(The second annual Vinyl Record Day blogswarm was another big success. At this blog, we set an all-time record for hits in one day, and I’m sure traffic was up at the participating blogs, too. There were 30 of us altogether, serving up a wide array of topics, and I’m grateful to everyone who wrote, and to everyone who read. Check the rundown to make sure you didn’t miss anything.)
The Pioneer Era of Recording has been over for nearly 90 years. The surviving recordings are often in poor shape due to age; even when cleaned up using the best technology the 21st century has to offer, the fidelity of the recordings makes them a hard listen. The styles popular during the Pioneer Era—marching bands, ragtime, barbershop, vaudeville comedy, and the infamous “coon songs”—have little appeal to our tastes today. These are the reasons why nearly all of the major stars of the Pioneer Era of Recording are remembered only by historians of the period and other like-minded geeks such as myself. Yet in their time, their accomplishments were every bit as impressive as the artists we venerate today. Let’s meet a few.
The first record that can be considered a hit in something like the modern sense came in 1891. An ex-slave named George Washington Johnson recorded “The Laughing Song,” which spent 10 weeks as the most popular song in the country, according to Joel Whitburn’s retroactive accounting in the marvelous Pop Memories: 1890-1954. (The book is out of print but available here.) “The Laughing Song”’s popularity can likely be attributed to something so simple as the novelty of infectious laughter coming from an unseen source.
Johnson followed “The Laughing Song” with another sizable hit, “The Whistling Coon.” “Coon songs” were an offshoot of ragtime, featuring supposedly comic lyrics about black people, which often seem jaw-droppingly racist to modern ears. Nevertheless, coon songs were incredibly popular between about 1890 and 1910, and were recorded by both white and black artists. One of the biggest stars of the Pioneer Era made his name singing coon songs. Arthur Collins came out of the 19th century minstrel-show tradition, where white performers in blackface imitated black dialect. Collins recorded “All Coons Look Alike to Me” in 1898 and “The Preacher and the Bear” in 1905. The former was the first song to be marketed as a “rag”; the latter was the single most popular record of the Pioneer Era, selling two million copies.
“The Laughing Song”/George W. Johnson (This is not the 1891 original; it’s a rerecording with orchestra made around 1902. The concept of “original recording” means less in the Pioneer Era because artists had to repeatedly record songs for duplication purposes—Johnson is said to have recorded “The Laughing Song” over 50 times a day at one point—and often recorded their hits for multiple labels.)
“The Preacher and the Bear”/Arthur Collins (As evidence for the above, this song was recorded by Collins on six different labels; this version is Edison cylinder 9000, the “hit” version. As coon songs go, it’s relatively tame. It’s been recorded in recent years by Rufus Thomas and Ray Stevens, but with its racist content cleaned up.)
One more tomorrow.
Recommended Reading: New Music Strategies wants you to meet Cliff Bolling, who’s digitizing his vast collection of 78s and uploading them for everyone to hear. Cliff is a Vinyl Record Hero if ever there was one.
Filed under: Tracks
