From the wonderful edisontinfoil.com -- the doll, and the hand-cranked player inside her.
Talking doll
cylinders
The Edison Phonograph
Toy Manufacturing Company
November 1888
Nightmare time!
As discussed in the last NRR Project entry, Thomas Edison
was all about finding a profitable use to which to put his inventions. Here’s
one of the terrifying consequences of that impetus – the Edison Talking Doll.
For decades, clever arrangements of bladders and reeds in
doll bodies had created the culturally familiar talking doll – one that
exclaimed “mama” and flipped open its eyes when stood. Edison dreamed of dolls
speaking with children’s voices, even telling stories to them, and animal toys
with real barks and whistles.
Here’s how the Edison
Talking Doll worked. A small tin or wax cylinder capable of 12 to 15 seconds of
recorded sound was housed in the torso of a child’s doll. Hand-turning the
playback crank would play the recording of a nursery rhyme. The eight surviving
recordings feature “Twinkle, twinkle, little star,” “Hickory dickory dock,”
Jack and Jill,” “Little Jack Horner,” “There was a little girl,” and “Now I lay
me down to sleep.” The National Park Service is the ne plus ultra for info on this, including recordings.
The recordings were individually, by young women using children’s
voices. The effect is past unnverving – plaintive, scratchy voices like the
kind you hear in the horror film right before the doll stabs you. Given our
uneasy associations with dummies, automata, mannequins and the like, it’s not
surprising these dolls were not as appealing as they were conceived to be.
Other problems – the hand crank meant that the playback was
uneven and warped if not turned careful, the cylinder wore out quickly, and
they couldn’t be switched out, either. Most reviews of the day classified the
playback as unintelligible. Patrick
Feaster’s masterfully thorough essay on the subject can be found here.
It’s useful to consider this dead end. Edison was constantly
throwing off ideas, like sparks off a flywheel. His laboratory was an immense
research and development complex. The persistent inventor and entrepreneur
wasn’t afraid to spend some money to test a product’s viability. Decades before
Teddy Ruxpin came long, Edison abandoned the project, buried the recordings in
a field, and sold the dolls. Scant few remain to tell the story.
The National Recording
Registry Project tracks one writer’s expedition through all the recordings in
the National Recording Registry in chronological order. Up next: ‘Fifth
Regiment March’ and ‘The Pattison
Waltz.’
Thomas Edison was one sharp operator. His first patent was
for a vote recorder – which no one bought. Why? Because it made it harder for politicians
to steal elections. The lesson Edison took from this was to focus on inventions
people wanted. In this, he was far more than an inventor – he was an
entrepreneur, a self-promoter. It seems fitting, then, that his should be the
first recorded voice we are intended to hear.
His cylinder recordings are the first commercially feasible
ones. Sound conducted through a horn vibrates a diaphragm, which in turn moves
a stylus; the stylus etches the resulting groove into the spinning cylinder.
Reversing the process by spinning the cylinder again and placing the stylus in
the groove allows the sound to replay via the horn.
Originally, the musician or speaker had to stand in front of
the horn all day, repeating the performance, in order to make copies; eventually,
mechanical multiples could be produced, but the loss of sound quality was
great. Cylinder coatings went from tinfoil to wax to cellulose to plastic,
until cylinders lost out to cheaper, less bulky discs. The number of effective
playbacks in a cylinder went from fewer than 20 to 100 or more – another reason
to switch to the more reliable, if more brittle, disc records.
Here Edison promotes not only his invention but himself, the
genial but commanding science-magician, the “Wizard of Menlo Park.” He
describes the kind of round-the-world journey that could only be contemplated
by people well-off enough to afford his new invention – Edison knows his new
toy will best be marketed to the leisure class.
Edison relates a string of cities this imaginary journey
takes him through – Liverpool, London, Calais, “Paree,” a litany of
destinations the smart traveler would not miss. Edison cracks a joke about
being laid up with cholera in “Bombay” for a few weeks, and continues through
Singapore, Hong Kong, Tokyo, and so on back home. This is the itinerary of the
Cook’s Tour, the pioneering travel agency of the 19th century. In
the wake of the “Grand Tour” usually taken by upper-class travelers in Europe
for 200 years, package tours such as Cook’s and others starting mining the
pockets of the culturally and socially ambitious nouveau riche and expanding
middle class. The Internet Archive has an excellent recording of it here.
Edison is selling not just a product, not just a process,
but an assumption that he’s discussing a common, and reachable, aspiration.
He’s selling a vision of a wider-ranging life.
The National Recording
Registry Project tracks one writer’s expedition through all the recordings in
the National Recording Registry in chronological order. Up next: The Edison
Talking Doll cylinders.
A phonautogram track, in close-up -- analog recording, like waves on the shore.
Phonautograms
Edouard-Leon
Scott de Martinville
c.
1853-1861
Though not officially listed as first in the Registry, this
pivotal set of recordings was brought to life 149 years after they were made.
It’s only natural, I guess, that the first recorded sound would be someone
singing a dirty song.
Edouard-Leon Scott de Martinville, who invented the
phonautogram, was not looking to make what we think of as a recording,
something you “play back.” A bookseller turned amateur physiologist, he sought
to reproduce, make visual, sound waves as they affected the eardrum. To this
end, he attached a boar-bristle stylus to the narrow end of a container,
leaving it just touching a soot-blackened cylinder on a screw. Shouting,
singing, or playing into the concave sound-catcher, the vibrations would be
crudely transferred onto the paper.
Scott was aware of the archival possibilities, and saw in
the tracings a kind of code too be codified and interpreted, but by the naked
eye, not via mechanical reproduction. “Will one be able to preserve for
the future generation some features of the diction of one of those eminent
actors, those grand artists who die without leaving behind them the faintest
trace of their genius?” he wrote.
Members of the incredibly helpful site FirstSounds.org
conceived and spearheaded methods of digitally reading and reproducing
high-resolution copies of the original lampblacked prints. The result is
handful of precious voices from 1860.
Interestingly, they are readable today only because Scott
included some 250-Hertz tuning-fork calibration tones, a simple but effective
way to insure a constant reading rate. If the tone doesn’t waver, the recording
is running at correct speed. A few earlier phonautograms he made, from 1857,
can’t be interpreted because no one knows at what speed or speeds (the
recording device was hand-cranked, adding more variables to the problem) they
were recorded.
Audio literally "tracked" through a recording medium -- the first sounds from 1860.
The first sound, from April 9, 1860, is Scott singing “Au
clair de lune” (“By the light of the moon”), a familiar French folk song from
the 18th century, the lyrics of which turn to double-entendre pretty
quickly. Someone needs a pen, someone’s fire is getting lit, and a guy and a
gal get it on. Nice. FirstSounds's top-notch site houses all the recordings of Martinville's work. As acoustic scientists worked on the project, there is plenty of precise, helpful data to be found.
The key to understanding pre-digital recording technology is
the imaginative leap of analogy. Sounds are waves, invisible but waves
nonetheless, in evidence like the tide against the shore, or wheat rolling and
rippling in the summer wind. They are palpable, capable of measurement and
description. Looking at an enlarged segment of phonautogram, it resembles
nothing so much as calligraphic brushstrokes on rice paper, furrows on a
hillside. Like an animal's track, sound leaves its wake in a medium that captures it, freezes it forever -- or until the medium is lost.
Even from an attempt this crude, we receive a message. No wonder it
once was considered akin to magic. It’s a haunting kind of time travel.
The National Recording
Registry Project tracks one writer’s expedition through all the recordings in
the National Recording Registry in chronological order. Up next: ‘Around
the World on the Phonograph.’
The National Recording Registry Project tracks one avid listener and writer’s expedition through all the recordings in the National Recording Registry in chronological order.
INTRODUCTION
What sounds do we want to remember?
For many years, the National Film Registry has drawn
attention to its annually-expanding list of movies deemed culturally,
historically, or aesthetically significant. A few years ago, in addition to all
the other writing I’ve done, mostly about the arts, I began what I thought was
a unique pursuit – to find, see, and review every film on the list in
chronological order. As of 2015, 675 films are on that list.
Of course, in my research I found Daniel Eagan’s admirable
and comprehensive 2009 book “America’s Film Legacy,” which is precisely that. His
monumental effort notwithstanding, however, I decided to press on. Just cussed,
I guess. I am still forging ahead – you can track my progress at Film Patrol,
through my NFR Project. If nothing else, it’s providing me with quite an
education and a lot of food for thought.
The National Film Registry began in 1989. Little-known,
though, the National Recording Registry has been pursuing the same path since
2002. Each year, it selects 25 recordings for its list, with input from the
public, just as the National Film Registry does. They “showcase the range and
diversity of American recorded sound heritage in order to increase preservation
awareness.”
What better way to do that than wade through them, in order,
as with the National Film Registry? The recordings are well-documented by the
Library of Congress, and each is given a brief but insightful description by a
scholar – an excellently curated project.
So why continue? Just cussed, I guess. I think that this
kind of journey through time will be another enlightening one. I haven’t looked
through the list extensively. I don’t know what I’ll find, or what I’ll think
of it. What will I hear? Why is it there? What does it mean?
More practically – where can we find these recordings, if at all? Why are they not compiled and collected in a public digital space so that everyone can learn about them, exchange ideas about them, and let them inspire new work?
The fact that the Film Registry gets all the press begs the
question as to whether we are primarily a visual culture or not. Film has its
own universal language of sign and gesture, but what about sound? Does it
resonate with us as deeply as image?
Let’s listen and find out.
Tune in Fridays at noon for new chapters. Up first: Haunting phonautograms from 1860.
After six months’ practice, I can play Bach’s Prelude for
the Cello Suite No. 1!
Well, the first six measures. At about one-quarter tempo. At this
rate, the complete piece will be ready for public performance in May, 2018.
That’s OK, though. I’m making music, which I haven’t done in
years. My weapon of choice – the humble ukulele, beloved instrument of amateurs
worldwide. Mine is named Fred. How did this happen?
I am learning thanks to the Hal Leonard Ukulele Method. They
know their boy – not only is there an instruction manual, but an instructional
CD and DVD as well. Failure is pretty well foredoomed. If they can help me to
make purposeful noises on this fancy hollow plank I’m holding, they know their
stuff.
It sat around the house for a year first. Here’s how it
wandered in. Our school district insists on one year of instrumental music for
the kids, which I think is great until I have to pay for it. Our youngest went
for the clarinet.
Fortunately (for them), our local music dealers are a
piratical crew who make the bulk of their gains off this dictum. The deposit on
a year’s instrument rental is not inexorbitant, and it is nonrefundable to
boot. It IS, however, applicable to an instrument. There was just enough for
the uke and the training doodads.
I was hoping one of the kids would pick it up. Nope.
Finally, I grabbed it myself one day when there was something else really important
to do. Wow! Did I learn fast! No. No, not really. I can now play “Go Tell Aunt
Rhody” r-e-e-e-e-l-y slowly, and clear a room really quickly. (And why in the
hell did she die in the mill pond a-standin’ on her head? This bothers me on
hot, windy, moonless nights.)
My 12-year-old observes my nightly practice. “It’s
obsessive,” she remarks with clinical detachment. I don’t think it’s a midlife
crisis. I have no illusions about becoming some kind of Renegade Ukulele God, a
virtuoso strummer born late in life, destined to tour the world, itsy bitsy
instrument in hand, stunning the crowd, forcing my stupid celebrity political
beliefs down interviewers’ throats, women draped all over me . . . OK, maybe I
have thought about it a little.
We were lucky in our house growing up to be exposed to many
different kinds of music. To begin with, there was church music. Every entrance
into the sanctuary on Sundays was accompanied by organ voluntaries, booming and
rolling through the high-ceilinged space. Hymns are a large part of Lutheran
music, which meant that I got to listen to massive amounts of Bach.
There are sporadic outbreaks of music-making in the family
past. My great-grandmother had an upright piano in her parlor, draped with
sheet music. Sometimes her daughter, my great-aunt Emma, would plunk out some
of the old tunes and we would all sing. The keys were genuine, yellowing ivory
that we were not to touch. My dad played trombone in marching band. And, when
we cleaned out my grandparents’ farm in Iowa, 20 years ago, we unearthed an
old, battered, unstrung uke that supposedly my grandfather wooed my grandmother
with.
My father’s side of the family was by far more hip – and
somewhat pretentious. My dad’s parents had all the latest sound equipment,
including one of the first reel-to-reel tape recorders. They had stacks and
stacks of brittle, heavy 78 rpm records: Al Jolson, Bing Crosby, Fats Waller,
Gene Autry, Spike Jones, the Andrews Sisters. They were also fond of operettas,
Gilbert and Sullivan, and what was then referred to as “light classical.”
Mom’s side definitely had less elevated tastes, and as a
result, were much more interesting. They were into country, the National Barn
Dance, Hank Williams, Roy Acuff. The hymns they sang were more heartfelt – “Blessed
Assurance,” “In the Garden,” and “Blessed Be the Tie That Binds,” songs that skewed
closer to evangelical practice. My mother’s enthusiasm for folk and protest
music swept us along, and we knew all of Woody Guthrie’s songs, and Pete Seeger’s,
and Paul Robeson’s. And of course, we worshiped daily at the Church of Johnny Cash. (She had a sideline interest in musical theater that inspired
my future involvement in it.)
We couldn’t afford instruments. So we sang. I spent 90
percent of my time in high school in the theater or the choir room. I never
learned how to read music, either. It wasn’t important at the time. We had
excellent teachers. The energy would flow upward from my feet, pushing up
through my breath, out the top of my head, clear cascading sound. When we were
focused, working as one, it was like launching the sun into the space in front
of us. Music manifested its own sacred space.
Now I am finding that feeling again, at my kitchen table
after dinner each night. After some practice, the instrument seems to warm up,
become more pliable. The strings follow my fingers’ suggestions, and I am making
magic, pulled out of myself again, but the feeling is smaller, quieter now, as
though I were cradling a song like you would a child.
My voice is certainly not a bell-like baritone any longer. I
can still sing, though, and that’s all that matters. I’m not going back to the
stage, or near any open mic. I can finally enjoy playing the bluegrass and blues I love so much. I am trying to suss out a little jazz, too, like the chord changes to "Compared to What." I can even pick up a little Motorhead or Clancy Brothers. Plunking my ridiculous lyre, I can sing Hank
Williams, and Bing Crosby. I can stutteringly finger-pick a little Bach. And
when I do, it all comes back – us kids singing along to records, pretending to
be The Student Prince or Ko-ko, the Lord High Executioner of Titipu. My mother’s
voice in church and in the kitchen. The connection.
And, of course, I am simply having fun, and very grateful
that I remembered how.
There was one thing all the boys in our neighborhood was
keen on in the 1960s – World War II. Our martial ardor was stoked by the flood
of film and television of the time replaying the war for us. We all tuned in to
“Combat!,” “Twelve O’clock High,” and “The Rat Patrol.” These took their cue
from the popularity of the popular war films of the time – “Battle of the
Bulge,” “The Guns of Navarone,” “The Longest Day,” “The Dirty Dozen.”
It wasn’t the propagandistic stuff made during the war,
although we could catch plenty of that on late-night TV. It was the propaganda
of the generation after. Already the Western, which dominated 1950s media, was
collapsing in popularity. It was time to culturally process the war through
mass media.
Each crop of surviving soldiers takes decades to work
through and integrate these experiences, and some never do. Men who had fought
the war were middle-aged fathers by now; the horrors they perpetrated and endured
were repackaged into entertainments, made largely bloodless, noble, and above
all necessary. Above all, these films featured scads and loads of
bucket-helmeted, gray-uniformed Jerries getting slaughtered in every way
imaginable.
This was our male paradigm. The warrior, reluctant to kill but grimly determined to defeat the enemy, ready to sacrifice his own life if need be. The G. I. Joe doll, Sgt. Rock, "Star Spangled War." The same archetype adored by the fanatics, the suicide bombers, the mass murderers. No cause is unrighteous in its own eyes. A fart has no nose.
As the youngest and scrawniest of my gang, and gifted quite
inadvertently with a Teutonic surname, I was volunteered to play the bad guy,
over and over again. I learned a few things – it is much more fun to play the
villain, for instance. But by and large it got old quick. I was tired of dying
a thousand different ways and coming home covered with the dust I’d bit all afternoon.
Oddly enough, the great-grandparent with the German name had
adopted it on arrival in the U.S. – we should rightly be named, like most good
Danes, Andersen. I’m not sure if this ever caused trouble for my Dad’s side of
the family, but I do know that my mother’s father, a good solid 100-percent
Kraut, knocked the umlaut off his moniker when the war broke out, rendering its
pronunciation a bit more un-German. He also volunteered for the U.S. Army
cavalry, and made it all the way to New York before peace broke out in November
1918.
Evidently, anti-German sentiment during World War I was
pronounced. I first ran into mention of it in Steinbeck’s remembrances – the
neighbors looked askance at his family until the war was over. Groucho Marx as
a young vaudeville comic had been playing a German-stereotype character,
already euphemized to “Dutch comic.” The night the Lusitania was sunk in 1915,
he changed his act.
“If I had come out as a German comic, they would have killed
me,” he recalls on his 1972 concert album “An Evening with Groucho.” He changed
his makeup “and now I was a Jew comic,” he continues. “I had never been a Jew
comic before!”
The threat was real. 4,000 German sympathizers were
imprisoned in the U.S. from 1917 through 1918. The Red Cross wouldn’t accept
volunteers with German surnames. Business names and street signs were changed;
they stopped teaching German in many schools. Sauerkraut became liberty
cabbage, dachshunds became liberty pups. German books were banned or burned. A
few men were killed by angry mobs.
Sound familiar?
Each rolling wave of immigrants to America has had to run
the gauntlet of prejudice. The Irish, the Germans, the Polish, the Italians,
the Mexicans, the Japanese, the Chinese, the Vietnamese, the Russians.
Suspected, disliked, stereotyped, and acted against. Now anyone vaguely Middle
Eastern is tagged as a Muslim and a violent one at that. A bit harder to hide a
complexion than a last name.
Of course, the Nazis were the perfect enemy. Evil personified. No problem killing them and anyone associated with them. Our polar opposite, we thought.
The lines of prejudice were redrawn after World War II. The
Germans, formerly one solid ethnic unit to despise, was now split in half.
Democratic Germans were good, Communist Germans were evil. The Red Menace was harder
to typify, differentiate, personify. The Cold War was fought by identical men
on each side, all wearing gray flannel suits, indistinguishable.
But . . . we still had memories of the perfect enemy, the Nazis.
Being seemingly perfectly inhuman, it was easy and guilt-free to kick their
asses in copious amounts in our fantasy lives. 1968’s “Where Eagles Dare” held
the record for decades for most German soldiers killed – here’s a funny video
tallying the count:
Steven Spielberg, that not-so-obscure filmmaker of my
generation, has related a fondness for this preposterous film. I wonder
sometimes if we all got desensitized to body counts in this manner. It certainly
seems like Spielberg follows in the wake of 1960’s World War II films when he
created the violent extravaganzas of “Raiders of the Lost Ark” and “Temple of
Doom.” Spielberg’s action films often mimic video games, with stage after stage
of peril to be run through and their inexhaustible supply of baddies to be
wasted. After Spielberg, the Matrix movies, Tarentino lately, and many other franchises and standalone
film sagas filled with mass, righteous killings.
So what’s the appeal? John Cleese has the most succinct
explanation of what shadow projection is:
Sound familiar? In a year when our shadow selves seemed to
leap into the light, brandishing weapons and killing innocent strangers in the
name of slaying dragons, I hope we can learn that these arbitrary distinctions
shouldn’t endanger us, that the misperceptions of others won’t get us killed,
that our superficial characteristics don’t mark us for a beatdown or worse.
When you come right down to it, most of our identity is
based on a set of imaginary constructs. Why should we let one set of illusions
prompt us to destroy lives that operate on a different set?
We shouldn’t have to blend in or hide. That’s why we came
here in the first place. Remember?
It was the first torch song. It’s only heard in old movies or TV shows these days. The scene is usually a smoky barroom, at the ass-end of the evening. It’s that peculiar time of night when the soused, haunted by their past, call for this maudlin ballad and begin to sob. It’s a running joke in the 1954 film version of A Star is Born, as poor Judy Garland is harassed with, “Sing ‘Melancholy Baby’!”
Two: The composer Ernie Burnett served in France in World War I, was wounded and lost his memory. In the hospital, he heard someone singing “My Melancholy Baby,” recognized it, remembered who he was, and made a full recovery.
I’m unable to confirm or deny the truth of the second story, but the first story is disputed by almost everyone.
Ernie Burnett
Composer Ernie Burnett (originally Ernesto Bernaditto from Cincinnati) and his then-wife Maybelle Watson, who was the song’s first lyricist, filed for copyright on the song, then called “Melancholy,” on October 31, 1911. Despite their efforts, they couldn’t interest anyone in it. (In those days, songwriters carried their songs from one publisher to another, auditioning them.) Finally, Denver club owner and music publisher Theron C. Bennett bought the tune, but tossed the words. He set an employee, George Norton, to write a new set of lyrics. This jerry-rigged song became an enormous hit.
“Come, sweetheart mine, don’t sit and pine
Tell of the cares that make you feel so blue
What have I done, answer me, hon
Have I ever said an unkind word to you
My love is true, and just for you
I’d do almost anything at any time
Dear, when you sigh, or when you cry
Something seems to grip this very heart of mine
Come to me my melancholy baby
Cuddle up and don’t be blue
All your fears are foolish fancies, maybe
You know, dear, that I’m in love with you
Every cloud must have a silver lining
Wait until the sun shines through
Smile, my honey dear, while I kiss away each tear
Or else I shall be melancholy too”
Why was it written? To whom? Burnett told a story abut waiting for a woman (presumably his wife) for eight hours at the train station; Norton spins a tale about being sweet on a Denver waitress. Despite the desire to getting nailed being the wellspring of most romantic tunes, neither of these anecdotes is likely. "My Melancholy Baby" is an inspired piece of hackwork.
When the sheet music was published, it bore a dedication to “Miss Maybelle Watson of Berkeley, California.” Burnett and Watson were divorced by that time; perhaps the publisher sought to assuage Watson’s ego and prevent her from suing for a piece of the royalties, even though her lyrics were replaced by Norton’s.
So who sang it first? Bennett, the original publisher, claims he gave the debut performance of it at his club, the Dutch Mill at 811 16th Street, in 1912 -- not Frawley. Two original copies of the sheet music feature two different artists pasted into the cameo center of the cover – “That Singer,” Jack O’Leary, and “winsome June Le Vey.” At this point, the song was still titled “Melancholy.” It was changed to “My Melancholy Baby” in 1914, and a year later Bennett folded, selling the song to Joe Morris Music Company in New York. Burnett claims he convinced Sophie Tucker to sing it, which began its rise to popularity.
The person who arguable made this song a hit was Walter van Brunt, whose 1915 recording may contain some of Watson’s original lyrics, pushed down into the song to make a second introductory set of lines. This set of words is omitted in nearly every recording of it:
“Birds in the trees, whispering breeze
Should not fail to lull you into peaceful dreams
So tell me why, sadly you sigh
Sitting at the window where the pale moon beams
You shouldn’t grieve, try and believe,
Life is always sunshine when the heart beats true
Be of good cheer, smile through your tears,
When you’re sad it makes me feel the same as you”
Gene Austin scored with it again in 1927, and England’s Al Bowlly in 1935.
It started showing up in films – The Roaring Twenties (1939), Birth of the Blues (1941), Johnny Eager (1942), Follow the Band (1943), Minstrel Man (1944). In the 1945 film noir Scarlet Street, director Fritz Lang and composer Hans Salter work the tune into the score and as source music in the film itself, as a theme to which the main characters disintegrate.
In Billy Wilder’s Some Like ItHot (1959), it’s the song that always seduces Marilyn Monroe’s character, especially when essayed on tenor sax. Forty-eight years after its birth, “My Melancholy Baby” ends its effective cultural life as a dick joke.
In the end, Bennett and Burnett reaped the royalties, after legal action against Joe Morris; Norton’s son had to litigate for years to get compensation for his father, who had signed away his rights to Bennett for $20 a week, back in the day. Watson got nothing. Frawley got the credit, and the song may have brought back its composer from the dead. Who knows? If you stick your nose down into the warf and woof of history, it's hard to see more than a tangle of contradictions, unresolvable, unprovable, lost in the past.
In the end, we still have a great song.
SOURCES
Denver’s Old Theater Row
Forrest Hall Johnson
Gem
1970
The Tin Pan Alley Song Encyclopedia
Thomas S. Hischak
Greenwood Press
2002
American Popular Song: The Great Innovators 1900-1950
Alec Wilder
Oxford University Press
1972
Tin Pan Alley: An Encyclopedia of the Golden Age of American Song
