Lost Sounds: Blacks and the Birth of the Recording Industry, 1890-1919

Notes

notes Introduction 1. For a somewhat similar discussion of ethnic influences in the early film industry, see Neal Gabler, An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood (New York: Crown, 1988). 2. Compare, for example, Cook’s evocations of the black experience in “Swing Along” and “Rain Song” with Sissle and Blake’s formulaic Tin Pan Alley tunes such as “Good Night, Angeline” and “Love Will Find a Way.” Blake on his own wrote more distinctive material. See their respective chapters. 3. Experts are still debating which surviving recording is the earliest. See “A Dialogue on ‘The Oldest Playable Recording,’” ARSC Journal 33, no. 1 (Spring 2002): 77–84. 4. Tim Brooks, “Columbia Records in the 1890s: Founding the Record Industry,” ARSC Journal 10, no. 1 (1978): 3–36. 5. “It Speaks for Itself,” Kansas City Times, Jan. 8, 1889; “A Machine That Talks,” Albany Argus, July 24, 1889; “A Wonderful Exhibition,” Albany Times, July 24, 1889. These clippings were located in the files of the Edison National Historic Site, West Orange, N.J., by the researcher Patrick Feaster. 6. National Phonograph Association, Proceedings of the Second Annual Convention of Local Phonograph Companies of the United States, 66. 7. The case for the Bohees has been advanced by Rainer Lotz in “The Bohee Brothers,” in Lotz, Black People, 35–50. See also Peter Burgis, “Archibald Quest,” Hillandale News, no. 173 (Apr. 1990): 4. Burgis has located an 1890 advertisement for an Archibald demonstration that includes a recording of a “banjo solo by Bohee Brothers” (Daily Telegraph [Launceston, Tasmania], Nov. 13, 1890, cited in Burgis’s letter to the author, Nov. 1, 1999). It is possible that Archibald had the cylinder shipped to him, or that the Bohees recorded in Australia, which they apparently visited (one such trip is reported in Freeman [Indianapolis ], Dec. 19, 1891). No mention of such a cylinder has been located in England, and no further recordings by either brother are known until 1898. With all this uncertainty, we can only say the Bohees probably recorded somewhere prior to November 1890. 8. Tim Brooks, “Early Recordings of Songs from Florodora: Tell Me, Pretty Maiden . . . Who Are You?—A Discographical Mystery,” ARSC Journal 31, no. 1 (Spring 2000): 51–69. 9. Noncommercial field recordings by ethnomusicologists have fared somewhat better . Institutions such as the Archives of Traditional Music at Indiana University and projects such as “Save Our Sounds” (a cooperative venture of the Library of Congress and Smithsonian Institution) work to preserve such material. 10. A recording is here defined as a discrete title on an originating label, issued on disc or cylinder. It does not include reissues, or rerecordings of the same title by the same artist, a common practice in the 1890s. 08.NOTES.531-580_Broo 12/17/03, 1:48 PM 531 532 11. Tim Brooks, “The Artifacts of Recording History: Creators, Users, Losers, Keepers,” ARSC Journal 11, no. 1 (1979): 18–28; Brooks, “An Appeal to Collectors and Archives,”ARSC Journal 28, no. 2 (Fall 1997): 196–97. Chapter 1: The Early Years 1. We cannot, of course, know exactly what was said on that morning in New York Criminal Court, but the foregoing scene, reconstructed from surviving evidence, is believed to be a reasonable representation. 2. Gaisberg, The Music Goes Round, 8, 42. 3. Jim Walsh, “Favorite Pioneer Recording Artists: George Washington Johnson,” Hobbies, Sept. 1944, 27. 4. Jim Walsh, “Favorite Pioneer Recording Artists: In Justice to George Washington Johnson,” Hobbies, Jan. 1971, 37–39, 50, 91, Feb. 1971, 37, 39–40, 50, 92. 5. See John Calvert, “Regional News: Midlands Group,” Hillandale News, Feb. 1989, 166; “Mystery Artists,” In the Groove, Apr. 1989, 12; “Mystery Artists,” In the Groove, May 1989, 16; Peter Adamson, liner notes to Emile Berliner’s Gramophone, The Earliest Discs, Symposium 1058 (CD), 1989. Despite being advised of their errors, none of these authors seemed interested in acknowledging their mistakes. The flurry of erroneous statements about Johnson in 1989 led me to write about the situation in my column in the ARSC Journal, under the heading “Lies That Will Not Die.” This became the first of a “Lies That Will Not Die” series about persistent historical misstatements in articles about recording history. This particular rumor about Johnson seems to have been less frequently repeated since then. See Tim Brooks, “Current Bibliography,” ARSC Journal 20, no. 2 (Fall 1989): 224–25. 6. Some scholars have even concluded that blacks may not have recorded prior to1900...