American Treasures

My interest in acoustic era music goes all the way back to the day long ago that my mother bought an old 1920's vintage floor model Victrola at an antique show. For years I coveted that Victrola, at one point thinking I could make do with a cheap imported crap-o-phone, purchased on Ebay, which looks fine as a conversation piece, but never worked quite right. Finally, about five years ago, I picked up a Victor VV-VIII, which is from about 1918, for a good price because the Victor plaque containing the serial number is missing. For a while I prowled Ebay in search of old 78's, realizing that the kind of old blues and jazz records I coveted were high-demand collectors items, so settling instead for earlier fare. Then, about seven or so years ago, I came into possession of a rather large collection of vintage sheet music, just about the time the internet was coming into full flower, and found a number of sites specializing in acoustic era music, as well as WFMU's wonderful Antique Phonograph Music Program.

I've long felt that this affinity for acoustic era music is evidence that reincarnation is real, because listening to this stuff gives me a sense of "being home" in a way nothing else does. Whatever else happened to me in a past life, I sure did love my Tin Pan Alley.

So for an acoustic music lover like me, this article in the Sunday New York Times Arts and Leisure section, about acoustic era music and the astonoshing new online collection at the Cylinder Preservation and Digitization Project at the University of Southern California at Santa Barbara, is like finding buried treasure.

So if you're interested in hearing the Harmony Four singing The Little Good For Nothing's Good for Something After All or Gladys Rice and Billy Murray singing Bungalow in Quogue, or if you saw Titanic in 1997 and wondered about that song about Josephine and the Flying Machine, it's here too. So are some less savory examples of Americana, in the form of the "coon song", which UCSB disclaims as follows:

"Coon songs," "rube sketches," "Irish character songs," and other dialect recordings that were popular vaudeville routines and genres of songs during the late 19th and early 20th century often contain negative stereotypes and portrayals of blacks and other ethnic groups. These recordings reflect the attitudes, perspectives, and beliefs of different times. Many individuals will find the content offensive. Some of these songs and recitations were written or performed by members of the ethnic group in question, while others were not, such as the tradition of blackface minstrelsy of whites performing caricatured portrayals of blacks. To exclude these cylinders from the digital collection would deprive scholars and the public the opportunity to learn about the past and would present a distorted picture of popular culture and music making during this time period. The mission of the UCSB Libraries is to make its resources available to the faculty, staff, and students of the University community and to the general public. The UCSB Libraries presents these documents as part of the record of the past and does not endorse the views expressed in these collections.

I had a number of pieces of sheet music of some of these songs, and when I was selling some of these items and donating the proceeds to breast cancer research, they were in high demand. Irish, Black, Jewish and Native Americans were the ethnic groups of choice for lampooning in early 20th century music.

Much of our study of American history, particularly what we learn in school, is limited to politics and war. But the part of our history that's most interesting to me is American social history -- how people lived, what they ate, how they entertained themselves in the days before everything was wired. Just as the advent of television replaced radio in many homes, and the advent of video games has replaced much of television in the lives of many American kids today, so did the Edison cylinders lovingly digitized for posterity at UCSB allow Americans to more passively entertain themselves than they did when the same songs were just notes on a page of sheet music that required a certain amount of proficiency at the piano.

I hope you'll give this treasure trove a listen and download a few selections to your iPod. It's something none of your friends will be listening to and you can say you discovered it first.