They're swamped from people following up this article. I figured out the 
little green icon that looks like part of a puzzle is for streaming, 
which I can't get to work, (firewall?) but if I search on the item it 
gives me the choice to download an MP3, which then plays fine on Winamp. 
Mario Ancona accompanying this email, from 1907...way cool!
thanks, and if I get weekend time I'll follow up the other 
possibilities. --Hc

Lou Judson wrote:

> Here's the actual article:
>
> March 19, 2006
> Music
>
> How Pop Sounded Before It Popped
> By JODY ROSEN
>
>
> FOR a couple of months now my iPod has been stuck on Stella Mayhew's 
> "I'm Looking for Something to Eat." It's a lurching little waltz-time 
> pop tune, drawled over brass-band accompaniment. The lyric is 
> hilarious, the lament of a gal on a diet who can't stop eating, and it 
> climaxes with a glutton's soul cry: "I want some radishes and olives, 
> speckled trout and cantaloupe and cauliflower/ Some mutton broth and 
> deviled crabs and clams and Irish stew." I can't get it out of my head 
> — so far, it's my favorite record of 2006.
>
> As it happens, it's also my favorite record of 1909. It is an Edison 
> Phonograph Company wax cylinder, recorded 97 years ago by Mayhew, a 
> vaudeville star who liked to poke fun at her considerable girth. In 
> certain ways, the song is up to date: the satire on dieting is plenty 
> relevant in the early 21st century, and Mayhew's slurred talk-singing 
> is a bracingly modern sound. But the noisy, weather-beaten recording 
> is unmistakably a product of the acoustic era — the period from about 
> 1890 to the mid-1920's, before the advent of electric recording — when 
> musicians cut records while crammed cheek-by-jowl-by-trombone around 
> phonograph horns in rackety little studios.
>
> Mayhew's record is just one of several thousand cylinders, the first 
> commercially available recordings ever produced, that have recently 
> become available free of charge to anyone with an Internet connection 
> and some spare bandwidth. Last November, the Donald C. Davidson 
> Library at the University of California, Santa Barbara, introduced the 
> Cylinder Digitization and Preservation Project Web site 
> (cylinders.library.ucsb.edu), a collection of more than 6,000 
> cylinders converted to downloadable MP3's, WAV files and streaming 
> audio. It's an astonishing trove of sounds: opera arias, comic 
> monologues, marching bands, gospel quartets. Above all, there are the 
> pop tunes churned out by Tin Pan Alley at the turn of the century: 
> ragtime ditties, novelty songs, sentimental ballads and a dizzying 
> range of dialect numbers performed by vaudeville's blackface comedians 
> and other "ethnic impersonators."
>
> For decades, these records languished unheard by all but a few 
> intrepid researchers and enthusiasts. Now, thanks to the Santa Barbara 
> Web site and the efforts of a small group of scholars, collectors and 
> independent record labels, acoustic-era popular music is drifting back 
> into earshot, one crackly cylinder and 78 r.p.m. disc at a time. These 
> old records hold pleasant surprises, but they also carry a larger 
> lesson about gaping holes in the story of American pop.
>
> While historians have exhaustively investigated blues, jazz, rock and 
> their offshoots, the mainstream pop music of the early 20th century 
> has received only glancing treatment, the victim of a variety of 
> prejudices entrenched in popular music culture. Listeners accustomed 
> to the crispness of modern studio recording have been put off by the 
> primitive sound of the old records, with their limited frequency 
> response and harsh bursts of noise. Pop-song purists have scorned the 
> music as the height of Tin Pan Alley's factory-produced pap — the 
> gruesome stuff that came before Jerome Kern, Cole Porter et al. 
> swooped in to transform popular music into a legitimate art form. 
> Nearly everybody has been repelled by the content of songs that date 
> from a time when coarse racial caricature was one of America's 
> favorite sources of amusement.
>
> Then there is the anti-pop sentiment that has dominated rock-era 
> historiography, the tendency to trace rock's roots exclusively to folk 
> sources — Delta bluesmen, Appalachian balladeers and other 
> romantically hard-bitten bumpkins — while dismissing as inauthentic 
> anything with a whiff of Broadway about it. But turn-of-the-century 
> pop was roots music in its own right, and the period that gave us the 
> very first star singers and hit records deserves a central place in 
> the historical narrative.
>
> "Acoustic-era music is the historical underdog," said Richard Martin, 
> the co-owner with his wife, Meagan Hennessey, of Archeophone Records, 
> a label that specializes in acoustic-era pop. "These are scratchy 
> records, with 19th-century aesthetics, with racist material all over 
> the place, with artists you've never heard of. This stuff is 
> completely unknown, and it's a treasure trove."
>
> Today, a flurry of activity is reviving those antique musical 
> treasures, and strengthening the challenge they present to critical 
> orthodoxy. Archeophone (archeophone.com), a tiny mom-and-pop label 
> based in St. Joseph, Ill., has released dozens of superb compilations 
> chronicling the careers of the period's top recording artists, 
> including Henry Burr, a prolific warbler of sentimental ballads, and 
> the acoustic era's biggest star, Billy Murray, who wrapped his reedy 
> pipes around virtually every hit of the day, including George M. 
> Cohan's "Yankee Doodle Boy" (1905) and Irving Berlin's "Alexander's 
> Ragtime Band" (1911). The label's current top seller is a two-disc 
> feat of audio archaeology, "Lost Sounds: Blacks and the Birth of the 
> Recording Industry, 1891-1922," released in conjunction with a 
> groundbreaking book by the historian Tim Brooks.
>
> Meanwhile, the Internet is crammed with specialists sharing knowledge 
> and posting audio files of their own collections. By far the biggest 
> online resource is the Santa Barbara site. It took $350,000 and 
> several painstaking years for archivists to digitize the university's 
> vast cylinder collection — the third-largest after the Library of 
> Congress's and Syracuse University's — using a newly invented electric 
> cylinder player that extracts information from the ancient grooves 
> with startling clarity. The response has been overwhelming, with more 
> than 750,000 songs downloaded and streamed in the four months since 
> the site went up.
>
> "I thought the site would be used primarily for scholarly research," 
> said David Seubert, the project's director. "I had no idea that so 
> many people would want to hear the records."
>
> Spend a little time browsing the site and a lost musical world opens 
> to you. The range of music is staggering: whistling soloists, 
> xylophonists playing polkas, John Philip Sousa leading his band 
> through famous marches. Hacks abound — tone-deaf songbirds mauling 
> treacly ballads — but there are also some real virtuosi. There are 
> dozens of catchy records by Harry Lauder, the Scottish music hall star 
> with a lustrous vocal tone and a flair for comedy. There's the 
> banjoist Vess Ossman, whose fleet-fingered renditions of cakewalks and 
> rags reveal that rhythmically dynamic improvisation entered American 
> music years before the rise of jazz. Pop vocalists like Murray don't 
> exactly swing, but there is a briskness and cheer in their singing 
> that is infectious — the sound of American pop shrugging off its 
> Victor Herbert-light opera complex and becoming something definitively 
> Yankee Doodle.
>
> It is a commonplace that sitcoms and stand-up comedy are contemporary 
> extensions of vaudeville, but we have lost sight of pop music's 
> vaudeville roots. The popular theater was the main performance outlet 
> for Tin Pan Alley's tunes, and you can hear that vaudeville lineage on 
> acoustic-era records, in the singers' booming, shout-down-the-rafters 
> vocal styles and in lyrics packed with punch lines. It was a time when 
> pop music and comedy were virtually one and the same, and one of the 
> delights of the period's big hits is the glee and unpretentiousness 
> with which they aim for the funny bone. That emphasis on jokes and 
> novelty has done the music no favors with historians who equate art 
> with gravity.
>
> But the best of these novelties were artful, with indelible melodies 
> and flashes of wit, and many have endured: "Give My Regards to 
> Broadway," "Yes, We Have No Bananas," "Shine On, Harvest Moon," "The 
> Darktown Strutters' Ball," "Carolina in the Morning." Period 
> recordings of these standards can be revelatory. Consider "Take Me Out 
> to the Ball Game": it's one of the most frequently sung songs in the 
> United States, but few people know the verses on Edward Meeker's 1908 
> record. It turns out "Take Me Out" was a comedy number about shifting 
> gender roles, starring a baseball-crazed young woman.
>
> Katie Casey was base ball mad.
>
> Had the fever and had it bad
>
> Just to root for the home town crew
>
> Ev'ry sou Katie blew.
>
> These lines, belted out by Meeker with an audible twinkle in his eye, 
> carry us back the social tumult of the Progressive era, to an America 
> moving swiftly and anxiously into a post-Victorian phase. Songwriters 
> were obsessed with topicality, charting every fad and invention and 
> bubble in the melting pot, and the recordings from the period are 
> unusually rich artifacts — far more historically evocative, for 
> instance, than the 32-bar variations on the theme "I Love You" that 
> dominated popular song for years afterwards.
>
> Yet most public archives and record companies have been cavalier about 
> conserving these valuable artifacts. (The preservation of silent film 
> reels has been a far bigger priority, although the very earliest 
> records, delicate brown wax cylinders from the 1890's, are far more 
> imperiled.) The most notorious episode occurred in the early 1960's, 
> when RCA dynamited the Camden, N.J., warehouse that held the masters 
> for Victor Records' thousands of acoustic-era 78's. The rubble was 
> bulldozed into the Delaware River and a pier was built atop it: a huge 
> part of our musical heritage, entombed in a watery grave.
>
> And while scholars and critics have lavished attention on early roots 
> music recordings — no rock snob's record collection would be complete 
> without Harry Smith's "Anthology of American Folk Music" and an Alan 
> Lomax field recording or two — they have almost completely ignored 
> this other recorded legacy. Pop critics are currently in the throes of 
> post-"rockist" revisionism, thinking through their longstanding biases 
> against commercial pop music. Maybe it's time to look at how those 
> same prejudices, projected back into history, have distorted our 
> vision of pop's distant past.
>
> The truth is, beneath their quaint rhythms and lyrics about "spooning" 
> under stretching boughs, acoustic-era songs are thematically quite 
> similar to rock and even hip-hop, awash in sex and dancing and a 
> cheery anti-authoritarianism. (Little wonder that moralists of the day 
> thundered against Tin Pan Alley's "suggestive" songs and the 
> pernicious moral effects of ragtime.) You hear that spirit in the 
> Columbia Quartet's 1911 recording of Irving Berlin's "Everybody's 
> Doing It Now," in the salacious relish with which the singers deliver 
> the lines "Everybody's doing it/ Doing it?/ Doing what?" Berlin's song 
> is nothing less than an anthem of youth rebellion, an ode to kids 
> going nuts doing racy dance moves — precisely the kind of song that, 
> according to conventional wisdom, did not crack the pop mainstream 
> until sometime around 1954.
>
> Of course, the biggest obsession of songwriters during this period was 
> ethnic pastiche, and you won't get too far into the Web site without 
> bumping up against "How Can They Tell That I'm Irish?," "I'm a Yiddish 
> Cowboy" or "Ching-a-Ling's Jazz Bazaar." And then there are the 
> ubiquitous "coon songs" — hundreds upon hundreds of them, filled with 
> racial epithets, chomped watermelon and other grotesqueries. No period 
> in American music has been as bound up with the question of racial 
> representation, and it is embarrassment about minstrelsy more than 
> anything else that that has kept this stuff tucked in the darkest 
> corners of sound archives.
>
>  "Some of it was probably better forgotten for a while," Mr. Seubert 
> said. "I think coon songs would have been a pretty hard thing for a 
> folklorist to try to resurrect during the civil rights era."
>
> Now, though, minstrelsy is a hot scholarly topic, and much of the 
> current interest in the acoustic era revolves around blackface and 
> black performers. By far the most talked-about figure is the brilliant 
> vaudeville singer Bert Williams, the first African-American pop star, 
> who specialized in blackface material. (Archeophone has released three 
> volumes of Williams's recordings.) But if we really want to know 
> acoustic-era pop music, we need to look at the white minstrels, ask 
> some hard questions and rein in our instincts to dismiss their acts as 
> racist trash, full stop.
>
> Some of the most compelling voices of the period belong to female 
> "coon shouters" — Mayhew, May Irwin, Sophie Tucker — who eventually 
> washed the burnt cork off their faces and graduated to a thrillingly 
> insouciant singing style. That style owed everything to minstrelsy but 
> was no longer explicitly "black."
>
>  Then there are even trickier cases, like that of Al Bernard, a 
> blackface comedian and female impersonator who specialized in fiercely 
> swinging ragtime and minstrel numbers. Are we ready to admit that 
> unequivocally racist songs, delivered by white singers in the thickest 
> possible dialect, might not only be historically significant music, 
> but great music?
>
> Students of pop history will be mulling over such questions for some 
> time to come. In the meantime, there are thousands of new records to 
> be listened to — some of them more than a century old. "Some of this 
> stuff is dreadful, you'd really rather not listen to it," Mr. Martin 
> allowed. "But there's some really enjoyable stuff along the way."
>
> One enjoyable record, which distills the period's pleasing mix of pop 
> hooks, belly laughs and sheer strangeness, is the vaudevillian Eddie 
> Morton's "Don't Take Me Home," a jaunty ragtime novelty about a 
> husband who runs off to war to hide out from his henpecking wife. 
> Morton sings the verses pretty straight, but in the fiendishly catchy 
> chorus — "Don't take me home!/ Pleeeease, don't take me home!" — his 
> voice ripples across the frantic oompah beat, a long sobbing phrase 
> that's halfway between an Irish tenor's flourish and the yelp of a dog 
> whose tail has been stepped on. It's unclear what impact the record 
> made when it was released in 1908. In 2006, it sounds like a hit.
>
>
> Copyright 2006The New York Times Company
>
> Lou Judson • Intuitive Audio
> 415-883-2689
>
> On Mar 20, 2006, at 6:47 AM, Dick Spottswood wrote:
>
>>
>> for modern journalism, an exceptionally insightful piece.  Maybe pop 
>> music criticism is finally moving beyond Rolling Stone.  
>>
>> ----- Forwarded by Dick Spottswood/dick/AmericanU on 03/20/2006 09:47 
>> AM -----
>> Hank <[log in to unmask]>
>>
>> 03/20/2006 09:26 AM
>> To
>> Recipient List Suppressed:;
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>> Subject
>> Fwd: NYTimes.com: How Pop Sounded Before It Popped
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> Date: Mon, 20 Mar 2006 09:06:18 -0500 (EST)
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>>  Subject: NYTimes.com: How Pop Sounded Before It Popped
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>> <unknown.gif><unknown.gif><unknown.gif>        This page was sent to 
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>> Message from sender:
>>  This is the site we spoke about a few months ago. I donated 6 
>> cylinders of mandolin music to them. Best Jim
>>
>>  ARTS / MUSIC   | March 19, 2006
>> Music:  How Pop Sounded Before It Popped
>>  By JODY ROSEN
>>  An astonishing trove of pop music from 100 years ago is now 
>> available on the Web, opening up a lost musical world that deserves 
>> its place in the historical narrative.
>>                <unknown.gif>                       
>> <unknown.gif>
>>                 <unknown.gif>
>> <unknown.gif>
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>>  3. Plight Deepens for Black Men, Studies Warn
>>  4. Music: How Pop Sounded Before It Popped
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>>  »  Go to Complete List
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