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I know about three other lists that got reposted - so no wonder they are swamped. I heard about it from DAW-MAC which was reposted from a Cabnadian composer's list, etc... Lou Judson Intuitive Audio 415-883-2689 On Mar 20, 2006, at 12:11 PM, Helen Cornwall wrote: > 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:; >>> cc >>> Subject >>> Fwd: NYTimes.com: How Pop Sounded Before It Popped >>> >>> >>> >>> >>> >>> Date: Mon, 20 Mar 2006 09:06:18 -0500 (EST) >>> Date-warning: Date header was inserted by ms-mta-02.rdc-nyc.rr.com >>> From: [log in to unmask] >>> Subject: NYTimes.com: How Pop Sounded Before It Popped >>> X-Originating-IP: [67.87.234.187] >>> Sender: [log in to unmask] >>> To: [log in to unmask] >>> Reply-to: [log in to unmask] >>> X-Initiated-By: [nytimes.com website user] >>> Original-recipient: rfc822;[log in to unmask] >>> E-Mail This >>> <unknown.gif> >>> <unknown.gif><unknown.gif><unknown.gif> >>> >>> <unknown.gif><unknown.gif><unknown.gif> This page was sent to >>> you by: [log in to unmask] >>> 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> >>> 1. Why Do So Few Women Reach the Top of Big Law Firms? >>> 2. 'American Theocracy,' by Kevin Phillips: Clear and Present >>> Dangers >>> 3. Plight Deepens for Black Men, Studies Warn >>> 4. Music: How Pop Sounded Before It Popped >>> 5. Wanted: A Few Good Sperm >>> >>> » Go to Complete List >>> <unknown.gif> >>> <unknown.gif> >>> Advertisement >>> Thank You For Smoking opens March 17th >>> >>> Nick Naylor, chief spokesman for Big Tobacco, makes his living >>> defending the rights of smokers and cigarette makers in today's >>> neo-puritanical culture. Confronted by health zealots and an >>> opportunistic senator, Nick goes on a PR offensive, spinning away >>> the dangers of cigarettes. >>> http://www2.foxsearchlight.com/thankyouforsmoking/teaser/ >>> >>> >>> >>> <unknown.gif><unknown.gif> >>> Do you love NY? Get the insiders guide to where to stay, what to do >>> and where to eat. Go to www.nytimes.com/travel for your NYC Guide >>> now. Click here. >>> >>> >>> >>> <unknown.gif><unknown.gif>Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company >>> | Privacy Policy <unknown.gif><unknown.gif> >>> >> >> >> >>