Densmore recording material with Mountain Chief of the Blackfoot tribe, 1916.
Chippewa/Ojibwe
Cylinder Collection
Curated
by Frances Densmore
Singer:
Billy Murray
Recorded
September 1907 – November 1910
357
cylinders (15 hours, 4 min.)
Here’s another example of sound recordings that are not
available to the public; like their predecessors,
the Passamaquoddy tribal field recordings of 1890, this is due to the
tribal control of the material’s use.
Frances Densmore was a pioneering ethnomusicologist from
Minnesota who began her career with these recordings. She was sympathetic and
rigorous, fighting to preserve Native American traditions at a time when the
American government was hard at work extinguishing them, and popular culture
was content with the stereotype of the marauding Redskin. More than 50 years of
her efforts resulted in a trove of material for tribal members, and
researchers.
The
National Recording Registry Project tracks one writer’s expedition through all
the recordings in the National Recording Registry in chronological order. Up
next: Caruso’s ‘Vesti la giubba.’
A quick change of sheet music, in response to public demand.
“You’re
a Grand Old Rag (Flag)”
Music
and Lyrics: George M. Cohan
Singer:
Billy Murray
Recorded
Feb. 6, 1906
2:46
Brash is seemingly a word coined for George M. Cohan. The
performer/playwright/songwriter/director/producer, who started his stage career
at age 8, was one of the most popular and powerful figures in Broadway history.
From 1904 through 1920, he staged more than 50 productions there – all but one
successful. His songs such as “Yankee Doodle Dandy" and “Give My
Regards to Broadway” are, justly, classics. Onstage, he epitomized a kind of
cocky, hard-charging, quick-witted American persona that audiences responded to
with devotion for decades.
“Americanism” was in the air. The country was finally waking
up from self-absorption and internal development and was beginning to make its
first expansionist stretches, jumping into jingoism with a will. Its industrial
might was wowing the world. There was need for a vernacular expression of this
energy and pride, akin to the already-popular marches of Sousa.
As a multiple talent, Cohan resembles impresario
predecessors such as Dion Boucicault and David Belasco, as well as his
contemporary Florenz Ziegfeld. Most of his plays are comic vehicles touched with
sentiment, their plots driven by the confusions of romantic entanglements –
early, important gropings toward the book musical.
“The Grand Old Rag,” as it was listed in the original
program, was a generally despised title. No one wanted to hear the Stars and
Stripes referred to in that way. The lyrics changed from “You’re a grand old
rag/You’re a high-flying flag” to “You’re a grand old flag/Though you’re torn
to a rag” to, finally, the redundant but unobjectionable “You’re a grand old
flag/You’re a high-flying flag.”
Unfortunately, the song had already been recorded. Popular
tenor Billy Murray, the “Denver Nightingale” (he lived in the Mile High City
from age 5 to 16) was another peppy, confident belter who could sell an upbeat
song. It’s instructive to see that the song was recorded six days before the
musical opened – marketing savvy is not as recent a development as we might
think. (Murray wound up recording all three lyric variants.)
The words and music are patriotic hodgepodges, interpolating
“Dixie,” “Auld Lang Syne,” “Marching through Georgia,” and Cohan’s own “Yankee
Doodle Dandy” hit of two years previous. The result is a sensory overload of
associations, delivered in an up-tempo rush that sweeps the listener along. We will run into Cohan again in a future installment, when we examine his classic of evangelical interventionism, 1917's "Over There."
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 Frances Densmore Chippewa/Ojibwe Cylinder Collection.
Booker T. Washington speaking in New Orleans, 1915.
Atlanta
Exposition Speech
Booker
T. Washington
1908 recreation
3:22
Was Booker T. Washington a kiss-ass?
I know less about this topic that you do, I bet. A cursory
listen to this excerpt from the African American leader’s famous,
attention-grabbing speech leads to examination of the whole text of it, and
more research.
The most masterful outline of the recording and its context
is available here
from Professor Jacqueline M. Moore. Washington, born a slave, was a self-made
man who worked in mills and mines to make enough money to pay for his advanced education.
He rose in expertise and esteem in the black community, eventually assuming the
founding leadership post at the prestigious Tuskegee Institute for black
students, in Alabama.
His speech was originally given at the Cotton States and
International Exhibition in Atlanta on September 18, 1895. In it, he strikes a
conservative tone – one that turned him overnight into the go-to black
authority for the white establishment of the day.
Washington’s views are accomodationist. He advises black
people famously to “’Cast down your bucket where you are’” – to be happy with
your lot, as it were –“cast it down in making friends in every manly way of the
people of all races by whom we are surrounded.” “By whom we are surrounded” is
a telling phrase. Without knowing more about Washington’s acts and words, I
believe he’d describe himself as pragmatic. The black population of American in
1895 was not substantially better off than it had been in 1865. The Plessy vs. Ferguson Supreme Court
decision of 1896 would endorse complete segregation, until the protests,
violence, and reforms of the Civil Rights era.
Washington saw economic power as the leverage that would
provide black people with political power, rather than the other way round. He
urged them to cooperate humbly with the white race for the benefit of both,
meanwhile assuring whites that blacks were not only concerned with equal
rights, but happy to live in complete separation, save for when they were
needed for some servile task. He touts the black race as far superior (and more
cost-effective) than immigrants as laborers.
The idea that the African American population of 8 million
people would know, as one, its “place” was a public declaration that reassured
the general population, preserved the unspoken differences between races, and
put serious reform to sleep for half a century. Lynchings proceeded apace, and
the Ku Klux Klan’s near-rise to national power took place in the 1920s.
Assuredly, there were a few detractors, and many more radical activists, such
as W.E.B. DuBois, rejected what came to be called “the Atlanta Compromise”
speech.
Washington is what is condescendingly used as a description
of an articulate African American person, “well-spoken.” It seems this has been
the key to white acceptance down the years; Martin Luther King was well-spoken,
Sidney Poitier was well-spoken, and so on. In fact, I believe a black person
has to be about 10 times better-spoken than the average white person to be considered
well-spoken. That President Obama is a terrific writer and masterful orator
stands by itself, but undoubtedly a shred or two of his appeal relates to that
idea of a black person possessed of white “correctness.” (Thank God, the
President is funny, has teenagers in his house, and makes his own playlists,
and so becomes seemingly comprehensible as a person to me.) His presentation as
a reasonable person made him acceptable.
The speech worked. Washington received millions for
Tuskegee, which educated several generations of pivotal American figures.
Washington became a voice at least for a time, helping as best he could. It is
interesting to contemplate what his rich white donors would have thought if
they had known that Washington was funding anti-segregationist and anti-voting
rights efforts on the sly. What if this speech was calculated, in part, to put
the racist establishment to sleep?
Gradualism in human rights did not work in America better
than it did anywhere else. It is arguable that things are worse for African
Americans now than they were in 1965. It seems that rights are won, racists are
conquered, and the eye blinks and it’s all slid back to where it was before,
and we have to suffer through it again.
So the answer, I think, is yes and no. In the speech,
Washington straddles the contradictions in a single sentence when he says, “The
wisest among my race understand that the agitation of questions of social
equality is the extremest folly, and that progress in the enjoyment of all the privileges
that will come to us must be the result of severe and constant struggle rather
than of artificial forcing.”
The
National Recording Registry Project tracks one writer’s expedition through all
the recordings in the National Recording Registry in chronological order. Up
next: ‘You’re a Grand Old Flag.’
'Uncle Josh and the Insurance Company' Cal Stewart
1904
2:24
America started off with barnyard humor, ‘cause that’s about
all there was at the beginning – both as subject and stage. Americans were
farmers principally for generations, and the minute port towns began to grow
into cities, the classic division and mutual suspicion between country and city
folk, long documented in human history, spring up here as well.
“Rubes” were figures of fun, and often were possessed in
their native habitat with what used to be termed “foxiness” – the capability of
outwitting the city slicker. Here lie the reputations of the “sharp” Yankee
peddler and his battles of wit with his peasant customers, and the archetypal
“Brother Jonathan” of New England.
An epitome of this tradition is Cal Stewart (1856-1919), who
worked a prolific and widely loved hybrid of standup comic and village sage,
Uncle Josh Weathersby, an inhabitant of the imaginary Punkin Center, a hamlet
located somewhere in the then-wilds of New England. In countless stage
performances and more than 100 recordings, the latter on cylinder and disc
between 1897 and 1919, Stewart honed his jovial, skeptic, gentle, wisecracking
persona.
He stole it from someone else. Denman Thompson wrote a
sketch for vaudeville in the character of Joshua Whitcomb, a “hayseed” who goes
to the big city. He first performed it in Pittsburg in 1875, and later
developed it into a popular four-act play, “The Old Homestead.” Read RandyMcNutt’s marvelous essay, which accompanies the NRR listing, right here for complete details. Stewart evidently lifted the concept and adapted it to his
own purposes, creating a whittling, tobacco-chewing, cracker-barrel wit that made him a major draw for
decades.
It was a style most humorists of the time were using.
Whether termed rural humor or dialect humor or ethnic humor, people such as
Washington Irving, Mark Twain, “Artemus Ward” (Charles Farrar Browne);
“Petroleum V. Naseby” (David Ross Locke), and Bret Harte all practiced in this
vein. Most of it, Twain aside, is not that funny now, but this was the
gut-bustin’, knee-slappin’ kind of stuff that made Lincoln delay Cabinet
meetings.
Stewart’s Uncle Josh represents common values – he is an
advocate of plain horse sense, an enemy of pretension, and a scoffer at
anything new-fangled. He functions in the Bergsonian sense of humor as a social
corrective. His humor reinforces the status quo, and articulates what the
attitude of the “normal” person inside it should be. And in truth, at the time
who could make a living creating transgressive comedy, something no family
would buy and play in their home?
Stewart has many descendants. Will Rogers, Charley Weaver,
Lum and Abner, Minnie Pearl, Judy Canova, Parker Fennelly’s “Titus Moody” radio
character, the “Ma and Pa Kettle” movie series, Jerry Clower, the antics of
CBS’s 1960’s-era rural comedy shows, TV’s syndicated “Hee Haw,” Jeff Foxworthy,
Garrison Keillor, and many more take up the Western/Southern/”hillbilly”/Far
North axis of American rural comedy history.
Here Stewart recycles the old “barrel of bricks” routine,
which has been traced by Snopes back to at least 1895. In it, a man hoisting
bricks in a barrel gets hurt about five different ways. Here’s the routine:
In keeping with his persona, Uncle Josh frames it with
another joke about the expense, impractability, and unreliability of an
insurance company. He’s a master storyteller, and he stands equidistantly
between Twain and Keillor as a brilliant practitioner of extemporaneous comedy,
something developed roughly and varied in each telling. Uncle Josh’s
soliloquies rises above mere satire by poking as much fun at himself as at
anyone else.
Whether or not you find his signature chuckle ingratiating
or not, listeners will find its homey gags and platitudes a familiar template.
The
National Recording Registry Project tracks one writer’s expedition through all
the recordings in the National Recording Registry in chronological order. Up
next: Booker T. Washington’s Atlanta Compromise Speech.
In 1903, a cultural arms race was on. The Victor and
Columbia recording companies were battling it out for a dominant share of the “high-end”
record market. At the height of the enthronement of Western culture as a beaux
ideal, opera was considered the most prestigious of the arts. Its combination
of music and drama was seen as the ultimate synthesis of forms, and opera
singers were globally-known celebrities in a manner not seen again until the
days of Pavarotti.
This recording was part of a set of releases by seven
Metropolitan Opera stars – Suzanne Adams, Antonio Scotti, Giuseppe Campanari,
Charles Gilbert, Marcella Sembrich, Ernestine Schumann-Heink, and Edouard de
Reszke. The Victor company had sent its representative to Europe to obtain
recordings by continental opera stars. Columbia beat them to the punch by
commissioning recordings in New York. The singers were well paid, and the discs
were correspondingly more expensive. Avid listeners shelled out $2 a disc,
twice what the going rate was for a record in 1903, and the equivalent of more
than $50 today.
De Reszke was a bass from Warsaw; his strong singing and acting
skills propelled him through an illustrious three-decade career (he often sang
with his brother, the equally talented and noted tenor Jean). He sings this
aria from Act III of the once-popular romantic/comic opera “Martha” by
Friedrich von Flotow, which premiered in 1844. The bass plays the hero’s best
friend, and gets to implement a little comic relief here and there. It’s a
drinking song, rendered here in Italian, as many German and French operas of
the 19th century found themselves translated into Italian for the convenience
of the predominantly Italian-trained singers.
Though Columbia won the battle, Victor won the war. Under
its Red Seal label, most of the first half of the century’s great artists would
choose to record for them – starting with its superstar, Enrico Caruso. Caruso
would make “Martha” a huge hit for the Met in 1906, and very familiar Flotow
melodies such as “Ach, so fromm” and “the Last Rose of Summer” would become
familiar cultural staples of the period.
As an aesthetic record, it’s lacking. The same year de
Reszke recorded his three sides, of which “Canzone” is his best effort, he
retired from singing. His breath support is wobbly, his tone is flat. Only his
phrasing and trills remain to remind us of what he must have sound like at the
peak of his career.
The
National Recording Registry Project tracks one writer’s expedition through all
the recordings in the National Recording Registry in chronological order. Up
next: ‘Uncle Josh and the Insurance Agent.'
The Funai Electric Company of Japan makes its last Video
Cassette Recorder, and the last one for the foreseeable future, in August. It’s
over.
The first videocassette recording of a film was released in
1967. Starting in 1977, the Video Home System consumer-level analog recording
tape was the film-industry standard. In 1997, the DVD began encroaching on the
VHS tape’s territory. The last major-market film (and future trivia answer), “Eragon,”
was released on VHS in 2007, and a year later, tape manufacture ceased
entirely.
Now whatever is left out there on magnetic video tape that
is playable will be stuck in a world that’s rejected its playback technology.
Like the V-disc, the 8-track tape, the player piano roll, the filmstrip, and
the LaserDisc, it has dead-ended, become a sport in the genetic sense of the
word. It’s a now-pointless mutation.
VHS tapes were essential to a very particular kind of
understanding of film. Not since the advent of art houses and repertory cinemas
on the American coasts in the late 1950s had such a stretch on unseen films
been found, easily accessible in the open market.
We viewers were previously subject to the imperatives of the
market. In childhood, there were a few enthusiasts who wrangled 16-millimeter
films, but these were few and far between, and well-off. We could find some of
the output of the famous Blackhawk Films on 8-millimeter and Super 8 (Super 8!)
at the local libraries, and we owned an old 8-millimeter job that played our
family home movies, and Blackhawks of Chaplin, Abbott and Costello, and Tarzan.
Otherwise, first-run films came and went, and if they were
good but not popular, you might never see them again. Broadcast television, the
first great secondary market, was a yawning abyss of hours to be filled, and
old movies filled them. “The Wizard of Oz” played every Easter, Christmas
movies at Christmas, etc. We used to go through the pre-cable TV guides every
Sunday and underline and/or circle (no highlighters yet) upcoming obscure gems,
making late-night appointments to stare bloody-eyed at the boob tube, getting
through a rare Douglas Sirk or Roy William Neill film, or “Alligator People,”
or even some freakish stretches of quality such as Bondarchuk’s “War andPeace,” through the incessant
interruptions of commercial blocks.
The bulky boxes of tapespool littered our weekend floors for
decades, as we chucked them into the maw of the machine, which ground and
gnawed at the boxes, straining to turn its gears and play that precious tape.
(We had, and still have, a TOP-LOADER! Good times!) The revolution was us.
The VCR released us from time and space, and gave us
ownership. We eagerly caught up with films we WANTED to see, WHEN we wanted to
see them. We could now set timers and tape TV shows too, free our viewing
schedule from the intentions and ends of the programmers. The power of the
movie theaters faced its second serious challenge at this time, after the
introduction of broadcast television and anti-monopoly action brought down the
big studios after World War II.
All the films we’d read about that we’d never seen rained
into our lives. It was now possible for the average person to self-educate
about the length and breadth of cinema.
The primary downsides of the VCR were the laughably
difficult programming problems the recording system always seemed to have, the
clanky, cranky laboring of the devices, and the grainy, stretched, and
stuttering quality of the image itself. (Anyone on the production side from the
period will tell you about the hellish nightmare that was editing videotape.)
As a legacy medium, the VHS tape still has cachet. Yale
picked up 2,700 of them last year, mostly horror films. Stephanie Rogers’ story
for the Yale News points out that the VHS and VCR spurred the rise of
low-budget cinema, particularly in the cost-effective horror genre, and
direct-to-rental market helps to undermine cinema-going. (Pornography was, as
always, on the cutting edge of whatever technological development came along,
and thrived as well.)
The DVD murdered the VHS tape. Its infinitely better image,
searchability, and capacity made it the winner over the tape. DVDs gave every
film freak far more than even they could digest in one sitting. The advent of
multiple data channels on each disc gave birth to the commentary track, scads
of now-expected “extras,” alternative edits, contextualizing content, gag and
blooper reels, and films within films. (The damn things do scratch easily.)
Now what’s next? A few years ago, Oliver Stone held up a DVD
and said, “You may be the last generation to own a movie.” The video (now DVD)
rental stores are almost extinct themselves. Even the Redbox movie-dispensing
kiosk service, which killed the Blockbuster video-rental chain, finds itself
becoming a less profitable anachronism. Its DVD rentals were down a whopping 17
percent in the fourth quarter of 2015.
Now that we are streaming film, we are purchasing temporary
access to a product that’s not material. Pay for play. Downloads are possible,
but we’ve come to find that digital files are just as prone to disruption,
damage, overwriting, and loss as all those playlists you made on GrooveShark.
And that’s disturbing. I have about 2,000 films on DVD, very
consciously chosen to provide me with an index of great films (OK, and “The
Attack of the Killer Tomatoes” and “Pootie Tang”) for reference and repeated
viewings. I am hoping the kids get into them and are accidentally infected with
the rewards of quality viewing. How long until I have to jury-rig some kind of
playback system for this collection I have no desire to rebuild again, from
scratch? We all seem to end up living primarily in the last medium we are
comfortable with, the one we commit to financially and emotionally.
That being said, I am still hoarding the following, as hope
springs eternal – 78 rpm records, 45s, and standard vinyl; first-generation
audiotape, cassettes, V-discs, CDs, DVDs, and . . . somewhere on this dusty
shelf I’m probing . . . my last VHS tapes.
There are 15 tapes here I deemed indispensable a decade ago.
I wonder what’s on them? Can I see the content on them some other way?
Here’s a head cleaner. “A Rugrats Chanukah,” “A Rugrats
Passover,” both available via Hulu. My friends Kathy and Robin Beck’s hilarious
documentary, “Grandpa’s Still in the TUFF Shed.” Keeper. Three vintage Daffy
Duck cartoon compilations, one of Bugs Bunny, one merely labeled “classic.”
(You can see where my priorities lie.) Keep.
Of course, I have to hang on to the Mary Martin “Peter Pan”
TV production. Priceless!
Homemade mixes: here’s a John Ford triple feature, “The Lost
Patrol,” “The Informer,” and “Wagon Master.” All easily found via streaming.
Here are two I can’t find anywhere else: Jack Gold’s
brilliant and underrated retelling of “Robin Crusoe,” 1975’s “Man Friday,” with
Peter O’Toole and Richard Roundtree. And the PBS mini-series version of Joseph
Conrad’s “Nostromo” from 1996. “Nostromo” was the last, great, unrealized
project of David Lean’s, and this production lacks something vital but points
the way toward a truly definitive adaptation of the novel.
The first and last “Star Trek: The Next Generation”
episodes. Of course. Keep.
Another compilation: the documentary on Russell Scott,
Denver’s TV clown Blinky (can stream it); “The Adventures of Robin Hood”
(likewise) and “The Maltese Falcon” (I have the DVD). Goodbye!
A documentary on my hero, Steinbeck; a miscellany of Laurel
and Hardy shorts, some vintage Dana Gould (a criminally under-regarded standup
comedian and writer), and some of those delectable vintage Fleischer Brothers
Superman cartoons. Keeper.
And the family home videos. Our father’s side of the family
was ravenously to new technology, and the earliest home-movie footage we have
dates back to the mid-1930s. Our dauntless cousin Elaine picked up dozens of
these Super 8 and 8mm home-movie shorts and had them transferred to videotape.
(A dissection of moving family images from before my father’s birth to my
youngest sister’s babyhood deserves another essay, and some therapy.) There are
hours there to be pored over by curious descendants, discussed, laughed at, explained,
and used as a springboard of associations. “That’s Aunt Emma,” I say, and her
clean, damp, kitchen-y smell, her scrollwork piano, a laundry chute, the cuckoo
clock, the steeply raked back yard, all manifest themselves, instantly.
The VHS tape in this last case will serve as a link to a new
technology, duped to DVD and then undoubtedly to whatever new forms of
recording and transmission evolve. But it’s a fact of physics that there is
loss of signal, a weakening of the resolution of the image, each time a
duplication to another medium is made. Will these irreplaceable ghosts of me,
my parents, grandparents, sisters, cousins, and friends fade away down the
years like pen strokes on a palimpsest, until finally forgotten and lost? When a
medium dies, that erosion, that slippage occurs, and I worry.
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”)
