting an elegant tone that people wanted to imitate. They succeeded in vaudeville, in Paris nightclubs, then on Broadway (Irving Berlin wrote his first show, Watch Your Step, for them in 1914).They popularized the ubiquitous foxtrot, and women bobbed their hair just like Irene, and switched to simpler, less cumbersome outfits, as she had. Above all, they made dancing look easy and fun.

The Castles were so popular that they could make their own rules. (They had an openly gay manager, Elisabeth Marbury.) The Carnegie Hall concert got their attention; they hired Europe and his band to accompany them – an extremely risky move at the time, as many areas forbade white and black performers working on stage together. However, the combination worked, and worked well, for a few essential years.

This “One-Step” is misnamed – it should be titled “Castle House Rag,” but whatever you call it, it’s a fast and furious expedition through raggy territory. The sheer mass of instruments being played gives the recording a harsh, undynamic wall-of-sound feel, buts its lively syncopations, derived somewhat from older dance forms but harnessed to the new rush and earnestness. Of particular note is the wild drumming codas of Buddy Gilmore – the first percussive solos on record.

World War I interrupted their careers. Vernon Castle joined the Royal Air Corps, and died in a training accident in 1918. Europe joined up as a lieutenant with the infantry regiment “The Harlem Hellfighters.” His military band traveled all over Europe, spreading ragtime and blues and igniting awareness of these new musics in the minds of listeners and composers there.

Europe was known for his stubbornness in following his own artistic path, and in insisting on professionalism from his musicians. After the war, Europe came back to the U.S. and got busy performing and recording. On May 9, 1919, he got into an argument with a drummer between shows in Boston. The man stabbed him in the neck, and he died later that day. He was 39.

The National Recording Registry Project tracks one writer’s expedition through all the recordings in the National Recording Registry in chronological order. Up next: Klezmer! with ‘Casey at the Bat.’

The NRR Project #33: ‘Fon der Choope’

A typical klezmer ensemble of the turn of last century.

‘Fon der Choope’

Abe Elenkirg’s Yidishe Orchestra

Recorded April 4, 1913

3:15

  

Klezmer is secular Jewish music. Say what?

Here’s the thing. Traditionally, in Judaism, instruments are not played on the Sabbath – songs of praise are sung unaccompanied, usually to tunes, also known as prayer modes, in use for centuries. But hey, what culture doesn’t have music in it? And at weddings, parties, and the like, bands of musicians would play what developed into klezmer -- a vital, emotional, dance-oriented music that developed in the Jewish communities of Europe during the 19^th century, a hybrid of Romani, Turkish, and Russian influences, steeped in the melodic modes of the prayer services.

Here’s the first surviving recording of the genre made in America. It’s credited to Abe Elenkrig’s Yidishe Orchestra, about which not much is known. Abe was a barber, and played trumpet and led an ensemble on the side, performing for social occasions. The 10 sides he and his outfit recorded for Columbia shine light on the genre during one of its most obscure periods.

“Fon der Choope” (“For the Wedding”) is a typical klezmer piece (ironically, the term wasn’t used until the 1980s – until then it was known as Yiddish music), the typical ensemble consists of trumpet, clarinet, violins, flute, accordion -- portability for traveling musicians. The high, keening melodies, based on sacred phrasings known as cantillations, give the music a penetrating feelingness.

The recording is fascinating in that it captures the music before jazz began to influence it. The first recording of jazz was four years away, and once it enters the picture it begins to perlocate into klezmer – and vice versa. A lot of the minor-key work, the vocal-style inflections, and the forthright emotionality found its way into early jazz, via practitioners such as Dave Tarras. Naftule Brandwein, and Ziggy Elman (Elman’s 1938 klezmer instrumental “Fralich in Swing” was Caucasianized into the hit song “And the Angels Sing” a year later.)

However, mainstream American Jewish culture was more interested in assimilation at the time. It wasn’t until the late 1970s that the Klezmer Revival took place, which revived traditional approaches and inspired new hybrids as well. Now klezmer is inextricably wound into the DNA of American music – aren’t you glad?

The National Recording Registry Project tracks one writer’s expedition through all the recordings in the National Recording Registry in chronological order. Up next: ’Castles in Europe One-Step.’ 

The NRR Project #31: Lovey’s Trinidad String Band

Lovey’s Trinidad String Band

Recordings for Columbia, Victor Records

Recorded June-July 1912

24 takes

What makes a music catch the ear of the public? Why this and not that, then but not now? Four years before jazz exploded onto the American scene, calypso came ashore.

It came in the persons of the uniformed members of Lovey’s Trinidad String Band, wielding waltzes and syncopated, swaying paseos. Trinidad and Tobago in the Caribbean was a hotbed of music generation in the 20^th century, and calypso was one of the genres. It was a full-bodied, orchestral kind of Afro-Hispanic dance music, based on violins and guitars, with some percussion and a few wind instruments thrown in for accents.

What makes calypso unique is its lyrics, none of which hare found on the Lovey (aka George R. Baillie) recordings. The rhythm in most calypso songs serve as a backdrop for freewheeling, improvised verse – extempo --, usually about sex, politics, or some other controversy. Sounds like rap? It’s a distant progenitor, whose offspring and relatives include The Dozens, toasting, and sanankuya. Calypso spread the news, lyrics were debated and records were banned. Without that edgy, alive word-battling aspect, these first known recordings of calypso are intriguing, but not riveting.

Lovey’s toured New York in the summer of 1912, and made exactly two dozen recordings, which can be heard on a finely curated compilation by Bear Family Records. Calypso’s singers would begin to record bodies of work in the 1930s, and in 1956 Harry Belafonte would spark a worldwide (and extremely sanitized) calypso craze with his recording of “The Banana Boat Song.”

The National Recording Registry Project tracks one writer’s expedition through all the recordings in the National Recording Registry in chronological order. Up next: Castles in Europe One-Step.

The NRR Project #30: ‘Come Down Ma Evenin’ Star’

‘Come Down Ma Evenin’ Star’

Lillian Russell

Music: John Stromberg

Lyrics: Robert Smith

Recorded March 22, 1912

2:49

 This recording is the rarest of the rare – an unreleased test pressing discovered 31 years after it was recorded. It captures the presence of a lovely and talented link in the history of celebrity culture – the legendary Lillian Russell, the first American “sex symbol.”

Like her 19^th century predecessors Lola Montez and Lillie Langtry, she first won praise as a performer, then as an ideal beauty and glass of fashion. Finally she was celebrated simply for being herself – set so firmly in the minds of the public that she had endorsement deals.

She was the daughter of a newspaper publisher and a writer/feminist. She studied voice with the great Leopold Damrosch, and despite her mother’s disapproval she was soon the best-known singer of operetta in the country. She was classy, charming and voluptuous, embodying the ideal Victorian female figure -- large-bosomed, corset-cinched, topped with a round, cherubic face.

Like many prominent female performers, she had a tumultuous personal life, studded with four marriages and many affairs, mostly with rich and powerful men. Newspapers tracked her incessantly. When Alexander Graham Bell initiated long-distance telephone service in 1890, Russell sang over the line.

“Come Down Ma Evenin’ Star” was written for Russell by composer John Stromberg for her starring role in the popular 1902 review Twirly Whirly. He held it back from her, saying it wasn’t ready. He committed suicide weeks before opening night, and the music for the song was found in his pocket. His lyricist put words to it, and it became Russell’s signature song.

It’s a sweet, wistful ballad of yearning, of a kind just ready to fall out of favor. Its sentimental strains were the last delicate gasp of the silk-and-lamplight niceties of the period. Russell made this recording in 1912, a decade after it became a hit, and eight years after Russell had stopped singing (but not performing) onstage.

Why did Russell record it? Significantly, she never allowed herself to be recorded live save for this disc, and a handful of film snippets. She didn’t need the income, certainly, being financially independent. Or the publicity. Perhaps she listened to the recording playback and found, like so many people, that her voice was unbearable. (She is a bit nasal and strained here.)

Interestingly, though, her performance here is technically top-notch, warm, clear, and expressive. It verifies the abilities of performer lost to popular consciousness, remembered if at all as a “sex symbol.”

The National Recording Registry Project tracks one writer’s expedition through all the recordings in the National Recording Registry in chronological order. Up next: Lovey’s Trinidad String Band recordings.

The NRR Project #28: 'Some of These Days'

‘Some of These Days’
Composed by Shelton Brooks

Performed by Sophie Tucker

Recorded 1911

2:05

  

She was a shouter, a moaner, the Last of the Red Hot Mamas. Sophie Tucker marketed herself as a force of nature, a ribald female Falstaff, whose belted sass, sex, and schmaltz paved the way for Mae West, Ethel Merman, Bette Midler and others.

She was Elvis before Elvis – a white singer who cribbed her style from African American culture. Her transformation from an Orthodox Jewish shtetl girl to a grand, big-hearted, bedecked pop idol is more extreme than Bob Dylan’s.

First she was Sonya Kalish, born on the run from Poland to America in the dead of winter, January 1887. A natural belter, she started singing in her family’s restaurant in Hartford as a kid. She eloped when she was 16, had her only child at 19, left her husband entirely and her son with her sister and began singing and telling jokes in New York wherever she could.

 Up until this time, lady singers were refined things, more suited to the parlor than the barroom. Women did not own up to sexual impulses unless they were fallen, or in the process of falling. Tucker really didn't give a damn about societal norms, and took her cue from the raw, bluesy kind of music that white culture wasn’t hip to yet. The minstrel show was still supreme, and she began as a blackface singer, as no one thought the crowd would buy her as anything but a novelty act. One night, she dropped the makeup and the Southern shtick, sang as herself, and began to catch on, singing rags, blues, novelty numbers, and ballads. (“Makin’ Wicky Wacky Down in Waikiki,” anyone?)

Tucker’s voice and temperament were perfectly suited to the new, lowdown boldness in music. In the pre-electric era, singers had to project over an orchestra into a house of indifferent acoustics. Vaudeville houses averaged 1,500 seats, so enunciation, tone, and sheer volume won the day. Singers such as Al Jolson and Nora Bayes were just loud. Tucker “got over” using a technique she learned from fellow performer Clarice Vance, another former “coon singer” turned popular performer. Vance’s half-talked, draggy style fed Tucker’s bantering, flirtatious persona. Tucker later befriended and learned from contemporary singers such as Mamie Smith and Ethel Waters -- two of the earliest popular black female recording artists.

More importantly, Tucker could transmit energy; she could “sell” any song. She didn’t hold back emotionally – she demanded your attention and got in your face. Her other surefire hit was the tearjerker “My Yiddishe Mama.” If she couldn’t get you with suggestiveness, she’d get you with the sentiment.

This, her signature song, was written by Shelton Brooks, the black composer who also penned “Darktown Strutters’ Ball,” “I Wonder Where My Easy Rider’s Gone,” and many others. In the wake of W.C. Handy, Brooks and others were figuring out how to wrangle the new rhythms and harmonies of blues and proto-jazz into the more genteel, verse-chorus-verse conventions of the ballads of the period.

The version chosen for the Registry is her first recording of the work, although her best-remembered recording of it comes from 1926, backed by Ted Lewis and his orchestra. The 1926 version is more confident, and by this time she's strongly rooted in her stage persona. In contrast, the 1911 is a bit stiffer, but also more emotionally naked. Over a century later, there is still something undeniably sexy and powerful about the way she throws in a plaintive "ummm" before singing "You know honey/I let you have your way . . . "

The song is straightforward and effective, a simple blues lament. As delivered, it's also cathartic, the way that blues are meant to be sung, and a triumphal crow, the celebration of getting over something bad. It’s conceivable that somewhere, someone has sung it slowly and quietly, in the spirit of the hit “I Wonder Who’s Kissing Her Now” of the previous year – but the song and Tucker’s hip-shaking, scarf-waving seismic delivery are for me inseparable. She came back to it repeatedly throughout her career, as she changed from being regarded as a transgressor to an innovator to a star to a beloved, nostalgic figure.

 The National Recording Registry Project tracks one writer’s expedition through all the recordings in the National Recording Registry in chronological order. Up next: Lillian Russell and ‘Come Down Ma’ Evenin’ Star.’ 

The NRR Project #29: Cylinder recordings of Ishi

Cylinder recordings of Ishi

Recorded September 1911 – April 1914

148 cylinders; 5 hours, 41 minutes

  

These recordings represent, depending on your orientation, a) an astonishing, nearly textbook effort to preserve and extrapolate a vanishing culture in the form of a single individual or b) a pathetic tragedy in which the “last wild Indian” was discovered, brought to civilization, studied and recorded, kept on display in a museum, and dismembered after death for the sake of science.

Or both.

On August 19, 1911, a starving Ishi entered civilization, near Oroville, California, hard by the Lassen Peak wilderness. There Ishi had lived for 50 years, mostly alone, the last member of the Yahi tribe. His people had been hunted by whites, seen their food sources dwindle, succumbed to new diseases brought in by the immigrants.

He was taken in by UC-Berkeley professors, housed and employed by them as they studied him, sometimes demonstrating his woodcraft to touring schoolchildren. Ishi was perhaps the last Stone Age man on the continent, still making tools and weapons by hand. He communicated all he could of his Yahi language and culture. Susceptible to European diseases, he succumbed to tuberculosis on March 25, 1916.

Despite the efforts of his friends, Ishi was autopsied and cremated – save for his brain which was placed in a jar and sent to the Smithsonian Institution. Meanwhile, write-ups of Ishi’s life, both fictional and non-fictional, by the widow of the museum director who studied him, made the case popular in the early 1960s. Other books, and films and even a play, have followed.

Ironically, Ishi turned out not to be the “last of his tribe,’ as he was branded; eventually his brain was found and repatriated to his closest living relatives, the Yana. The recordings, of use to specialists, are housed at Berkeley. A 22-second excerpt of Ishi chanting can be found here.

The contact with Ishi undoubtedly extended his life as much as it endangered it. And who wouldn’t, if he or she were the last person in their left, try to set down everything about it that they could? Was it worth that to become a museum exhibit? He was asked thousands of questions about his people; I don’t see any evidence of anyone ever asking him what he thought of us.

The National Recording Registry Project tracks one writer’s expedition through all the recordings in the National Recording Registry in chronological order. Up next: Sophie Tucker and ‘Some of These Days.’ 

The NRR Project #27: 'Let Me Call You Sweetheart'

‘Let Me Call You Sweetheart’

Columbia Quartette (The Peerless Quartet)

Recorded July 28, 1911

2:37

  

American popular song became a going concern around the turn of last century, thanks to music publishers. Before recordings and radio came along, everyone had to make their own music, or listen to others make it live, and for that you needed the sheet music.

The only modes of transmission were social – you heard a new song at the minstrel show, vaudeville, via church or by word of mouth. Ethnic and alternative musics stayed firmly lodged inside their isolated groups of origin. Every home had a piano, organ, and/or a guitar; a jumble of instruments and music sheets took up the front room, or sitting room, or parlor, whatever it was termed.

A song had to be memorable, relatively easy to learn, and family-friendly. America was living in the shadow of the Victorian period culturally. Opera and operetta were the accepted models of singing and composition, and the sentimental ballads popular in the post-Civil War era reflect that. From the 1890s through the end of World War I, Tin Pan Alley in lower central Manhattan cranked out songs for popular consumption – songs that dealt almost entirely with sentiment, melodrama, nostalgia, the novelties of the day, or patriotism. The tone was optimistic – genteel, cheery, and decorous.

 These were all songs I learned growing up. My great-grandmother’s house still held a hulking old piano, and she played, expertly licking her right fingers and flipping the pages of the score just at the last moment, as we all stood around and sang. This was also the heyday of Sing Along with Mitch on television, and we gaily chirped with the Singalong Gang as they plowed in close harmony through the hits of the pre-WWI period.

The closest existing manifestation of this music is found in the barbershop quartet tradition, and most of the songs in the genre’s unofficial canon date from this period – “Down by the Old Mill Stream,” “Shine On, Harvest Moon,” “Sweet Adeline,” “In the Good Old Summertime,” and so on.

“Barbershop” singing of course has become a hoary cliché. The nightmare image of four men approaching in straw boaters and garish vests, bellowing close-harmony vocals, is enough to put the fear of God into any person. But there is thrill to be had in singing and hearing this kind of music, an emphasis on technique and showmanship that overrules other considerations. Since its 1940s revival, barbershop has grown and diversified into men’s and women’s ensembles and choruses, and remains a wholesome niche art.

“Let Me Call You Sweetheart” is a classic sentimental waltz, but like many of the era’s hit compositions, it’s an assembly-line job. Frequently, music publishers amassed reams of verses and lyrics and farmed them out of songwriters, hoping someone would set a hit or two. Beth Slater Whitson’s lyrics were set to music by Leo Friedman without the two ever meeting.

It was recorded by the Peerless Quartet, billed here as the Columbia Quartette. This group was arguably the most popular of its time, cutting hundreds of discs in various lineups for nearly 30 years. Their most successful incarnation was led by the prolific Henry Burr, whose clear nasal tenor would become the clichéd sound of the era.

Meanwhile, the sounds and jazz and blues were in development, and would soon percolate into pop music as well. For a while, though, America's music was easygoing, familiar, and bright, and it still sparkles sometimes when a hurdy-gurdy plays or a carousel goes around.

The National Recording Registry Project tracks one writer’s expedition through all the recordings in the National Recording Registry in chronological order. Up next: recordings of Ishim the ‘last of his tribe.’