The NRR Project #48: William Jennings Bryan's 'Cross of Gold' speech

‘Cross of Gold’ speech

Speaker: William Jennings Bryan

Recorded: 1921

9:32

William Jennings Bryan was known as “The Great Commoner,” but it is more apt to think of him as America’s first great demagogue. He was the ultimate orator, with a booming voice, expressive body, and a mellifluous approach to speechwriting that swept listeners into a rapt state, and sometimes rapture itself. He could command a crowd, but not the electorate — he ran for president three times, and lost each time.

Fate deigned to make him an early success. At the politically young age of 36, he reached his zenith in the American consciousness on July 9, 1896 at the Democratic convention in Chicago — his celebrated “Cross of Gold” speech.

Robert Cherny’s essay on the speech is invaluable for making clear the then-burning issue of the “gold standard” versus the “free silver” factions in U.S. politics. In essence, big business and the moneyed interests, what Teddy Roosevelt was soon to term “the trusts,” preferred the low prices caused by accepting only gold as legal tender. Meanwhile, the farmers of the country, still a substantial majority, wanted the coinage of silver in order to ease the debts they could not pay due to lower prices for their goods.

“The Boy Orator of the Platte” was a champion of the people (something disputed by historians such as Irving Stone, who considered him a fatuous blowhard). Devoutly religious, he had a Messianic sense about him that was quite compelling. The Democratic Convention was made for his purposes.

The speech itself was a mishmash of invective, sentiment, and rhetoric, much of it audience-tested in prior speeches for maximum effect. “The humblest citizen in the land when clad in the armor of a righteous cause is stronger than all the whole hosts of error that they can bring. I come to speak to you in defense of a cause as holy as the cause of liberty — the cause of humanity.” He excoriated the “Atlantic coast” (aka big business) and apotheosized the common man —

“Ah. my friends, we say not one word against those who live upon the Atlantic Coast; but those hardy pioneers who braved all the dangers of the wilderness, who have made the desert to blossom as the rose—those pioneers away out there, rearing their children near to nature’s heart, where they can mingle their voices with the voices of the birds—out there where they have erected schoolhouses for the education of their children and churches where they praise their Creator, and the cemeteries where sleep the ashes of their dead—are as deserving of the consideration of this party as any people in this country.

“It is for these that we speak. We do not come as aggressors. Our war is not a war of conquest. We are fighting in the defense of our homes, our families, and posterity. We have petitioned, and our petitions have been scorned. We have entreated, and our entreaties have been disregarded. We have begged, and they have mocked when our calamity came.

“We beg no longer; we entreat no more; we petition no more. We defy them!”

He aligned himself with populism, that great uprising at the end of the 19^th century that pitted the farmers and the labor movement against bank, railroads, monopolies, and the bigwigs of high finance. This progressive and socially responsible outline of action would be co-opted by the major parties and become a significant thread in American political thinking.

“There are two ideas of government. There are those who believe that if you just legislate to make the well-to-do prosperous, that their prosperity will leak through on those below. The Democratic idea has been that if you legislate to make the masses prosperous their prosperity will find its way up and through every class that rests upon it.

“You come to us and tell us that the great cities are in favor of the gold standard. I tell you that the great cities rest upon these broad and fertile prairies. Burn down your cities and leave our farms, and your cities will spring up again as if by magic. But destroy our farms and the grass will grow in the streets of every city in the country.”

Finally, Bryan wound up with a killer finish. Gesturing dramatically, he concluded with, “. . . you shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns. You shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold.”

The convention went wild, applauding and parading Bryan on their shoulders for 25 minutes. “The Silver Knight of the West” won his party’s nomination, but lost to McKinley.

Bryan was a large political figure, but never an effective leader. He was a great candidate (he invented the election strategy of canvassing the country, speechmaking incessantly as he went to rally his supporters) but he was destined to be an ever-more-marginal player. Finally, he wound up as a kind of “fundamentalist pope” (according to H.L. Mencken) who fought the teaching of science in schools, most notably in connection with the Scopes trial of 1925.

Still, he articulated the feelings of a large mass of the American public. More than that, he worked a kind of rhetorical magic. In the days before media’s rise (in fact, this recording is a 1921 recreation by Bryan of his epic speech), the compelling individual had to prove their mettle live, in public, in front of hundreds or thousands. This kind of magnetism can only be hinted at in Bryan’s recorded commemoration.

The National Recording Registry Project tracks one writer’s expedition through all the recordings in the National Recording Registry in chronological order. Up next: Fanny Brice sings ‘My Man/Second Hand Rose.’

Dear Fred: Reading ‘Good Things Happen Slowly’

Good Things Happen Slowly: A Life In and Out of Jazz

Fred Hersch

Crown Archetype

2017

Dear Fred:

I was going to write this to you directly, but I thought if I published it, that it might lead more people to read your new autobiography. It certainly is good!

I have loved your music, both as a player and as a composer, for a long time. (Readers, in case you didn’t know it, Fred is an award-winning, killer jazz pianist and composer. You should listen to him. He has released solo work, and played with ensembles of varying size; he has also composed a lot of fully notated music that is -- well, you could say that’s art music or whatever, the main thing is, it’s GOOD.)

You are a little older than me, and we have some things in common. For instance, we both got to New York around the same time – although you stayed and I didn’t. It was great to read that your impressions of that nasty, smelly, rough, dangerous NYC of the late ‘70s and early ‘80s align with mine – and that we both loved it. Like you, I sat on the curbs outside the clubs I couldn’t afford to get into and listened, blown away, to the music inside.

Unlike you, I am not gay, but I lost my best friend to the first wave of AIDS, along with many other good and talented friends. Reading about your life with the diagnosis for going on 30 years now helps me immensely in understanding what he went through. It was very painful to bring all those memories back up again, but in a way good too.

Like you, and like many folks that I think will like this book, I have always felt ill at ease and different, yearning for acclaim and acceptance. Me? I performed comedy for years – now I write. Your writing here is great, too – clear and concise and straightforward, but evocative. I didn’t realize until I got to a certain point in the book that David Hajdu helped you out with it. He is one of my favorite non-fiction writers, someone I read and re-read to remind myself how to communicate on the page effectively. (Don’t worry – you do not sound like him, you sound like you. The best writing mentors help their pupils sound like themselves.)

Jazz really sustains me as a writer, the idea that you just have to swing with what you’ve got. And then you write: “In jazz, it’s individuality, not adherence to a standard conception of excellence, that matters most. . . . Difference matters – in fact, it’s an asset rather than a liability. There is no describing how exhilarating this epiphany was for me, as a person who always felt different from other people. In jazz, difference is the key element that makes artistry possible.” Amen.

It’s great to read about all these aspects of your life – how you approach creative projects, your struggles with addictions (I’m right there with you, again), and just the contours of the changes wrought by time and circumstance as they cut and shape your life and work. Thanks for being brave about putting all that down on paper – it certainly inspires me to be as rigorous. Didn’t someone once say that all the good stuff is hidden inside the pain?

I was sorry to read of your recent and intense health struggles. I am just coming out of a period of being physically and mentally ailing to the point that I was in bed for three months – nothing compared to what you went through, but nothing like anything I’ve experienced before. Reading those passages was an inspiration as well, although I’d just as soon we could all skip that shit and just have the inspiration straight. Still, reading about your perseverance came at just the right time for me. Thanks for the help.

And hey, I still have a ways to go before I get through your discography, but the one I’m most grateful for isn’t even on there. In 1999, you made, in collaboration with Beth Kephart and Art Lande (Art lives near me here in Boulder) Nourishing the Caregiver, which I found providentially at the time my mother was dying from cancer., and many nights when I couldn’t sleep after a day of taking her to her chemo I’d put it on and feel better. It’s the best medicine I possess.

Anyway, that’s basically it. As a creative person, and simply as a person, your book gets me where I live and makes me feel connected, not wrong, like I’m not so different after all. I think that if the world doesn’t grant you the feeling of fitting in, and if the impetus is strong enough, you can build an entire culture out of yourself, and it ends up being a gift that others can inhabit as well. I think that is exactly what you have done and are doing. 

I hope you are feeling OK, being productive, and having fun with Scott. Thanks for everything!

Sincerely yours,

Brad Weismann

The NRR Project #46: 'Swanee,' Jolson, and the problem of blackface

‘Swanee’

Composer: George Gershwin

Lyricist: Irving Caesar

Performed by Al Jolson

Recorded: January 8, 1920

2:34

For decades, male entertainers in America had two things – a tuxedo and an Al Jolson impression. Anyone could get a laugh of recognition simply by going down on one knee and calling out “Mammy!” The World’s Greatest Entertainer was, for much of his career, precisely that.

Jolson was a performing marvel. At the time, vaudevillians and variety artists hid their hunger for audience approval under a veneer of stylish nonchalance. Compared to them, Jolson was a dynamo, a sweaty, energetic pulse of naked need. He had big, rubbery facial features and a resonant voice, both essential in being heard and seen in the farthest reaches of the cavernous, unamplified theaters of the day. He was one of the first to treat singing a song like he was acting out a three-minute playlet, to sing TO the audience, not just at it. His energy was an embrace that theatergoers felt obliged to return.

Jolson, the son of a rabbi, was born in Lithuania and migrated to America with his family at a young age. Motherless at age 14, he and his brother Harry began busking, singing in the streets for money. After 15 years on the road, Jolson finally opened a New York show as the lead in La Belle Paree in 1911. For then until his stage retirement in 1926, he was the number one theatrical attraction in the country.

He also worked in blackface. This was a holdover from the tradition of the American minstrel show, which had seen its heyday from the 1840s through the end of the 19^th century. Although rapidly becoming an anachronism, the idea of a white man acting out the caricature of a black man was still strong in, and acceptable to, the general audience. Jolson excelled at “selling” songs, especially in wringing out all the pathos from sentimental ballads, especially those by Stephen Foster, which were written expressly for minstrelsy (“My Old Kentucky Home,” “Old Folks at Home”). Part of the license for acting out vulnerability and feeling onstage was, for many white performers of the era, came from adopting a concept of blackness that was inseparable from identifying it with childlike immaturity and a lack of emotional repression.

It’s painful now to see the incongruity of one ethnic minority mocking another to make itself acceptable to the mainstream -- A Jew playing a Negro for affluent white, largely Christian viewers. Jolson was not unconscious of the dilemma, and went out of his way throughout his career to befriend and stand up for black entertainers. Still, he made a fortune out of singlehandedly perpetuating a demeaning, stereotypical representation of blackness that otherwise might have died out much sooner.

At the edge of the Jazz Age, pop songs about the ‘dear old South’ were still big. The legacy of Foster and other sentimental balladeers was powerful, and the Victorian era was rife with maudlin nostalgia in vocal music. Odes to times past, the rural homestead, and the balms of motherhood filled the music racks of pianos across the land – particularly poignant in a time when the American population was moving rapidly from farms to cities.

“Swanee” is the archetype of that kind of song. Jolson had a hit two years earlier with the similar “Rock-a-Bye Your Baby with a Dixie Melody,” and a year later would score again with “My Mammy,” but “Swanee” was his biggest hit, selling two million records and more than a million copies of the sheet music. Perhaps what distinguishes it is its composer – George Gershwin.

The 20-year-old Gershwin wrote it for a 1919 revue, after which it languished until Jolson heard Gershwin play it a party (some say at a bordello). Gershwin had already been working for five years in Tin Pan Alley as a song plugger, one of many who would demonstrate and promote new pieces for performers and laymen alike. After the success of “Swanee,” his first and biggest hit, Gershwin would focus on composing for the stage and the concert hall for the rest of his short life.

The song is a perfect vehicle for Jolson’s style. Its lyrics are typically plaintive and yearning, but they are couched in a springy, energetic, propulsive melody utilizing percussive block chords. It is not played as much as it is stamped out on the keys. The opening phrases charge up the scale – “I’ve been away from you a long time/I never thought I’d miss you so”; the next are framed in melodramatic staccato –“Somehow I feel/Your love was real/Near you I long to be.”

For the chorus, the shift from minor to major key brightens the tone, the repetitive “Swanee, how I love ya, how I love ya” like a freight train chugging along. Gershwin makes a narrative out of the piece, again turning to stair-step phrasing – “I’d give the world – to – be/Among the folks – in – (and the payoff, in a falling phrase) D-I-X-I-E . . . “ It’s easy to remember, infectiously singable.

The bridge brings in quotations from earlier songs – the explicit “I love the old folks at home” phrase from Foster, but also in its use of a subtle musical paraphrase of “Listen to the Mockingbird,” an 1855 gem, which can easily be hummed along in harmony with “Swanee, Swanee/ I am coming back to Swanee.” (If remembered at all today, “Mockingbird” is as the opening theme music, in parodic form, for the Three Stooges shorts.)

By song’s end, it’s become a triumphal celebration of return, a glorious anticipation of trouble no more, almost a march. No wonder it was a hit. Despite its racist connotations, you can’t deny it’s a nifty piece of work.

Jolson gradually weaned himself away from blackface, but not before performing in it in the first sound feature film, The Jazz Singer, in 1927, and again and again in special appearances in film and on radio.

At his memorial shrine at Hillside Memorial Park in Los Angeles, a bronze statue of Jolson shows him on one knee, hands spread, just as he posed on stage at the end of belting his crowd-pleasing songs. You can’t tell if he’s wearing blackface or not.

The National Recording Registry Project tracks one writer’s expedition through all the recordings in the National Recording Registry in chronological order. Up next: William Jennings Bryan recreates his 1896 'Cross of Gold' speech.

The NRR Project #45: 'Crazy Blues' (1920)

‘Crazy Blues’

Composer: Perry Bradford

Performed by Mamie Smith and Her Jazz Hounds

Recorded: August 10, 1920

3:26

To begin with, the blues were never really just the blues. By the time Mamie Smith recorded “Crazy Blues” in 1920, becoming the first African-American to sing the blues on record, blues concepts and forms had already infiltrated American music. However, her recording sold more than a million copies, sparking a storm of interest and a host of followers, and codifying a genre of music.

Pioneers such as Ma Rainey, while on vaudeville tours at the turn of last century, heard early blues sung by non-professionals and started to pick up the vocabulary, pulse, and feeling of the music. However, when it came to black music, the mainstream taste of the time ran to what were termed “coon” songs – racist and derogatory comedy songs that emphasized stereotyped black behaviors, sung by “coon shouters” (oddly, these were mostly white women, in and out of “blackface” makeup).

Even African-American musical giant W.C. Handy, composer, bandleader, and “father of the blues,” infused elements of ragtime and proto-jazz into his pioneering compositions such as “Memphis Blues” in 1912. That tune was first sung on record by a Caucasian, Morton Harvey, two years later. It was a staid rendition, not “hot” nor deeply felt, delivered as a kind of novelty number. Soon, these pseudo-blues became the province of white female singers such as Nora Bayes and Marion Harris.

Pianist, singer, and composer Perry Bradford convinced Okeh Records’ A&R director Fred Hager to take a chance and record Mamie Smith. She had appeared in Bradford’s 1918 revue Made in Harlem, and she had a strong, clear contralto voice that transferred onto acetate well using the acoustic recording techniques of the day. Despite reported pushback from groups that didn’t like the idea of a black singer making records, Hager went ahead.

Revenue trumped racism. Copies of the record sold by the hundreds of thousands, not just to African-Americans customers but whites as well, rich as well as poor. Here was a genre of music, a sibling of newly-born jazz, which really connected with listeners and exploded into the big time. Soon singers such as Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Alberta Hunter were drawing audiences all across the country. Soon, despite the record industry’s attempt to ghettoize the music by classifying African-American recordings as “race records,” they were welcomed into everyone’s consciousness.

Smith’s accompanists were black, too – Ernest Elliott on clarinet, Leroy Parker on violin, Johnny Dunn on cornet, Walter “Dope” Andrews on trombone, and either Willie “The Lion” Smith or Bradford himself on piano – both men claimed the distinction in later years. “Crazy Blues” is not traditional, straight blues – Bradford artfully interpolated enough variation to make it unique. However, all the elements are there – the repeated phrases, the mournful elegance of the lyrics, and most importantly the undisguised feeling that distinguished the blues from the pallid offerings of the pop hits of the day such as “I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles” and “Whispering.”

The raucous interplay of the instrumentalists are in keeping with the organized chaos of early jazz orchestration, none of it laid out on paper but rather made up on the spot in what were known as “head” or “hum” arrangements. The strong rhythmic sense propels the song, particularly the step-down note sequences between chord changes (that familiar “wah-wah-wah” sound). Dope Andrews’ performance on trombone is a distinctive and delightful feature, using the “tailgate” or “smear” slide technique that allowed the trombonist to flow from one note to the next with ripe abandon.

Smith sings full-out, bending the notes or sidling up to them rather than landing on them with the precision of a conventional vocalist. It’s an urgent, raw sound, one that demands attention. Even though the lyrics are despairing (“I can’t sleep at night/I can’t eat a bite”), there’s something positive and assertive in her delivery that affirms a key part of the blues – the idea that the singer is working through their emotions, purging themselves of the hopelessness that inspired the song in the first place, using the music to come out on top. No wonder people were knocked out by it.

Interestingly, the last verse of “Crazy Blues” is often altered or omitted by singers and scholars. It’s an egregious example of minority-on-minority racism. “I’m gonna do like a Chinaman, go and get some hop/Get myself a gun, and shoot myself a cop,” Smith sings.

Prejudice against Asian immigrants, and Asian-Americans, was just as rife as anti-black sentiment at the time. Anti-“Chinese” riots had been recorded since the 1870s, and the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 was on the books. The stereotype of Chinese as pidgin-English-speaking opium addicts who constituted a “Yellow Peril” that consciously sought to destroy Western civilization was entrenched in the culture. Bradford cast his despairing singer into an imagined situation where they could end their misery by bringing on death through killing a police officer, a disturbing projection of a transgressive desire.

Later performers would change the words; on Leon Redbone’s 1977 album Double Time, he artfully slurs and mumbles the offending passage. The lyrics in question are a blemish on an otherwise transformative, landmark composition.

The National Recording Registry Project tracks one writer’s expedition through all the recordings in the National Recording Registry in chronological order. Up next: Al Jolson sings Swanee.

The NRR Project #44: 'Tiger Rag'

‘Tiger Rag’

Composition origin unknown

Performed by the Original Dixieland Jazz Band

Recorded: March 25, 1918

3:11

  

Define jazz. Go ahead, give it a shot. Its very slipperiness, its looseness, its inclusiveness, its constant evolution and convolution, is perhaps a definition in itself. Robert Christgau termed it “inventing meaning while letting loose,” and that’s close enough for me.

The birth of recorded jazz is here with this squawky recording of five white guys playing music created by African- and Latin-Americans, an appropriation familiar to students of this country’s cultural history. To the uninitiated, it sounds like a riot in a music store – a raucous and random compendium of blatts and squawks, trills and slides, polyphonic discoordination. The mainstream initially characterized it as a fleeting novelty, nothing more.

Although the Original Dixieland Jass (later, Jazz) Band copyrighted the tune, its origins are much older. “Tiger Rag” had long been considered a “standard” by the early jazz bands in New Orleans, where it was born without historical documentation. It went by various names – “Weary Weasel,” “Number Two Blues,” “Play Jack Carey” (after the New Orleans trombonist who made his instrument growl), and others. It’s a mashup – various cels of repeated phrases that serve as templates, beds for improvisations, call and response, the fragmentation and juggling of notes among the players. (The Band originally recorded the piece on August 17, 1917, but they did so for Vocalion using a strange and soon to be outmoded vertical-cut recording process, instead of the familiar lateral, outside-in tracking that became standard.)

But there’s a through-line underneath, a strong, syncopated, swinging motor that drives an aggressive assertion of unity through diversity, a loose confederation of soloists sharing time and tempo. Jazz burst forth in a tepid time musically, drugged with delicacy, sentiment, and the insipid imitation of European song models. The only “stirring” music was written for marching bands. The bold, insistent assertion of “Tiger Rag” made it a hit.

The bearers of these glad tidings were musicians from New Orleans, brought up first to Chicago and then New York to capitalize on the sudden demand for hot music to dance to in tony nightclubs. When Cornetist Nick LaRocca, clarinetist Larry Shields, trombonist Eddie Edwards, pianist Henry Ragas, and drummer Tony Sbarbaro began their gig at Reisenweber’s Café in Manhattan in early 1917, they sparked a craze and started a musical revolution. Soon trainloads of Crescent City musicians were headed north to make some money and spread the new musical gospel.

It helped immensely that jazz was a vernacular music, rather than an art music that required years of training and a submission to an academic tradition and repertoire, dragged down into dullness through tradition and politesse. It was rough, crude, participatory, and eminently replicable, something you picked up “by ear” through participation and kept in unwritten “head arrangements,” a trial-and-error ethos that’s stuck with it to this day and kept it vital. With jazz there was freedom and a chance for the individual voice to soar – even if it had to roar above the other creatures in its pandemonious musical zoo.

“Tiger Rag,” covered countless times in countless ways since its debut recording, became one of the foundations of jazz development, along with other gems like “When the Saints Go Marching In,” “Indiana,” “Didn’t He Ramble,” “Careless Love,” “St. Louis Blues,” “Keep A-Knockin’,” and other tunes that would influence everything that came after them.

The National Recording Registry Project tracks one writer’s expedition through all the recordings in the National Recording Registry in chronological order. Up next: Mamie Smith sings Crazy Blues.

The NRR Project #43: 'After You've Gone'

‘After You’ve Gone’

Music: Turner Layton

Lyrics: Henry Creamer

Sung by Marion Harris

Recorded: October 18, 1918

3:22

“After You’ve Gone” represents a turning point. Up until it became a hit, “black” and “white” musics stayed in their respective corners. Bluesy music wasn’t even thought to be fit for recording. When it finally was, it was classified as fit only for “race records,” not for right-thinking Caucasians, who were still awash in sentimental ballads and waltz tunes. After it hit, the mainstream move away from the stilted, pallid songs of the day began in earnest, sparking the collective creation of the Great American Songbook.

The tune was composed by African-American vaudeville partners Layton and Creamer, who supplied many shows and revues around Manhattan with material – the Ziegfield Follies, for one. Though civil rights were still abysmal, finally black artists were finding their work valued. It gave them a toehold in the entertainment world that would lead to other opportunities.

The song is definitely built on a blues lament – it’s a classic you’ll-be-sorry-for-leaving-me song. The cadences are long and loping, with a series of descending chords that make the singer feel as though they’ve stepping down into the phrases. Meanwhile, the poignant runs up and down to the “gone” notes actually convey woefulness. Songwriting is starting not to tell but to show, to embody strong and intense emotion in the music itself, in compact unis, all tied together to reinforce an overarching theme. The architecture of pop is under invention.

The lyrics are direct and conversational, and reflect the growing idea in American songwriting that a song is personal, sung to an imaginary individual, instead of just belted out to the crowd. The song tells a story, and conveys a perspective – a two-minute miracle. This, along with a melody that welcomes harmony and variation, resulted in it being one of the most recorded standards ever.

The delivery of Marion Harris in this recording is stiff and polite. It would take the 1927 recordings made by Last of the Red Hot Mamas, Sophie Tucker (covered earlier her in the series) and Empress of the Blues Bessie Smith to really give the material the swing and heft it deserves. Since then, it’s been recorded countless times, in all kinds of tempi and arrangements. It’s indestructible.

The National Recording Registry Project tracks one writer’s expedition through all the recordings in the National Recording Registry in chronological order. Up next: Tiger Rag. 

The NRR Project #42: Early Heifetz recordings

Acoustic recordings

Jascha Heifetz, violin

53 sides recorded between Nov. 9. 1917 and Dec. 19, 1924

What would it be like to be the best ever at something? The epitome, the paragon, the pattern of perfection? It is painful, wonderful? Both? Is the expression of genius-level talent inevitable?

Case in point -- Jascha Heifetz. Born in Lithuania in 1901, he was the son of a violin teacher who noted his responsiveness to his playing in the child’s infancy. Lessons began at age 2, and his status as a prodigy spread quickly. By 1911, he was giving outdoor concerts in Odessa that drew thousands.

The looming Russian Revolution prompted the Heifetzes to flee the hard way – to the East, across Siberia and the Pacific to America. Heifetz’s appearance at Carnegie Hall on October 25, 1917 electrified the musical world and led his lifetime recording relationship with Victor Records (later RCA).

The records in this selection were made over 16 sessions, all using the acoustic recording process. This literal analog method of reproduction was best for brass, all right for vocals, piano, and high-register strings – and deadly for many others without a crisp sound that cycled between 250 and 2500 Herz. Heifetz’s strength, speed, accuracy all come through loud and clear.

Heifetz’s preternatural technical skill meant that he could leap over the first and highest hurdle to instrumental mastery. (Yes, he practiced diligently nonetheless.) After a century of so of robust, flamboyant, and sentimental showmanship in violin soloists, Heifetz focused on eliminating all affectation – paring everything back to the notes on the page and how to express them as cleanly as possible. This led to accusations of robotic performances later in his career. However, it’s evident that he was merely locked into a laser-like intensity of focus that precluded excessive gestures.

The pieces recorded here are very much a part of the violin repertory of the time – concert pieces, many considered “light,” lyrical works by Sarasate, Paganini, transcriptions by Fritz Kreisler, the last of whom was the top-dog fiddler of the day. Heifetz subordinates himself to the needs of the piece he is playing rather than imposing a style. His dedication to clarity, clarity, clarity markedly narrowed the gap between the composers’ intents and the listeners’ ears.

The National Recording Registry Project tracks one writer’s expedition through all the recordings in the National Recording Registry in chronological order. Up next: After You’ve Gone.