This page contains articles on particular recordings and artists, piecing together biographies, history, context and meaning. I also talk about the circumstances of finding each record.

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Old World Music Classics #29

Nie Zna Śmierci Pan Żywota- Kwartet Braci Okulskich

1929 (Columbia Records)

POLISH-AMERICAN

In the late 1990s in London, when I began to collect shellac, good ethnic 78s were scarce. In the heyday of the technology, the city lacked the huge swells of immigration that convinced New York City record companies to churn out thousands of ethnic titles in the teens and ‘20s. Not long after we moved to Boston in 2005, picking through the crates of random 78s he’d brought along for the ride, I met an old gramophone dealer at Brimfield Antique Market. He assured me that he had a barn-full more back home. “Always only $1 each, even if you find a rarity. I don’t know what’s in there.”

Sure enough, when I arrived at his place in New Hampshire, he showed me to an outbuilding tottering with shellac. Just in the immediate vicinity I spied some dark green Columbias, the livery of the most prodigious ethnic series in American history.

That day I went home with over 80 discs—Irish, Czech, Italian, German—labels and places almost unknown in the UK in the wild.

But it was a random Polish record, a Columbia from 1929, that most caught my attention.

Not the harried sawing fiddles on many a CD compilation but a hymn rendered by a sweet quartet and ragged soloist accompanied by bells, gossamer organ and strings. An “Easter Song” (Nie Zna Śmierci Pan Żywota), the piece evoked both simple village faith and Big Apple sophistication. And the performance, tense then exultant, stopped me in my tracks.

I knew nothing of the quartet—Kwartet Braci [Brothers] Okulskich—and quick online searches turned up very little. The track became an enduring favorite, but I put off further enquires for another day.

A full fifteen years later, I finally began some serious research. Despite the span of time, the Internet offered up the same meager results: scattered tracks on YouTube, scant discographical entries, all regurgitating the same basic facts. Spottswood counts a dozen discs under the quartet’s name, two on Okeh and the rest on Columbia, between 1925 and 1929. The early discs included the quartet’s hometown: Passaic, New Jersey.

I turned to genealogical and old newspaper sites, and initially found nothing. “Okulskich” produced almost zero. I then noticed the prior entry in Spottswood: Fabian Okulski. Might this be a member of the quartet recording as a solo artist? References to Fabian—and various brothers—turned up quickly on Ancestry. Then I stumbled on material so often missing when researching little known ethnic recording artists: photographs and a potted family history (written by younger brother William, not a member of the quartet). These documents confirmed that these Okulski brothers were indeed the Kwartet Braci Okulskich.

So here is my pieced together account of the Kwartet Braci Okulskich, seemingly the first time the brothers’ genealogical record has been properly connected to their brief career as ethnic recording artists.

The members of the Kwartet Braci Okulskich were:

-          Chester Okula (born 1894)

-          Alfred Okula (born 1896)

-          Fabian Okula (born 1900)

-          Benjamin Okula (born 1902)

The brothers were born in Warsaw in then Russia-controlled Poland, their parents (Joseph Okula and Anna Bielawski, both born in 1863) having migrated from their respective villages.

Within the Russian imperial orbit since the Conference of Vienna in 1815—when much of Europe was reorganized after Napoleon’s demise—Warsaw grew, industrialized and prospered but was never at ease. Periodic demonstrations and uprisings, demanding Polish autonomy, were met with Russian gunfire and repression. Relentless Russification saw restrictions on the Polish language and native Catholicism.

The Russian Revolution of 1905 spilled over into Warsaw and other Polish cities, fueled by recession and imperial disarray after Russian’s surprise loss to Japan in the Russo-Japanese war of 1904-05.  An amalgam of Polish independence and socialist zeal spurred the demonstrators, leading to a long and ugly general strike. The Russian authorities, consumed with tumult at home, teetered between concessions and violence.

This was the backdrop to the Okula family’s decision to try to reach America. Joseph had for years evaded conscription into the Imperial Army, scraping together enough money to pay someone else to go in his place (a legal escape hatch at the time). But with Russian forces bleeding in the east and facing revolution at home, he knew he could evade no longer.

Joseph devised a plan. Through army connections, he arranged for Anna to become governess for a wealthy family, taking the boys with her. The family spent the summer near Odessa on the Black Sea. Then, as Joseph envisaged, his wife and sons fled into nearby Turkey, gradually making their way—on foot and by wagon—into Europe and finally to Rotterdam and the SS Rijndam to New York City, arriving in July 1906. The immigration authorities somehow changed the family’s name from “Okula” to “Okulski”.

Joseph entered the army, stationed in Siberia, but eventually escaped. He somehow reached Ellis Island himself in 1908.    

The family lived first in Ipswich, Massachusetts, near a relative, before moving to Paterson, New Jersey, just across the river from Manhattan, in 1914. Musical talent precipitated the relocation: Anna sang and saw promise in her boys, eking out money for music lessons. Alfred at age 13 was organist at a church in Ipswich. A Father Nowakowski from Paterson heard of the musical family and convinced them to migrate, installing Alfred as organist in Paterson’s St. Stephen’s Church.  Fabian also learned the organ and piano. Chester took up the violin, Ben the organ, and all four brothers sang.

In 1916, Joseph was killed in a railway accident, hit by a train as his car crossed the track. Fog and a faulty train whistle caused the tragedy. After a legal battle, the family won compensation, investing the money in an ice-cream store. War rationing put an end to that business, and the older brothers enlisted.

After the war, the brothers found employment in the orchestra pit at local theatres, accompanying vaudeville and silent movies. All four married in the teens or early 1920s, continuing to reside in Paterson or nearby Passiac.

Making Records

In 1925, amid increased commercial interest in ethnic records, centered in nearby Manhattan, the Okulski family’s talents came to the attention of the Okeh record company. The Johnson-Reed Act of 1924 curtailed immigration to the United States, drastically reducing the flow of new arrivals from the old county. This put a premium on “authentic” homegrown singing and music. The strong economy of the 1920s gave many first-generation Poles more disposable income, putting phonographs and records within reach. Parallel to growing commercial openness to “down home” blues and country music during this period, the record companies opened the door to a wider range of ethnic styles.

The brothers Kwartet Braci Okulskich, featuring vocals, bells, organ and violin, stood somewhat apart from the usual dance music, solo singers and instrumentalists in the Polish catalog. Twelve discs were issued between 1925 and 1929, almost all with a religious theme. According to younger brother William Okulski’s recollection, some of the pieces came from Anna’s repertoire, some were traditional, and some composed or adapted by one or more members of the quartet.

The records are scarce today, suggesting less than stellar sales. Equally, the brothers’ switch to big-time Columbia Records in 1926 indicates some commercial success- although I can find no advertisements for the records in period newspapers. In the 1920s the family ran a piano store, also selling phonographs and records. Having an in-house quartet with its own line of records must have been a nice fillip for the business. Fabian Okulski convinced Columbia to let him record an additional sixteen solo sides—all Polish material—in 1928 and 1929. His final recording took place a month before the stock market crash.

The Great Depression chewed up the ethnic recording industry, crushing record sales everywhere. The 1930 census records three of the brothers working as musicians, two in the theater and one as a “musical director”.

Two of the brothers pursued musical careers. William says Alfred attended the Julliard School of Music and Boston Conservatory, composed a mass to St Joseph, in honor of his father, and was a choir director. He led the Harmoni Choir to victory at a Polish Choirs competition in Cleveland in the 1950s. Fabian was a band leader, accompanying shows and films in theaters. He is said to have conducted for stars such as Al Jolson and Eddie Cantor.  

By 1940, Chester was a “proprietor” (of rented accommodation or a store?), Fabian an “agent” (likely music-related) and Benjamin worked as a tester of radio sets. Only Alfred listed “organist”.

Both Alfred and Fabian were employed as church organists at the time of the 1950 census. Chester was a painter at the Freight Car Manufacturing Company, and Benjamin was a foreman at an “Electrical Instruments Factory” (and also a church organist, according to William).

Alfred died suddenly in 1961, of a brain hemorrhage, while at home playing the piano for friends. His funeral was attended by over 1,000 people. The other brothers, William included, passed away in the early 1980s.  

Easter Song

The Kwartet Braci Okulskich track that caught my attention is a celebration of Christ’s resurrection and victory over death. The words are from a poem by Franciszek Karpiński (1741-1825), a fondly remembered Polish writer of romantic and religious verse. The music appears to be by Teofil Klonowski (1805-1876), a well-known composer of Polish choral music.

Here is my translation of the words of Nie Zna Śmierci Pan Żywota:

The Lord of Life Knows Not Death

The Lord of life knows not death
although he passed through its gates;
The tomb was rent.
Holy hand. Hallelujah!
The tomb was rent.
Holy hand. Hallelujah!

Adam, your debt is repaid,
You are reconciled with the nations.
You will enter Heaven with your joyful children. Hallelujah!
You will enter Heaven with your joyful children. Hallelujah!

Vainly you soldiers are guarding!
You will not find him in this grave.
He rose, diffused into the dome.
God of nature. Hallelujah!
He rose, diffused into the dome.
God of nature. Hallelujah!

(based on a translation by Marcin Lydka)

This 1929 recording by the Kwartet Braci Okulskich evokes religious devotion and communal dignity far from home, with the last days of Roaring ‘20s New York City blaring outside. Along with millions of their fellow immigrants, these four young, naturalized Americans straddled old world and new, Polish and English, having pieced together a new life. Like the harmonies of the piece, the brothers found resonance from dissonance. The instrumentation—the flourish before the final verse—speaks to personality and ambition. “Tradition” is never static. Old hymns and sharp suits; holiness and microphones.  

Against the odds, the coincidence of ethnic vibrancy and new technology captured the moment before it was lost.

I have yet to find all twelve of the Kwartet’s discs. What I’ve heard so far, from four, are in similar style, but none reach the heights of Nie Zna Śmierci Pan Żywota. Perhaps something else awaits discovery.

Old World Music Classics #28

Baïlèro- Madeleine Grey & D’Orchestre de L’Opera Comique

1930 (Columbia Masterworks reissue 1945)

AUVERGNE- FRANCE

This track is a vintage rendering of music in the Occitan language from southern France: Baïlèro, from the famous Songs from the Auvergne collection by Joseph Canteloube (born 1879) and sung by soprano Madeleine Grey. The composer managed, with a few notes and words, and Grey’s performance, to propel this song to immortality- if himself to obscurity.

To my ears, Baïlèro is a rare example of composed music inspired by folk tradition that transcends both: more sweeping and lyrical than most field recordings but bright and immediate in a way few “serious” works manage.

A ubiquitous vocal piece today, found on endless light classical selections, Baïlèro was long unmoored from context or intent.

What is the story behind this incredible composition and stellar recording?

Marie-Joseph Canteloube de Malaret was born into a well-to-do family in the Auvergne region of France, speakers of the Auvergnat Occitan dialect. He studied piano as a child, and as a teenager began to compose. He moved away for university and then embarked on a banking career, torn between a life of music and earning a living. When his father died, Joseph returned home to take over the family estate.

But music continued to inspire him and following correspondence with Vincent d’Indy, a noted composer of the time and more than twenty years Joseph’s senior, the young father, leaving his wife and twin sons behind, moved to Paris in 1907 to enroll in d’Indy’s Schola Cantorum, a music academy. Founded in 1894, the Schola Cantorum emphasized older musical forms, such as Gregorian Chant and Renaissance polyphony. D’Indy was a devotee of Wagner, taken with the German’s molding of folk traditions and national pride. The Schola attracted aspiring composers from France and beyond, including many mesmerized by folk music, such as Isaac Albéniz from Spain, a few years before Joseph’s time, and John Jacob Niles from the United States, a few years after.

Joseph gradually made a name for himself as a composer but struggled to align his musical instincts, favoring the strains of his home region, with the tastes of the capital’s elite. His early output, operas, suites and symphonic poems, a pan-European sensibility, gave way to song cycles inspired by the peasant music of the Auvergne and other French regions.

From 1910 to 1925—sidetracked by the war—Joseph labored on his first opera Les Mas, in the Occitan language. The work won the Prix Heugel and 100,000 francs but it took four years to convince one of the Paris opera houses to stage it. A second opera, Vercingétorix, about a Gaulish chief who resisted the Romans, was also tepidly received.

Baïlèro, the star of the most famous Chants d'Auvergne, begun in the mid-1920s, garnered Joseph some attention, leading to the first recording of the piece, along with a selection of other songs, in February 1930.

Timing was fortuitous. The horror of the First World War a fading memory, French nationalism and regionalism bright and vital, and the collapse of the long economic expansion of the 1920s not quite realized, the Songs of the Auvergne 78 rpm album set, as it appeared in English, barely escaped the maw of the Great Depression.

The involvement of Madeleine Grey (1896-1979), the voice that helped push the work into the limelight, was also opportune. A French singer of Jewish heritage, Grey was much admired during the 1920s and worked with leading French composers such as Ravel and Fauré. Joseph sent her a copy of his Chants d'Auvergne, and she gave the compositions’ first public performance in 1926, to great success. Despite acclaim, enhanced by the favorable reception of the recordings, Grey made very few other studio appearances, hobbled by rising antisemitism. If Baïlèro had been recorded just a few years later, Madeleine, credited with rendering a freshness and directness inherent in the music, dimensions others sings may have struggled with, might not have been considered.

Indeed, the conductor on the Baïlèro recording was Elie Cohen, the Jewish Chef D’Orchestre de L’Opera Comique, which accompanied Madeleine Grey.

Madeleine Grey, singer on the first recording of “Songs of the Auvergne”.

To me, Baïlèro is very striking, capturing a joyous essence both ancient and composed. Yet the rest of the song cycle, at least what I have heard on the original and subsequent recordings, pales by comparison: so much quotidian cheeriness and tame thematic recycling. My ears recall endless dull field recordings of folk music the world over; evocative sepia photograph album covers, quaint and worthwhile, drawing me in, aching for some magic. Sitting outside the culture, the words, the local color, uncertain in translation, seem at best mysterious and at worst banal. Without Baïlèro, I wonder if Chants d'Auvergne would be long forgotten.

To add to the miracle, the words of Baïlèro, at least in English, seem trifling: a conversation with a shepherd—whose calling to his sheep is the song’s signature—exchanging clipped remarks about the troubles of pastoral life, where the grass is best and the river between them. The personality of the singer (simply a “girl” according to some commentators) is unclear.

Shepherd across the river,

You're hardly having a good time,

Sing baïlèro lèrô

No, I'm not,

And you, too, can sing baïlèro

Shepherd, the meadows are in bloom.

You should graze your flock on this side,

Sing baïlèro lèrô

The grass is greener in the meadows on this side,

Baïlèro lèrô

Shepherd, the water divides us,

And I can't cross it,

Sing baïlèro lèrô

Then I'll come down and find you,

Baïlèro lèrô

Perhaps it is a shy love song or makes subtle allusions to the urban-rural divide, but any deeper meaning appears lost. Baïlèro, today a minor staple of the “classical” repertoire, present on innumerable “relaxing classics” collections, has assumed a life of its own. The song’s regional origins are acknowledged but nothing more, with Joseph noted only in passing.

"Peasant songs often rise to the level of purest art in terms of feeling and expression, if not in form." Like many folklorists of his day, Canteloube transcribed the music he heard from the mouths of the people. He did not employ the phonograph, then used by a few collectors since the 1890s. The composer is quoted as saying that a transcribed folk song "is like a pressed flower, dry and dead - to breathe life into it one needs to see and feel its native hills, scents and breezes". Joseph saw adaptation and orchestration as that breath of life, the recreation of the sounds of home, but it would be fascinating to be able to hear the source for Baïlèro, if there was one.

To my ears, field recordings from Auvergne and of Auvergne extraction in Paris—such as the those on the France- Une Anthologie des Musiques Traditionnelles CD boxset released in 2010—sound pedestrian by comparison. This suggests either that what Joseph remembered from his youth had vanished by the time a recording device showed up, or that Baïlèro is predominantly the product of the composer’s study, passion and imagination.  

During World War II, Joseph cooperated with the Vichy regime, broadcasting French folk song recitals on the radio. Given the vicious nationalism of the Nazis, perhaps this was quiet subversion.

Joseph Canteloube as a young and older man.

 As Joseph faded into old age and obscurity, “Songs of the Auvergne” took on a life of its own. Remarkably, strains of Baïlèro ended up in William Walton’s music for Olivier’s 1944 film of Henry V, a British blockbuster designed to boost morale late in World War II. That French regional music was chosen as the backdrop for a tale of the English bashing the French underscores the raw appeal of Baïlèro. The piece provides the crescendo at the wedding of Henry and his bride, Catherine, daughter of the vanquished French king.

After the war, Joseph continued to tinker with his most famous work, expanding Songs of the Auvergne to five volumes. He died in 1957.  

Much folk-inspired art music stumbles while Baïlèro soars, tethered to the soil but flashing high above it.

Old World Music Classics #27

Processo de Saint Bartomeu- Cobla La Principal de La Bisbal

(Disque “Gramophone”, 1931)

CATALONIA- SPAIN

For the record collector, the most precious quarry is a disc of delightful music that nobody wants. Norms dictate which records are desirable, expensive and hard-to-come-by and which are dismissed, cheap and ubiquitous. But sometimes orthodoxy overlooks something.

So it was when a well-known dealer in Paris listed a host of delectable international 78 rpm discs on eBay- among them dark choral dirges from Albania and lusty theater troupes from Madagascar, genres highly prized in the world of ethnic shellac collecting. But also available were a few hard-to-discern discs from Spain, dating from the 1930s; in wonderful condition but priced at a discount.

I took a chance, suspecting either staid classical fare or some gleaming but insubstantial popular style. What I discovered, weeks later when the thick cardboard box arrived, a straitjacket of tape and padded with crumpled French tabloids and supermarket coupons, was some remarkable music.

Several sides caught my attention but most exuberant was La Processo de Saint Bartomeu by the Cobla La Principal de La Bisbal.

This piece is an instrumental accompaniment to a Sardana, a popular circle dance from Catalonia, the northeast region of Spain of which Barcelona is the capital. Like many regional dances the world over, the Sardana is a mix of distant folk origins and nationalist revival. Josep Maria Ventura i Casas (1817-1875), a composer who was part of the Renaixença, or Catalan cultural renaissance of the 19th century, was taken with local musical forms but sought to develop them. He considered the standard dance and accompaniment too limited- a fixed 98 measures, barely two minutes in length and played by four musicians: bagpipes, shawn (a primitive oboe), and a one-man flabiol (a Catalan flute) and tambori (a small drum).

Josep expanded the ensemble, which gradually evolved to the eleven musicians considered standard from the late 19th century, and the size of the assembly that made the recording discussed here. A larger woodwind section featured, as well as brass instruments and a double bass. The composer also invented the long sardanes form and wrote hundreds of compositions, long and short.

Coblas, groups of sardana musicians, proliferated across the region, conjuring the soundtrack to Catalan nationalist sentiment. The goal was both musical revival and innovation, fashioning new sophistication from hand-me-downs. Music professors and conservatories joined the movement, as well as municipal orchestras.

Sardanes dances were viewed as both skilled and popular. Tradition dictates that observers may join the circle if so inspired. The braiding of culture and participation, legacy and spontaneity, underlined Catalan claims to ancient nationhood and engaged both ambitious musicians and ordinary people. Catalan nationalists such as the famed poet Joan Maragall i Gorina feted the sardanes as an example of warm, vibrant popular art in contrast to “cold” and over-thought high culture.

As Spain steadily lost its empire and the central government weakened, the regions grew restive for greater autonomy. Advocates for self-determination called for a federal Spain or a Catalan nation rising from Spanish ashes. In 1892, the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s voyage to America (remembering that the Spanish crown sponsored the venture and that some Catalans claim Columbus as their own), Catalonia held cobla contests as part of the celebrations, further disseminating the genre. This year the Bases de Manresa, a founding document of Catalan autonomy, was formulated.

The Cobla La Principal de La Bisbal (CPB), the cobla that made this record, was formed in 1888 in the city of La Bisbal d’Empordà, north of Barcelona. Over the years, a revolving door of 11 musicians formed the core, with singers and dancers added for certain performances.

Joan Carreras i Dagas (1828-1900), composer and musicologist, ran a music school in the town that attracted promising musicians from across the region. Dagas also had a history of organizing “primitive” music schools for local children. He is credited as a guiding hand in the formation of the CPB. As the waves of sardana and Catalan feeling crested, the CPB, like comparable ensembles all over Catalonia, was a vehicle to showcase and evolve indigenous composition and musicianship.

To my ears, the music of the CPB and similar coblas is both familiar and strange. Quotidian trumpets and double-bass mingle with two tible and two tenore- smaller and larger shawms that make tight, buzzing blasts- two fiscorns- a rotary-valve baritone saxhorn with the bell facing forward- a valve-trombone as well as the one-man flabiol (a tiny one-hand piercing flute) and tambori (small drum, tapped with a stick or one finger) player.

Some cobla pieces meander, imitating long-winded classical forms. The restricted span of the 78 rpm recordings I have heard often mean extra focus and energy. From the first trill of the flabiol, many of the recordings are endlessly immediate, rousing and inventive.

This particular piece, La Processo de Saint Bartomeu, recorded in 1931, is not credited and is most likely a traditional composition that has been adapted over the years. Bartholomew was one of the twelve apostles of Jesus and was martyred somewhere on the outskirts of eastern Christendom, skinned alive and crucified upside down according to legend. I can find no obvious connection between Bartholomew, La Bisbal d’Empordà or the CPB other than the saint’s feast day being a fixture on the Catholic calendar (August 24).

I imagine the musicians, sweltering in their Sunday best, up on a platform as the townspeople file past holding aloft some minor relic of the saint.   

CPB operates to this day. The ensemble has always blurred the lines between Catalan and international fare, and traditional and modern. The most prominent videos online show recent incarnations performing the Rocky theme and singing songs from West Side Story, but pieces similar to those captured on old recordings are also in evidence. In fact, the “cobla” outfit appears to stick with traditional pieces while offshoots do show tunes, Frank Sinatra and other fashions. Recent cobla videos, filmed in town squares, show many audience members dancing in large, informal circles- bags and coats piled in the middle.

I later remembered that two CPB pieces closed the 1996 “Voice of Spain” CD on the Heritage label, a retrospective of Spanish regional 78s reviewed in The Gramophone magazine by diplomat and musicologist, Rodney Gallop. I bought this CD in 1997, opening my ears to styles I did not know existed.

For a video version of this track—the music accompanied by commentary and period photographs—please click below for a link to my Music Atlas YouTube channel.

Old World Music Classics #26

Palesteena- Original Dixieland Jazz Band

(Victor, 1920)

JAZZ- USA

Much early jazz- pre-1925- I find dull. The energy and excitement of the music, so exhilarating or even shocking to contemporary ears, can seem tame today. So much form over substance, all speed and novelty. And the Original Dixieland Jazz Band, first to make jazz records, and forever bedeviled by being in both the right and wrong place at the same time, epitomize the problem. Titilating audiences with their frenetic syncopation, this white band from New Orleans are often dismissed as just the lucky jokesters who cleared the way for the real thing.

I found this record in an antique market on the outskirts of Denver, Colorado. Shiny as new, and just $2. I knew the significance of the band (years ago in Bedford, UK, as I waded through tottering piles of 78s, the owner winked “All just £1 each, unless you find any Original Dixieland Jazz Band records”), but I was not expecting much. The A side, Margie, has a nice chord change but is otherwise forgettable. Side B, however, made me sit up and pay attention. Here, in 1920, was a piece of obviously carefully composed jazz, as much for listening as dancing, and evoking not the streets of the Big Easy but the Jewish Lower East Side. Right down to the ten second clarinet solo in the middle, stopping the dancers in their tracks, as if Naftule Brandwein or Dave Tarras had joined the band.

What was this music? Appropriation, parody or genre-twisting, stereotype-crunching creativity?

Let me first offer an opinion on the rumbling ODJB controversy- mediocre opportunists who took advantage of racist times or under-appreciated pioneers with a fleeting edge over their peers?

The ODJB did indeed strike gold when they made the inaugural “jass” records for Victor in 1917, sparking a worldwide craze that revved up the Roaring ‘20s. At that early date, the musicianship and originality are unarguable, and the music was fresh and exciting. The heart of the matter- whether ODJB really did come up with the formula of timing and interplay that marked “jass” as something new, as they always claimed, or whether they were just the first to etch a regional sound on shellac- can never be answered conclusively. By definition, no earlier jazz records exist, and efforts to find such- from James Reese Europe to Wilbur Sweatman- never quite match or transcend the ODJB sound, or are mythical, such as the supposed Buddy Bolden cylinder.  

New Orleans was a hot bed of musical possibilities, with strong African American influences, yes, alongside numerous European, Caribbean and Creole strains. The fact that jazz arose in that city strongly suggests that it was the diversity of musical contributions that shaped the new sound. That children of European immigrants should be part of the jazz story seems logical, and there is no denying that numerous Big Easy residents of European extraction played in the city’s array of brass, string and ragtime combos in the first years of the 20th century, and that music drew inspiration from far and wide.

The trouble was that the Original Dixieland Jazz Band struggled to evolve. Torn between riotous numbers, “authentic” down home blues, and Tin Pan Alley standards, the ODJB never found a mature voice. Overtaken by imitators and innovators alike, jostled by the “symphonic jazz” of Paul Whiteman and George Gershwin, the blues fad that added suggestive lyrics to jazzy instrumental gyrations, and by the step-change small band creativity of Louis Armstrong and Sidney Bechet, the band were running on empty by the mid-1920s, and broke up. A flitting 1930s revival aside, Nick LaRocca, cornetist and band leader, then spent decades sulking about what might have been, embellishing the tale to the point that he and his bandmates alone had pulled jazz out of the air.

The 1960 book The Story of the Original Dixieland Jazz Band by H. O. Brunn, published just before La Rocca’s death, makes the cornetist’s (often convincing) case but the almost complete lack of recognition for black musicians leaves a bad taste in the mouth. For anyone to assert that the ODJB somehow invented jazz out of nothing- which LaRocca and Brunn often flirt with- is preposterous, but to deny the band members’ formative experiences, skill and creativity is no less far-fetched. If LaRocca’s perspective and humility matched his blowing he might have secured the central place in musical history he craved.   

The 2015 documentary, Sicily Jass: The World’s First Man in Jazz directed by Michele Cinque makes LaRocca’s case in more measured tones, acknowledging his bitterness and racism but also his skills and innovation, and that of the ODJB.

There is a piognant moment in the film where three members of a reimagined brass band, assembled in the ruins of the Sicilian town LaRocca’s parents left in 1877, step away from their fellows and join a five-piece jazz band. That jazz has multiple roots, not least from Europe, is the assertion, underlining LaRocca’s contention that the creativity of he and the ODJB was as important as any. A clip of Mark Beresford, famed jazz record collector, playing a tape of Nick LaRocca, later in life, conjures the voice of a working class son of immigrants, challenging the simplistic “white” label with its implications of privilege and blandness. The ODJB certainly had privileges not available to black musicians, but that does not mean white musicians of the period had uniform experiences or lacked inventiveness.

I can only smile at the story that Freddie Keppard, black New Orleans virtuoso cornetist, born the same year as LaRocca, turned down Victor’s 1915 offer to record, variously said to have dismissed the fee or be anxious that recordings would enable rivals to steal his style. And smile some more that in January 1917 Columbia Records decided not to issue their (very first) recordings of the ODJB, fearing public backlash at this outlandish music, whether played by whites or blacks. This pushed the band into Victor’s arms who released the first jazz record a few weeks later. The story of the first jazz record could have been very different.

It is a shame that the film Sicily Jass did not feature more black voices. Only one black person is interviewed about the ODJB, and this brief segment is simply used to imply unthinking black incredulity about any significant white roots of jazz. The film is well done and makes a decent case but largely talks to itself.

If we need a reminder of the multiple strands of jazz derivation, Palesteena is a case in point.

Palesteena was composed by Joseph Russell Robinson, a member of ODJB’s second line-up. Original pianist, Henry Ragas, died of Spanish Influenza in 1919. Robinson, born in Indianapolis in 1892, a sometime ragtime composer, theater pianist and songwriter, then in Manhattan, auditioned to replace Ragas and got the job. The band whisked off to London for an extended tour. Back in the states, the ODJB released their only pieces composed by Robinson- Margie and Palesteena, in 1920. The record was a hit, but Robinson maintained only intermittent connection with the band from then on. As their fame dwindled, Robinson turned out a steady stream of compositions for other artists, including Mamie and Bessie Smith, collaborated with W. C. Handy and Noble Sissle, and worked as a session musician. The ODJB’s subsequent records before their demise returned to the Dixieland formula.

So how to make sense of Palesteena?

The piece has a dual identity- as the ODJB instrumental and a comic song- Lena from Palesteena. It appears the latter, which tells of chubby Lena, a Jewish girl from the Bronx who travels to Palestine to play the concertina (badly) but nonetheless stays trim and entertains the locals, came first. The song- along with Margie- was written with Con Conrad, another aspiring composer. In 1921, major stars Eddie Cantor and Frank Crumit covered the song, reviving the hit over and over.

To my ears, the comic version, with words, has nothing of the elegance and sparkle of the instrumental. The tune is the same but in the vocal rendition is just a vehicle for the lyrics.

From one perspective, the Lena from Palesteena version fits a type of Robinson composition: music clothed in the regional or exotic. Hawaii Calls from 1916, You Brough Old Ireland Back To Me from the following year, and Shanghai Melody and Pan Yan (and his Chinese Jazz Band) from 1919 suggest Robinson saw popular appeal in the allure of distance lands, homeland nostalgia and pocking fun at stereotypes.

So did the songwriters simply start with some lighthearted parody, and then Robinson, perhaps under pressure to give his new comrades, the ODJB, a new twist upon their return to America, spun the sophisticated instrumental?

Regardless the “Palestine” theme was timely. Robinson’s song coincides with the burgeoning settlement of Jews in Palestine, and efforts by the nascent Zionist movement to persuade the British to establish some sort of Jewish homeland in the wake of the Ottoman Empire’s retreat. Robinson’s stay in Manhattan would have exposed him somewhat to the concerns of NYC’s swell of Jewish immigrants. Jews who chose America were sometimes dismissive of Zionist ambitions in Palestine, perhaps inspiring the songwriters.

It may be no accident that Palesteena appeared in the wake of the runway success of The Sheik, the 1919 novel by Edith Maude Hull, which kicked off the “desert romance” genre and sparked a brief period of popular fascination with what we now call the Middle East. Arab love interest and “all those sheiks” appear in Robinson and Conrad’s lyrics.

But Palesteena is more than Arab exoticism or Gentile humor about Jews. In Klezmer: Jewish Music from Old World to Our World, Henry Sapoznik notes that the composition “used the minor-key section of the popular klezmer melody “Nokh a Bisl” (Just a Little More) as its main theme and, in case the ethnic origins weren’t clear enough, inserted sixteen measures of the ubiquitous Jewish melody “Ma Yofus” as a bridge” (p77). This implies Robinson and Conrad had more than an acquaintance with contemporary Jewish music.

While jazz was not recorded until 1917, some Jewish dance music was, and waxed in New York City. Most recorded Jewish music of the era was either Yiddish Theater pieces or Cantorials, but some popular instrumentals and instrumental-backed songs were also made. Abraham Elenkrig’s Yidishe Orchestra recorded twenty sides between 1913 and 1915, and Joseph Moskowitz’s cymbalon discs, some which were Jewish is character, sold well-enough to persuade Victor to issue a string in 1916. Abe Schwartz (Yiddisher Orchester) and Henry Kandel made numerous records, but first in 1917, a few months after ODJB, although both had released plenty by the time Robinson and Conrad penned Palesteena.

In summary, the significance of Paelsteena is twofold. First is that this lone recording, overlooked in the ODJB’s catalog, belies Nick LaRocca’s sour assertion that he alone created jazz. Robinson’s instrumental version of Palesteena is an acknowledgement of the interlaced roots of klezmer and jazz, highlighting just one of the strands that influenced the latter. The tale is told, again by Henry Sapoznik, that renowned Jewish clarinetist, Shloimke Beckerman, was working in another band at Reisenwebber’s restaurant the night in 1917 the ODJB’s debuted in NYC. Years later, recalling seeing the ODJB perform for the first time, Beckerman said “Every trick he did I could do better!” (p101). There is no “original”, just the endless interplay of influence and creativity.

The second reason why Palesteena is significant is that it marked a turning point in the ODJB’s career. The band’s UK recordings already exhibit departures from the frenetic Dixieland mold- some slower, more tuneful numbers; and while Robinson is not credited as composer on any, my theory is that his influence was decisive. Fresh from their England triumph, the band returned to America buoyed with pride and anticipation. But the idea that they could simply repeat their past performances and sustain the same level of success was a mirage. Like any artist, initial popularity requires further innovation to keep audiences engaged and outwit the competition. With Robinson on-board, both Margie and Palesteena afforded ODJB the makings of a new direction, a nod to mainstream dance music and the strains of a multi-ethnic American populace, and most importantly, in Palesteena, creative composed music that took disparate elements and fashioned something new.

But the moment was lost. No doubt LaRocca resented being out of the limelight and insisted the band return to their signature sound. Robinson may have felt underappreciated and saw better opportunities elsewhere. Marguerite, Robinson’s beloved wife and no doubt the inspiration for Margie, died suddenly in 1921, throwing the composer into turmoil. For a few more years the ODJB churned through another series of increasingly outmoded numbers before giving up the ghost.

Transcending the tired black versus white debate about the origins of jazz, Palesteena is a reminder of other sources and of individual creativity. Had the stars aligned, the ODJB could similarly have transcended their fateful beginnings.

Finally, here is my video version of Palesteena on my Music Atlas YouTube Channel.

Old World Music Classics #25

Skin Game Blues- Peg Leg Howell

(Columbia, 1927)

COUNTRY BLUES- USA

“When I came to Georgia, money and clothes I had babe. All the money I had done gone. My Sunday clothes in pawn”. These are the opening lines of Skin Game Blues by “Peg Leg” Howell, recorded in November 1927. I selected this song for two reasons. First because it is a striking combination of blues sentiment with non-blues melody and structure, a reminder of the tangled influences on blues and country artists at the time, and a far cry from the plodding blues norm. Second because Peg Leg Howell, born Joshua Barnes Howell, is from my current hometown of Eatonton, Georgia.

Biographical sketches uniformly begin with Howell’s birthplace, but the pioneering singer is completely unrecognized in the small southern city he called home. It is ironic, but perhaps typical, that such a town, where segregation is a living memory, should in its search for relevance and viability so conspicuously overlook one of its renowned African American sons.

(Update: in 2022, three years after I published this article, plus a sketch of Howell’s life in the Eatonton Messenger, the City hosted the inaugural “Peg Leg Howell Blues Festival”).

In Eatonton it is Joel Chandler Harris, famed chronicler of the Uncle Remus slave folk tales, who is the most feted local forebear. Depictions of Brer Rabbit, both from the books and the 1946 Disney version Song of the South, dot the city, and there is an Uncle Remus Museum. Mr. Harris died in 1908.

Another famous author, Alice Walker, born 1944, best known for the Pulitzer prize-winning novel The Color Purple, grew up in the surrounding countryside. The legacy of Jim Crow, and Ms. Walker’s vocal criticism of the sometime vicious small mindedness of many white southerners mid-century, meant Eatonton never whole heartedly embraced her, and the feeling was mutual.

This year was Alice Walker’s 75th birthday and there was something of a rapprochement. A gutsy Georgia Writers Museum was established in town a few years ago, with recognition of Walker at its heart. Certain friends and colleagues of the writer saw an opportunity for reconciliation. Ms. Walker at first said that she appreciated the birthday gesture- a weekend celebration was planned- but would not attend. She then changed her mind and was guest of honor. We had the good fortune to host Alice and her party for lunch at the Dot2Dot Inn.

On her website, Alice Walker commented:

Thank you, and blessings to the sweet people of Eatonton, Georgia, from around the country, and around the world, who showed up in loving ways for this amazing celebration.  Let it be known far and wide that we have- together, this time- begun the dance of Life again. -AW

My hope is that the reset relationship between Alice Walker and Eatonton grows and develops from here.

But Peg Leg Howell is stuck in the middle. Uncomplicated in death like Mr. Harris but out of public consciousness, unlike Ms. Walker.

Born March 5th 1888, Howell’s documentary mark is slight. I can find no birth certificate online- only in 1919 did Georgia centralize things- and there is no sign of the family in the 1890 census. In the 1900 count, our subject, aged 12, reported as Barnes Howell and still living in Eatonton, is named as a “boarder” with a Rose Bailey, a “washerwoman”. Barnes is “at school” and literate. Perhaps the boy’s parents farmed in the countryside and sent him to a school in town. But no other Howell is reported in Putnam County beyond the city limits.

Four other Howells are named in Eatonton that year- Edward W. Howell, born 1872 and his wife S. Fannie Howell, born 1867, plus their infant daughter, Frances; and an older man, Isaac Howell, a boarder elsewhere in the city. Were Edward and Fannie, Barnes’s parents? Just possibly- although only a surname connects them; but if so, why would their son board nearby?

Howell’s own reminiscences when he was rediscovered in 1963 recalled a farmer’s life in Eatonton until around 1914, working with his father. He then said he worked in a fertilizer factory in nearby Madison before, in 1916, he lost his right leg to a gunshot wound inflicted by his angry brother-in-law (motive unclear). The story goes that Howell, now less able to work the farm or factory, idled around Eatonton before trying his luck in Atlanta, about 75 miles away, in 1923.

Again, our friend is missing from the 1910 and 1920 censuses. A 1917 draft record confirms a Madison address and a lost leg rendering him unfit for military service. The document appears to give his occupation as “nothing”- perhaps Howell’s sore response so soon after the accident. He is married but has no-one “solely dependent” upon him.

Implausibly, Howell claimed he learned the guitar one night around 1909. “I learnt myself- didn’t take too long. I just stayed up one night and learnt myself” he maintained to the young blues enthusiasts who tracked him down in old age. But there is no question that for a disabled black man in the Jim Crow South, musicianship offered a measure of dignity and independence.

Swelling Atlanta trumped tottering Eatonton, hit hard by the boll weevil scourge in the late teens and early ‘20s. There was far greater opportunity to play for tips on the busy streets of black and in pockets prosperous neighborhoods of the state capital. Howell conjured a mix of a blues and country dance tunes, sometimes teaming up with fiddlers and mandolin players. Playing alone did not pay the bills, persuading Howell to run bootleg liquor- of course illegal under prohibition however you looked at it- which landed him in prison.

No doubt there were plenty of black country musicians plying their trade in 1920s Atlanta, but a Mr. Brown from Columbia Records saw Howell playing on the street and invited him to make a record. This was 1926 when the female blues singer craze was fading, the economy was booming, electrical recording was brand new and record companies were seeing early success with rougher blues, country and ethnic sounds. Billed as Peg Leg Howell, Barnes was the first country blues musician to make a record for Columbia, one of the two leading companies of the day. Howell pre-dates greats such as Charley Patton, Blind Willie McTell, Son House and Tommy Johnson in the studio, and helped the country blues go mainstream (if short-term only within the “race records” market).

Over the next two and a half years, Howell made about 15 records (30 sides) of blues and country music, sometimes solo and sometimes with Eddie Anthony (fiddle) or Jim Hill (mandolin). He was born earlier than almost all other country blues musicians who made records, connecting him to a deeper repertoire.

Howell’s records are a mix of gravelly complaint about prison life, dangling sexual prowess and pleading for his woman to come back. The country dances are lighter, with playful, rambling lyrics. In my opinion, Howell’s recordings are raw and authentic but few are inspired. The words may be heartfelt, but the tune and playing often routine. If you are not at a country picnic in 1927, the dance music can seem a little over-familiar.

Skin Game Blues stands out. Stefan Grossman, an accomplished guitarist and teacher who learned from a number of blues legends in the twilight of their careers, considers the melody “unique in the history of the blues”. Wilifrid Mellers, in his 1963 book Music in a New Found Land, writes that the “beautiful tune preserves much of the pentatonic freshness and lyricism of Appalachian folk-song from which it is derived; and that tune in turn descends directly from an Irish or Scottish original” (p268). Mellers does not speculate further about the supposed origin of the tune, and I can find no other origin theories. In the notes to the 1960s LP of Howell in his dotage, the singer implies that he wrote the song himself (yet credits third parties for certain other of his records).  

A melodic and lyrical cousin may be Don’t Let Your Deal Go Down by Charlie Poole and The North Carolina Ramblers, according to a 1999 Inside Bluegrass article, but the relationship is distant at best. Most likely Howell’s piece, in common with most of his repertoire, is a hybrid of various sources and his own creativity. Reference to gambling “all through Spain” is a giveaway for recycling old lyrical staples. Howell lived all his life in Georgia. He did not “come to Georgia”, as the song maintains.

The melody of Skin Game Blues, free from the clutches of the blues scale, builds the tension, as the second and then surprisingly the third line rises ever higher. As Meller notes, the brightness of the pentatonic scale clashes with the mournful words, and it is this ambivalence that makes the song great. The accompaniment is more rhythmic and banjo-like than a typical blues of the period. Howell recounts his gambling highs and lows, telling his woman what went wrong. He does not make excuses. His tone is repentant.

If this Peg Leg Howell discography is accurate, Skin Game Blues was recorded in November 1927 but not released until 1929. Indeed, it was the b-side of Howell’s final solo record. It is sobering to think that the track might not have been released at all, judged insufficiently commercial or ending up on the wrong side of the stock market crash.

“Skin” is a game, common across the south at the time, where each player is dealt a card and then wagers which like card- another ten or Jack, say- will be drawn first or last, with endless variations. A losing player can try to recoup their losses by selecting another card from those already turned. For a price, a player may select the card of their choice, buying into superstition about lucky cards. The dealer plays against everyone else, inviting all manner of suspicion and trickery.

In her 1935 book Mules and Men, folklorist Zora Neale Hurston describes a game of Georgia Skin. The banter is thick and fast, such as:

Hurston recounts how the dealer sings “Let the deal go down, boys. Let the deal go down” as the cards “fall”, each line punctuated by “hah!” Howell’s song has the same refrain, but his tone is anything but jovial. He dramatizes bold plays- “Hold the cards! A dollar more the deuce beat a nine!”- but otherwise his is a tale of folly. All his money is gone, the police try to arrest him and his fellow players rough him up.

Why “skin”? It is not clear, but perhaps an allusion to fleecing punters.

Howell’s records sold well enough- more than 10,000 copies in some cases- to keep him busy in the studio. He relays that he earned $50 for his first record, plus unspecified royalties. But everything came crashing down when the economy tanked in 1929. Before long, Howell was bootlegging again and back behind bars. After that, like so many blues and country artists of the 1920s, Howell vanished from view. In the 1960s he recalled giving up music altogether once Eddie Anthony passed away in 1934.

Howell worked odd jobs and seems to have continued to elude the census takers in 1930 and 1940. The Atlanta City Directory has him, and wife Bessie, living at the “rear” of 316 Martin Street SE in downtown Atlanta, and in 1937 at a wood yard at 21 Keystone Alley (a street which appears to no longer exist). In 1944 he is back inside, convicted of two counts of what looks like- based on the crime abbreviations used in the register- violation of liquor laws. He received a year’s sentence. The 1960 directory has Howell, with no wife, at 683 Cooper Street SW, about a mile south of today’s I-20 through the city center.

When blues enthusiasts George Mitchell, Roger Brown and Jack Boozer tracked down Howell in 1963, the old man was living in much reduced circumstances. Pitifully, he’d lost his other leg to diabetes. He was pleased with all the attention, and gathered enough strength to record a few tracks for a Testament LP, but was too sick and immobile to get any further benefit from the blues revival. Joshua Barnes “Peg Leg” Howell died 11 August 1966, aged 78 and is buried in Chestnut Hill Cemetery in Atlanta.

A Social Security record from 11 May 1966 contains the only reference I have been able to find to Howell’s parents, who are named as Thomas Howell and Ruth Mirik. These names do not match the Edward and Fannie Howell living in Eatonton in 1900. A Ruth Myrick was living in Putnam County in 1880 but then the trail goes cold. There is no clear path to Thomas Howell.

Today, now recorded music is all but free, Peg Leg Howell’s recordings are increasingly well-known and appreciated, and he stands among the blues greats of the 1920s. Perhaps locked away in the Putnam county archives are more clues about Howell’s early life and family. Who were his parents? Did he have any siblings? Was “Bessie” his wife all along, or a second wife in Atlanta? What happened to her? Did they have any children?

In closing, Eatonton take note. With Peg Leg Howell on guitar, Joel Chandler Harris on fiddle and Alice Walker on mandolin, we have something special.

Old World Music Classics #24

I Hear You Calling Me- John McCormack

(Victor, 1910)

ENGLISH POPULAR SONG OF THE EDWARDIAN ERA

The worst mistake a listener can make is to judge a piece of music based on its style, era or other associations. This record, a bestseller in the Anglophone suburbs and sung by one of the most famous singers of the first half of the 20th century, intrigues me for the same reason any track discussed on this site intrigues me- a striking performance, a creative composition, and a record lost to time.

I came across this record, in the over-stuffed racks of Haggle Records in Islington, on an old LP chronicling some of the earliest recordings of John McCormack (1884-1945), the Irish tenor famed for his renditions of classical arias and popular songs. I knew McCormack only vaguely and worried the combination of trained singer, parlor music and tinny 1900s technology would be bland, but the vintage of the recordings (as early as 1904) and evocative titles about old Ireland persuaded me to plump down a few pounds. I was pleasantly surprised.

Songs such as Kathleen Mavourneen and Savourneen Deelish had a mournful, heartfelt charm, carried by the eerie crackling sweetness of the small orchestra. Most of the songs were about windswept landscapes of Eire and sorrowful colleens, but one stood apart as lighter and more modern. Maybe I’m over-interpreting but on first hearing, I Hear You Calling Me seemed attuned to the tentative liberties of Edwardian London: a stolen kiss between two lovers “when the moon had veiled her light”, no mention of marriage or engagement. Perhaps playing safe, tragedy strikes. The girl dies- cause unknown but a hint of moral ambiguity- and the boy wonders if she can still behold him listening for her voice one more time. No reference to faith or God, just a longing for romance to span the grave.

The melody is fresh and inventive, yet serious and sincere. Each verse is subtly different in turn and phrasing, never mind McCornmack’s vocal acrobatics with the word “calling”. This is not trite parlor music.

I Hear You Calling Me was written in 1908 by Harold Lake (lyrics) and Charles Marshall (music), and proved one of McCormack’s biggest successes. While no clue is offered in the words, the story goes that the song was inspired by a tale told to Lake about a student-teacher of 16 who fell for a girl of 15. Devoted to each other for three years, the girl then died of consumption.

What is strange to me is that Lake and Marshall- together- seem associated only with this song. Moreover, Lake was a journalist- under the name Harold Harford- not a lyricist; and Marshall was a sober 51-year old accompanist when he composed I Hear You Calling Me, not a budding songwriter bursting with youthful enthusiasm. Neither man seems a likely source for such a composition. Perhaps the last verse, which contains the beautiful line “Though years have stretched their weary length between”, is meant to imply an older man looking back on long ago events that defined his life.

Neither Lake nor Marshall merit a Wikipedia entry nor seemingly any biographical sketch, not even a photograph, save almost passing reference in connection with their famous song. No indication of year of birth or death. All we are told is that Lake took six years to come up with the words, turning them out in two minutes after recalling the sad tale of the young lovers. One source (Belfast Telegraph, 5 August 1933) says Lake showed the lyrics to publishers but was told to start again. It is not clear how Lake knew Marshall, or what Marshall brought to the composition. It is said that Marshall took the piece to McCormack’s lodging in London. The tenor was instantly enamored with it and rushed Marshall to Boosey & Co., a leading publisher who agreed to put out the sheet music. The line goes that the men made little from the score but a fortune from gramophone records.

Surely the authors of such a beloved song- said to be the best-selling in McCormack’s storied career- deserve better. I did some research and have been able to fill in at least some of the gaps. Birth, marriage, residence and the like reveal little about character and career but do afford some scaffolding.

Harold Harris Lake was born in Southampton, Hampshire, in May 1882, son of Harris Carrington Lake and Jane Marchant. By the 1891 census, Harold’s father is absent and I have not yet been able to ascertain the cause as death or abandonment. The family are then living with Harold’s maternal grandfather, William Marchant, in Kent. In 1901, aged 19, still in Kent, Harold is named a school teacher; and by 1911 a “journalist lead writer” in Manchester in the north of England, and still living with his mother, sister (Edna) and grandfather. Based on results from the British Newspaper Archive, in the teens, alongside his journalism, Harold was a regular contributor of serialized short stories, published in newspapers up and down the country.

Harold died in London in 1933, aged 51. There was some press coverage of the man “practically unknown outside Fleet Street” who penned the words to the famous song. Some accounts state that Harold heard of the fateful lovers from a friend, but others say he himself was the forlorn boy. I think the latter is most likely. Harold wrote the words in 1907 or 1908, about “six years” after he was 19 and a school teacher. Lake relayed the tale as taking place in Canterbury in Kent, which matches his residence in the 1901 census. He did not marry until 1928, when he was 46, to Sybil Chaloner. Sybil was 16 years of age and living in Cheshire in 1911 when Harold was in nearby Manchester. Whether Harold met Sybil when she was so young, like the fabled love of his youth, is not clear. They did not marry until Sybil was about 33. There is no evidence of any children. Just five years later, it was Harold who passed away.

Charles Marshall was born in 1856 (not 1857 as the online consensus suggests) in Halifax, Yorkshire, son of John and Emma Marshall. He was the seventh of ten children. His 1871 census entry names Charles, age 15, as an “apprentice musician”. By 1881, Charles was married (in 1879) to Janet (or Janetta) Sophia Collis and living in Hammersmith in London as a “professor of music”. The couple had, by 1891, four children and Charles describes himself as a headmaster at a school in Watford. This is consistent with press mention of a Charles Marshall as a conductor and accompanist at a Watford recital in 1888. Another press report, from 1894, names a Charles Marshall as earning a pass certificate in piano from the Royal College of Music.

Then the trail goes cold. A “Chas” Marshall, apparently our subject, is named in 1901 as a visitor at the Fulham residence of Victor Buzian, another musician. There appears to be no record of Janet and the children that year. In 1911, Charles is registered as living alone in West Kensington, while Janet, and youngest child Freda, are residents in nearby Hammersmith. Both are “married” but this may indicate a separation. Perhaps Charles’ success as a songwriter- he is the subject of many glowing notices during this period- had turned his head. Another destablizing influence may have been the death of two of his brothers, in 1909 and 1911.

Charles died, aged 71, in 1927, in Hendon in north London, but there is some evidence that he lived in the United States for much of the last decade of his live. Passenger lists mention a Charles Marshall of the right age travelling to New York City in 1914 and returning in 1926. Perhaps Charles followed John McCormack to America. The tenor became a US citizen in 1917.

Lake and Marshall struggled to build on the success of I Hear You Calling Me. The Discography of American Historical Recordings lists 36 sides with Marshall as composer, but 29 of them are for I Hear You Calling Me. For Lake the figures are 24 sides featuring songs from his pen, but 22 are for the same song. According to the John McCormack discography, the singer recorded only three other Marshall compositions but returned to I Hear You Calling Me again and again. Indeed, the piece became McCormack’s signature song. After his death, his wife used the song in the title of her memoir about her husband. Some say Marshall was McCormack’s accompanist at the time I Hear You Calling Me was first recorded, but the discography only credits him as such in 1908. Press coverage refers to one or two other Marshall compositions that McCormack performed but did not record.

Some of the titles of later Marshall or Lake pieces, such as Dear Love Remember Me and I am Longing for You might be viewed as vain attempts to repeat the magic of the big hit. A 1913 review of the former song, by Lake and Marshall, sums it up: “A conventional sentimental song of no great interest”. McCormack recorded the song the same year, but it is hard to disagree with the dismissive review.

By contrast, testament to the power of I Hear You Calling Me, one scholar proposes inspiration for another famous Irishman, James Joyce. In the final segment of Joyce’s Dubliners, Gabriel Conroy observes his wife transported upon hearing a song. Imagining the scene a painting, Gabriel says its title would be “Distant Music”. Séamus Reilly, author of the article, conjectures that I Hear You Calling Me is the likely source of the phrase, from the song’s middle verse, and draws various other parallels between the song and story. Like the protagonist in the song, Gretta, Gabriel’s wife, is remembering her dead lover.

Not noted in the article is that Joyce and McCormack knew each other. In fact, Joyce was also a singer, and both men had been taught by Vincent O’Brien- choirmaster at the cathedral school in Dublin. Joyce was impressed by McCormack’s victory at Feis Ceoil, the Dublin singing competition in 1903. McCormack persuaded Joyce to enter the following year, where be took bronze; and the two men performed in a concert together on at least one occasion. Joyce followed McCormack’s career with interest, and remained an enthusiastic supporter. The author alludes to McCormack as “John MacCormick” in Uylsses and in Finnegans Wake (the “golden meddlist”).

Over the years, I Hear You Calling Me is routinely cited as a “millionaire” ballad, supposedly earning Harris and Lake a large sum of money. Harold left Sybil 597 pounds sterling, less than 10,000 pounds today. A tidy sum but hardly a fortune. I could not locate a comparable death notice for Marshall.

From my perspective, Harold Lake and Charles Marshall deserve our unending gratitude for bringing I Hear You Calling Me into the world. Description, in the Irish Standard, an American publication, of a 1916 McCormack performance sums up public reaction to the song. When the accompanist “struck the three tiny notes that precede the opening bars… the response:

Yet in many ways the song overwhelmed the men, who received ever-less recognition as time passed. Perhaps they enjoyed the notoriety and got on with their lives, or perhaps I Hear You Calling Me was the standard they could never reattain, the fluke they could not explain or the popular obsession that obscured whatever else they accomplished. It is regrettable that so little information is available about the creators of this great song; information that would throw more light on these paradoxes. My hope is that my rough sketches may catch the attention of a living descendant who can illuminate things better. Photographs of Harold and Charles, perhaps even together- one thing I have been unable to find- must surely exist.

Old World Music Classics #23

I Believe (The Creed)- Choir of the Russian Church of the Metropolitan of Paris

(His Master’s Voice, 1931)

RUSSIAN ORTHODOX

I bought my first 78 rpm record in 1997. Already transfixed by ten years collecting LPs and CDs of vintage vernacular music from all over the world, 78s were both tantalizing and elusive. At that time I lived in central London in the UK, one of the world’s great historical recording centers and a migration magnet from every corner of the earth, but a tough place to find interesting international shellac. In the first half of the 20th century, the city lacked the large and recent influx of immigrants from far away that drove the ethnic recording boom in the United States. Numerous international and ethnic artists were brought the UK to record but the records were for export only. By the time London swelled with Caribbean and south Asian arrivals in the 1950s, the 78 was on its way out.

Searching for 78s in the UK means wading through an endless parade of dance band and easy listening discs. So often, promising shellac was borderline- an “old song”, a foreign script or something religious. And so it was, in a junk shop near Borough Market, that I happened upon this record.

The label had an English translation- accessible for me, but a risk that the performance was sanitized. “Under” and a named composer can betray something overly artful. And why was a Russian Church choir recorded in Paris???

For a couple of quid, I took a chance. Side 1 turned out to be astonishingly good.- haunting countertenor vocal, choir surging and falling, a hybrid of ancient chanting and modern composition.

Today’s world of streaming often renders music as mysterious as forgotten 78s languishing in an antique shop corner. Put “I Believe (The Creed)- Russian Choir Paris” into a search engine, and you get innumerable images of the label and entries on Amazon Music, Google Play, Apple Music etc. The record is everywhere and nowhere. Almost no accompanying information is provided. To the casual listener, this might have been recorded yesterday. The choir, soloist and composer are just names shuffled in the air. Seemingly the only substantive treatment available online, in English at least, is a review in Phonograph Monthly Review in 1931, when the record was first released.

So what is the story behind this record?

This 1931 recording of a Russian Orthodox Church choir in Paris is a tale of exile and schism in the wake of the Bolshevik Revolution little more than a decade earlier. Developments in the 18th and 19th centuries set the scene.

France was a great fascination for many Russian nobles and intellectuals from the 1700s, spurred by Peter the Great’s push to modernize the country. French had displaced Latin as the lingua franca of Europe, and the language became a mark of sophistication among the Russian nobility. The French Revolution of 1789 scattered many French aristocrats, some of whom took refuge in Russia. Russia’s modernization preserved authoritarianism, political and religious, better than most, but still suffered its contradictions. Some reformists chose or were forced into time abroad, often in Paris. The Russian state, too, at times, regarded France as an ally to counterbalance unifying Germany and swaggering Britain. As the century progressed, French ideas were a major influence in Russia, and a burgeoning Russian community of exiles and dissidents, travelers and officials, writers and artists, settled in Paris.

The shifting relationship between church and state in Russia is another piece of context. In the eighteenth century, Peter the Great sought to limit the power of the church, replacing the ancient Patriarch with a pliant council. Many clergy swallowed the alignment of church and state, but some saw Christianity as a call for greater liberty and pushed back. Again, many dissidents regarded Paris, also swept up in the revolutions of 1848, as a beacon of religious freedom and culture creativity.

Tsar Alexander II, crowned in 1855, brought new energy to reform efforts at home. He ended the Crimean War, which pitted France and other powers against Russia, conceded captured territory at the Treaty of Paris and restored friendly relations. In 1861 Alexander took the dramatic step of freeing the Russian serfs, emancipating some 23 million people with full rights as citizens, including the right to own property, run a business and marry without permission. Alexander saw emancipation as part of his country’s commitment to being a modern nation, and as a guard against revolution.

The same year, in recognition of good terms between Russian and France, Alexander funded the building of a Russian Orthodox Cathedral in Paris- Alexander Nevsky Cathedral, the first formal site of Russian Orthodox worship in the country. The move was part of the Mother Church’s effort to formalize parishes for the Russian diaspora in Europe and elsewhere. Far-flung orthodoxy signaled both fragmented ideology and the makings of a globalized Russia and Russian orthodoxy, emblematic of the ambition of the state.

In 1881, Tsar Alexander was assassinated on the sixth attempt, blown up by radicals who thought the emperor was dragging his feet on further democratic reforms. But the new era that dawned, under Alexander’s son, Alexander III, and later his son Nicholas II, the last tsar, was decidedly more conservative and authoritarian. The younger Alexander and his son saw calls for reform as the kernel of their own demise, so instead framed class hierarchies as immutable and God-given. Of course, this period culminated in the 1917 Bolshevik revolution.

The Orthodox Church went from state co-opted spiritual guardian of autocracy to, in the eyes of many “godless” revolutionaries, the enemy of the people. The church itself was divided. For decades some priests had been in the vanguard of reform efforts, chaffing against official alignment of church and state, and encouraging personal exploration of faith and morality. In the early days of the Soviet era, priestly elements attempted to fashion a hybrid of socialism and Christianity, discarding the ritual trappings of traditional orthodoxy, but proved no match for the hardening atheism of the new state.

This is where Paris re-enters the picture. In 1921, the head of the ailing Mother Church, took steps to strengthen the Russian churches outside Russia, perhaps seeing the “provinces” as a haven for embattled orthodoxy. Vasili Semyonovitch Georgiyevskiy, archbishop of Volhynia in the western empire, was sent to Paris to head the ‘Provisional administration of the Russian parishes in Western Europe’. Known by his religious title as Metropolitan Eulogius, Georgivevskiy increasingly stood in opposition to the Mother Church, which in 1930 demanded loyalty to the Soviet state. Eulogius refused, in line with the views of most of his parishioners, swollen by hundreds of thousands of Soviet-era refugees who had fled to Paris in the late teens and 1920s. Eulogius, who himself had been imprisoned along with other priests in the aftermath of the Revolution, broke from the umbrella Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia, which had bowed to Soviet authority, and in 1931 successfully petitioned Patriarch Photios II of Constantinople, the head of all eastern orthodox churches, to have his province recognized as independent under the patriarch’s authority.

‘I am temporarily forced to take on myself all fullness of authority…until the restoration of correct, normal relations with the supreme authority of the Russian Church’. (Metropolitan Eulogius’ letter to Metropolitan Sergius on 21 June 1930 on his reasons for ending communion with the Mother Church).

This excerpt from a 1937 interview with Archbishop Eulogius sums up the predicament of the Paris church:

So, a recording in 1931 of I Believe (The Creed) by The Choir of the Russian Church of the Metropolitan of Paris sent a direct message to the Mother Church. By recording The Creed, the central orthodox prayer, Eulogius was asserting that his church carried the flame of true Russian orthodoxy. The name of the choir, seemingly innocuous, was heavy with meaning. This was the Russian Church of the Metropolitan of Paris, the center of the world.

The composer of this rendition of The Creed is also symbolic. Alexander Gretchaninov, renowned romantic composer of the pre-Soviet era, wrote many religious works, and impressed Nicholas II so much that we was awarded an annual pension. Gretchaninov stayed in Russia after the revolution but left for Paris in 1925, where he stayed until emigrating to the United States in 1939. No doubt Gretchaninov and Eulogius met in Paris, and the exiled composer’s piece was the perfect choice for the 1931 recording.

Immediately after World War II, perhaps seeing in Stalin’s rapprochement with England and France, and the dictator’s resort to the language of faith to galvanize the people in the depths of the conflict as signs of orthodox resurgence at home, Eulogius took his church back into the fold. He died soon thereafter, in 1946, but his successor, suspicious of Seraphim, the new Moscow Patriarch, returned to schism, as did his counterparts in many other parts of the world.

Like Gretchaninov, as the country slid into fascist orbit in the 1930s, many Russian emigres in France moved on to the United States. The vibrant Russian community, centered on Alexander Nevsky Cathedral, dissipated. But, amazingly, what today is known as the Archdiocese of Russian Orthodox Churches of Western Europe, was still separated from the Mother Church up to 2019. In 2016, the Russian Church ended communion with Constantinople when the Ecumenical Patriarchate recognized two Ukrainian Orthodox churches that broke away from the national body in the wake of Russia’s annexation of Crimea and presence in eastern Ukraine, Then, in 2018, Constantinople decided to end recognition of the Archdiocese in Paris, and integrate the various national parishes into their counterparts separately administered under the Ecumenical Patriarchate.

The Paris Archdiocese acknowledged that Constantinople has the right to end its recognition, but after months of tense debate and consultation, 93% of Archdiocese members eligible to vote refused to accept the decision. A number of orthodox churches, including Moscow, have “opened their arms” to Paris. An Extraordinary General Assembly, in September 2019, voted narrowly for a return to Moscow, which was formalized later that year, but disputes rumble on.

Moscow’s dislike of the Paris Archdiocese’s separation is clear from President Putin’s investment of $175m to build a second Russian Orthodox cathedral in Paris, which opened in 2017, just two kilometers from Alexander Nevsky Cathedral. Putin was key to the reintegration of another rebel church, the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia, in 2007, and no doubt his goal was to effect the same for the Paris Archdiocese. Perhaps Constantinople saw de-recognition of Paris as a way to bring Moscow back to the fold, although the Ukrainian issue remains. Paris could have aligned itself with the True Orthodoxy churches that have long rejected the authority of both Moscow and Constantinople.

One thing is clear: for some members of the Paris Archdiocese, reintegration with today’s Moscow Patriarchate must seem an ignominious end for a church that for almost a century stood for non-politicized orthodoxy. Just as at the 1931 recording, The Creed, whether chanted or sung, yet again takes on new meaning.

Old World Music Classics #22

Roumania, Roumania- Aaron Lebedeff

(Columbia, 1941)

YIDDISH

As Yiddish 78s go, this is one of the most famous; with even to this day a smattering of gentile recognition. The record has a visceral immediacy that leaps cultural divides- the raucous delivery, the changes in tempo, the wisdom and jibberish. “Roumania, Roumania”, accessible yet mysterious, evocative of old world and new. For the ethnic shellac aficionado perhaps this record is too familiar. To me, it is a masterclass in thinking big and reaching out.

Composer and performer is Aaron Lebedeff, giant of Yiddish theater, low-key first in Russian and Eastern Europe, and then spectacularly in America. Born in 1873 in Gomel in what is now Belarus, between present day Lithuania and Poland to the west, and Russian and Ukraine to the east.,Lebedeff was smitten with music and theater from an early age. Gradually making a name for himself, he rose to modest fame with a variety of theater groups in the 1890s-1910s. Touring in Shanghai, of all places, Lebedeff received an invitation to perform in New York from pioneering Yiddish theater promoter Boris Thomashevsky. In 1920, already 47, Lebedeff crossed the Atlantic poised to make his mark.

New York was the new center of the Jewish world, swollen with 1.5 million Jewish immigrants from Eastern European who arrived in the United States in numbers from the 1880s, fleeing overcrowding and persecution, and their two million descendants. The majority, like Lebedeff, came from lands under Russian rule, and many stayed in New York. Yiddish theater was banned in Russian territory from 1883 until 1904, part of the authoritarian reaction following the assassination of Russian Emperor Alexander II, forcing many performers to emigrate to America and elsewhere. (This helps explain Lebedeff’s sojourns in China). In 1912, Thomashevsky opened the grand “National Theater” in Jewish Manhattan, seating 1,900, cementing the city’s new-found cultural status along with 20 other Yiddish theaters in the five boroughs. Religious freedom, democracy and economic opportunity, if often imperfect, opened a fabulous window, a few decades between huddled discrimination and faded assimilation, where Jewish culture grew in creativity and confidence. For Lebedeff, this was a stage like no other.

Possessed of rare dramatic presence, a fine singing voice and a delight in improvisation and comedy, this stalwart performer captured the authenticity of the old world- for many in the audience an ambivalent and increasingly distant memory, or a received one- with the verve and spirit of the new. He wrote and stared in numerous productions in the 1920s and 1930s, and made more than a hundred records. Lebedeff won over his American audiences with songs and stories that embodied the best and worst of “home”, and the predicament of the immigrant, who both longs for and runs from the old country, and who is both troubled and fascinated by the land of the free.

Roumania, Roumania is Lebedeff’s quintessential performance, one he recorded three times- first in 1925, again 1941 and finally in 1947. I have the 1941 disc, which is the most well-known, and I think the best from a musical perspective- backed by the Sholem Secunda Orchestra, with Dave Tarras on clarinet. The 1947 recording, over two sides, reproduces Lebedeff’s stage version but is essentially the same, including plenty more goofy vocalizing.

In essence, the song portrays “Roumania”- a stand-in for the Eastern Europe Jewish immigrants to America let behind- as bountiful and joyous, but Lebedeff has his tongue in his cheek.

Oh! Rumania, Rumania, Rumania …

Once there was a land, sweet and lovely.

Oh! Rumania, Rumania, Rumania …

Once there was a land, sweet and fine.

To live there is a pleasure;

What your heart desires you can get;

A mamalige, a pastrami, a karnatzl,

And a glass of wine, aha … !

The song continues in the same vein, praising various other foods and drink, and dancing “up to the ceiling”. Lebedeff plays on his audience’s nostalgia for the past but also skewers the selective memory of old timers who remember only the good and forget why they left. The song is charming, funny, irresistible, but non-controversial.

Things then turns more bizarre and cynical. The singer comments out of nowhere that “And he who kisses his own wife, is the one who’s crazy” and relays how “Moyshe”, dressed in “rags and tatters”, takes the “best part” of food prepared for Sabbath, and grabs the “pussy” of the cook. The girl “pouts, seems unwilling, but allows it”. Lebedeff introduces the verse with a quote from Sabbath prayers- “May salvation come from heaven…”. Words tumble from Lebedeff, faster and faster. The song finishes with:

It’s good to kiss a lass

When she’s sweet sixteen;

When one kisses an old maid,

She begins to grumble…

What a pleasure, what could be better!

Oh, the only delight is Roumanian wine …

At top speed, too quick to be caught, Lebedeff,teases his listeners with the seedy side of old world life- poverty, drunkenness, infidelities and sexual predation. Life in mid-century America may have been seen as more civilized, but no doubt some such topics were taboo enough to laugh at but familiar enough to all. Whether Lebedeff is chiding his people, or just laughing at them or with them, is hard to tell. The endless playful delivery allows the unsayable to be said. The jester can speak the truth and get away with it.

In 1941, Lebedeff was 68 years old, and 75 by 1947. His undiminished energy and enthusiasm is remarkable. In 1924, with the passage of the Johnson-Reed Act that curbed immigration for the next forty years, the flow of newcomers slowed to a trickle, meaning Lebedeff was faced with ever fewer people with recent experience of the old world. By 1947, much of the old world was gone. But Lebedeff, still touring the Catskills and reprising the classics, cranked up the entertainment, rolled out the characters, and cast a discerning eye over the proceedings, one more time. The National Theater, by then a cinema, was demolished in 1959, and Lebedeff died in 1960, buried in the Yiddish Theatrical Alliance section of Mount Hebron Cemetery in Queens, NY.

Perhaps it is my imagination, but Roumania, Roumania seems to me a rare example of ethnic music that is universal. This is not only music of the insider. Yes, language is a barrier, but the delivery, the musicality- and the meaning- need no translation. There are many more examples waiting to be discovered.

Old World Music Classics #21

As de Corazones Rojos- Los Gorriones

(Norteño, 1950s)

MEXICO

“We don’t have any 78s” said the lady behind the counter at Del Bravo Record Store, San Antonio TX. After speaking at a conference in the city, I slipped away, taking a chance on a taxi ride to what seemed like the most likely place in town to find Tex-Mex shellac. The lady pointed me to a junk store across the road. I looked but something brought me back to Del Bravo. Eyeing me again, the lady- Irma Gutierrez, co-owner- motioned me to follow her into the back where she waved her hand at shelves and shelves of black discs.

“We have 78s but we don’t sell them. This is our family collection. We’re working to organize everything”. I was duly impressed but itching to buy something. Back out front, thumbing through vinyl I didn’t really want, Irma emerged with a stack of shellac. “Here are a few things. Some duplicates. Are you interested?” Labels I’d never seen before- Alapulia, Ansonia, Arrca, Azteca, Bohemia, De-Luxe, Falcon, Landia, Melco, and Norteño., and an unknown Columbia series Post-war Mexican and Texas 78s. We agreed a (very reasonable) price, on condition I also take an unwanted pile of American pop records of the same period.

I don’t know why Irma changed her mind- twice- and I don’t know why she decided to pull out what (to me) seemed like a shellac treasure trove. But I will be forever grateful- many of the records are good, and a few are great. Back at the fancy downtown hotel, I surreptitiously deposited the pop records in a waste bin and escaped to the airport.

This post is about one of the great records from my Del Bravo horde- As de Corazones Rojos by Los Gorriones on the Norteño label.

“Norteño” refers to northern Mexico and a musical style from that region. A fusion of Spanish/Mexican influences from south of the shifting US-Mexico border, and the stylings of German/Czech 19th century immigrants from the north, types of Norteño music include polkas, waltzes, and mazurkas on the German/Czech side, and rancheros and boleros on the Spanish. Instrumentation is typically accordion, bajo sexto (a 12-string guitar) and tololoche (a 4-string bass). Many Norteño recordings have vocals but the present one is an instrumental.

Los Goriones, or Los Goriones del Topo Chico to use their full name, which means The Sparrows of Topo Chico- a region north of Monterrey and the name of a mountain- perform the track. Formed in 1945, the group is best known for being among the first- or perhaps he first- to combine the saxophone and accordion. José González Pérez, saxophonist and founding member, is credited by some with the innovation, which is so characteristic of the present recording. Pérez helped spawn a Norteño sub-genre, Norteño-Sax.

The Norteño record label was one of a cluster of post-war record companies across the US and Mexico devoted to particular regional and ethnic styles, when the major labels had lost interest and recording technology was more accessible. Based on Monterrey (some say San Antonio), the label recorded numerous local artists, first on 78 rpm and then on LPs and 45s, and was one of the most productive Mexican record companies of the era. The Stratchwitz Frontera Collection of Mexican and Mexican American Recordings, the largest repository of such recordings in existence, names Norteño as the third most represented label in the collection.

The man who started Del Bravo Records in San Antonio, Salome Gutierrez, before he opened the store in 1966, recorded local artists in a makeshift studio for Norteño and other labels, before founding his own label, DLB Records.

As de Corazones Rojos,(Ace of Hearts) is not typical Norteño material. Composed by Luis Alcaráz, one of the most popular big band leaders in Mexico and the southwestern US from the 1930s to 1950s, the original is Mexican easy listening. Slow with melancholy lyrics about lost love, the song is transformed by Los Goriones into an upbeat, thoroughly Norteño instrumental. Free from the lyrics, the mood changes completely, and the music is dizzy and infectious. Performed here, the track is badged a foxtrot. Invented in the teens in New York City, the foxtrot became the world’s most popular dance of the mid 20th century, even showing up on regional Mexican 78s.

Los Goriones, powered by the sons of some of the founders, continue to perform to this day, and Norteño, in all its variety, remains a popular and evolving style throughout Mexico, the southwestern United States and parts of Latin America.

I felt bad about dumping them, but nobody wants American pop 78s anymore. The music is out-of-style, and tracks are widely available in modern formats. Heavy, dirty, scratched, fragile- you cannot give them away. I imagine Doris Day, Perry Como and Frank Sinatra, fed up with life on the shelf at Del Bravo’s, throwing caution to the wind on one last adventure.

Old World Music Classics #20

江南之夜 (Night of Jiangnan)- 吳鶯音唱 (Wu Yingyin)

(Red Label, early 1950s)

CHINA

Vintage music from China can be tough on outsiders. Record labels make no concession to the foreigner, and there is no a-b-c to plug into Google Translate for a clunky rendition of the title. An alluring disc may turn out to be a solitary excerpt from a clashing opera series, a curious cinematic hybrid, a romantic songstress, or an oriental jazz outfit. Any of these- and more- can be marvelous, tedious, or a musical conundrum I can make neither head nor tail of.

I chanced on this record online, and bought it only because the seller- the legendary Green River Records in Vermont, USA- allows prospective purchasers to listen to all their 78s in advance. On first listening, I did not fully appreciate the glory of this piece, but sensed enough to hit “Buy it Now”.

Like Chinese 78s generally, what I call the “Red Label” had produced unpredictable fare, so I would have dismissed the disc had it not been for the digital file. What I heard was a heart-stopping blend of western and Chinese music, half-familiar and half-strange.

The singer, stage name Wu Yingyin, was born Wu Jianqiu in 1922 in Ningbo in eastern China, one of the country’s oldest cities, a stop on the Silk Road, and a major port. Born to professional parents, her early interest in singing was frowned upon. She wanted to attend The Shanghai Academy of Music, in the neighboring city, but her parents refused, saying she should aspire to be a doctor. Undeterred, as a teenager Wu began to perform under a pseudonym, appearing in small venues and on radio. She later worked as a primary school teacher.

The late 1920s and 1930s were the golden age of Shidaiqu, a fusion of Chinese music and jazz that defined Shanghai’s status as both Chinese cultural capital and commercial headquarters of the western powers. Shanghai composers were fascinated by the foreign sounds flowing from the orchestras and gramophones in the British and French concessions, and experimented with admixtures until a winning formula was found. The high-pitched, angular delivery of many older Chinese styles gave way to smoother phrasing. Melodies blurred local and foreign motifs, and lyrics were heartfelt declarations of love or odes to nature. Western instruments predominated, but some recordings also feature Chinese flutes or drums. Some conservatives saw foreign influences as harbingers of cultural decay and moral laxness, with western-style dancing most criticized.

Her ambitions interrupted by the Japanese invasion of China (1937-1945), and the occupation of Ningbo and Shanghai, in 1946 Wu, aged 24, won a singing competition at liberated Shanghai’s famous Ciro’s nightclub. In the brief post-war years between Japanese defeat and Communist victory in 1949, Wu’s star rose with bookings all over the Paris of the East, and a record contract with Pathé. The story goes that Wu’s father heard her first hit on the radio, and still had no idea his daughter was a professional singer.

Renowned for her “soft” yet powerful voice, Wu released a string of wistful and romantic hits in the late 1940s, to the backdrop of the escalating conflict between the Chinese Nationalists and Communists. Her stage name, Wu Yingyin, means “Voice of an Oriole”, after the distinctive song of the much-admired black-and-gold bird common in eastern China. “Queen of the Nasal Voice” is another of Wu’s accolades, one that does not translate well into English. Wu became the last and youngest of the “Seven Great Singing Stars”, the most famed female Shidaiqu vocalists of the 1930s and 1940s.

After suffering the war and occupation, Wu then faced Chinese Communism. In revenge for the Shanghai Massacre of 1927, when thousands of communists were slaughtered by Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist Party, Mao’s forces swept into the city, executing untold “counter-revolutionaries”. I do not know what happened to Wu and her family during this time. Her father, an chemical engineer, and her mother, a gynaecologist, living in nearby Ningbo, were hardly in the vanguard of the proletariat.

During the civil war post-1945, Shanghai’s entertainment industry began to migrate to nearby Hong Kong, a British colony. Mao denounced Shanghai’s popular music as “Yellow Music”, meaning indecent and shameful. In China, the color yellow is associated with eroticism and pornography. Artists of all kinds were subject to censure, re-education or worse. Popular entertainment was marshaled for propaganda purposes, lauding the achievements of the Communist Party and the glories of New China. In 1955, no doubt in the interest of self-preservation, Wu joined the Shanghai People’s Broadcasting Station. She escaped to Hong Kong in 1957, where Shidaiqu continued to flourish in the 1950s and 1960s.

The present record is a testament to Wu’s life in Shanghai after the golden age of Shidaiqu was over, the Communists were in charge, and singers were trying to divine their futures. The plain red record label denotes that this disc was released sometime between the Communist takeover in 1949 and Wu’s flight to Hong Kong. It appears to be an early 1950s reissue of a 1947 recording (or perhaps a re-recording). Red, the color of good fortune in China since time immemorial, was appropriated by Communists in China and elsewhere, dominating the country’s new flag. The label, conveying simply language (Mandarin), singer and song, suggests either proletariat record-making, low-key commercial adaptation or even an underground reissue. The typefaces of western record companies- Columbia, Odeon, Pathé- purveyors of many Shidaiqu discs in the 1930s- have gone. If intended to trumpet Communism, the unassuming label seems mute, but perhaps in the early days the red background spoke volumes.

The song is titled “Night of Jiangnan”, in reference the Jiangnan region of China, that includes Shanghai and Ningbo. “Jiangnan” means “south of the [Yangtze] river”, that reaches the ocean just north of Shanghai. The region is an ancient center of Chinese culture and commerce. The words evoke the beauties of the landscape and night sky:

The bright moon dressed with pieces of clouds,

The blue sky lightened by scattered stars,

It comes from afar, It comes from afar, the bell ringing from the mountain temple afar.

Fisherman’s lights faintly burn in the small port,

Fields of wheat ripple in the wind.

Ah! The night of Jiangnan, is filled with poetic splendor.

The bright moon dressed with pieces of clouds,

The blue sky lightened by scattered stars,

It comes from where? It comes from where? The music of a bamboo flute at someone’s home.

The composer is Yao Min, one of Shidaiqu’s most famous tunesmiths, and words are by Chen Dongyu. Intent is mere speculation, but there is no doubt that the lyrics glory the past more than the present. Agriculture and fishing are mentioned, the “small” port, and what appear to be the decidedly non-communist “mountain temple” and “bamboo flute”. In 1947- year of first release- such sentiments may have been uncontroversial. Admittedly, the first decade of Chinese communism was less hostile to traditional culture, but re-release in the early 1950s might still have been risky, even subversive. In 1966, Mao really got going, ushering in the Cultural Revolution by calling on his countrymen to sweep away the “Four Olds”, old customs, culture, habits and ideas, which led to the destruction of countless historic temples, paintings, works of literature and musical instruments.

“Night of Jiangnan” may have been innocuous subject matter in the uncertain days after the Communist takeover- no hint of western decadence. The theme may have been seen as in line with renewed Chinese self-confidence as colonialists were sent packing, or was perhaps a veiled longing for simpler times.

Many Shidaiqu recordings seem to my ears melodically tame, but “Night of Jiangnan” soars with passion and invention.

Wu’s career faded as the 1960s turned to new styles, but she benefited from Shidaiqu nostalgia in the 1980s onwards, returning to stage and studio. In 1984, Wu emigrated to California, but continued to tour all over east and southeast Asia, and performed in Chinatowns in America. In 2003, Wu gave a concert in Shanghai for the first time in almost fifty years. See here for a video of Wu Yingyin singing in the 1990s.

The great singer passed away in 2009, aged 87.

If all purveyors of 78s allowed buyers to listen to discs in advance, I’d buy many more, and many less. Untold wonders can lurk in tantalizing places, but can also languish in plain sight.

Please click below for a video version of this track, on my Music Atlas YouTube Channel.

Old World Music Classics #19

Northfield and Greenwich- United Sacred Harp Musical Singing Convention

(Rounder, 1959)

UNITED STATES

There are two schools of Christian sensibility- restriction and participation. The first, exemplified by the mainline Orthodox and Catholic traditions, starts with the majesty and remoteness of God, and emphasizes ritual, special language and the separation of priest and believers to bridge the divide. The Protestant instinct, by contrast, is participation- the humanity of the divine, the Word of God as accessible, and the priesthood of all believers. There are musical consequences.

The songs of the Sacred Harp- the antique choral music of the American South- belong to the congregation. Sung not by a choir or in pews facing the minister but in a square of believers- trebles, altos, tenors and basses each taking a side- with a song leader in the middle. The leader choose a key, and conducts the group as they lay out the song using a system of shape notes- Sacred Harp singing is also called shape-note singing- diamonds, triangles and rectangles, designed to make the music easier to learn. Each shape is sounded with a particular syllable- fa, sol, la or mi (the first three repeated to form the octave). After the essentials of the song have been sung in this way, the singers then perform the full piece with the assigned words, each adding their own touch and style. This is a partnership of equals- all ages, both sexes.

The Sacred Harp is communal and straightforward, yet also wondrous and creative. “Sacred Harp” refers to the range, beauty and possibilities of the human voice; a gift to praise God.

Reaching back to folk song and the Reformation sects, this music is characterized by the “open” intervals of the fourth, fifth and octave, and use of the minor scale. This gives it a primitive and other worldly reception to modern ears. Free of an established church, the colonists re-worked the choral music of Protestant Europe. As settlers moved south and west, perpetuating frontier conditions, these styles traveled with them. Dying out in the Northeast, as communities prospered and industrialized, and looked to the latest from Europe for musical inspiration, what became Sacred Harp flourished in the small towns and backwoods churches of Georgia, Alabama and Texas. The religious revivals of the first half of the nineteenth century were swollen by the Sacred Harp. Faith and music as direct and personal.

Over the years, various songbooks were published, most famously The Sacred Harp in 1844 compiled by Benjamin Franklin White (1800-79) and Elisha James King (1821-44). White was an experienced shape note “singing master”, of modest means, resident in Harris County, Georgia, and King the son of a wealthy planter in nearby Talbot County. Said to have been White’s pupil, King may have funded the project but is also named as composer or arranger of a number of songs. King died a few months after the collection was printed.

The book helped spread and cement tradition, spurring revised editions and rival compendia over the decades. Some congregations accommodated the latest musical fashions, some died out, while others held fast to the legacy, which continued to expand in terms of songs and settings. Across America, mainline Protestant attendance began to dwindle in the 20th century, the music captured by the choir; the faithful droning through tired hymns. The emotion and spontaneity of gospel music turned heads, but Sacred Harp quietly held on in pockets of the South, in both white and black churches.

Swept up in the brief vernacular recording boom of the 1920s, a few shape note groups stood before the microphone, but then silence until folklorist Alan Lomax, in 1959, made the first stereo recordings. Taken at the United Sacred Harp Musical Association, an annual convention attracting 100+ singers from multiple states, held in Fyffe, in northeast Alabama.

I’ve selected two pieces here. Greenwich, grabs your attention with the soaring final note of the first line. The dark works- the wicked in “pride and robes of honor shine” will soon meet their “dreadful end”- have fearsome music to match. “On slip’ry rocks I see them stand, and fiery billows roll below”. The piece is led by Dr. M. O. Slaughter of Dallas, Texas, and composed by Daniel Read (1757-1836), who ran a general store in Connecticut but was also the second American composer, after William Billings, to publish a collection of his own music.

Northfield, led by Rosie Hughes of Villa Rica, Georgia, is lighter, joyful and more playful. The singers long for Christ’s return. “How long, dear Savior, oh how long shall this bright hour delay? Fly swift around ye wheels of time and bring the promised day.” The words are by Isaac Watt, the prolific 18th century English writer of hymns, and the music by Jeremiah Ingalls (1764-1838), a Vermont choirmaster who published The Christian Harmony (1805).

The song names- Greenwich and Northfield- hark back to places associated with the song’s origin, but otherwise have noting to do with the subject matter.

Lomax’s 1959 recordings were reissued on a now out-of-print CD in 1998- Harp of a Thousand Strings: all Day Singing from The Sacred Harp. These and other Sacred Harp recordings can heard online at the Center for Cultural Equity, the keeper of Lomax’s legacy. Far from moribund, shape-note singing today has a new lease of life, spreading all over the United States and beyond. In the modern world, the power of the Sacred Harp is clearer still.

Old World Music Classics #18

Boll Weevil Blues- Leadbelly New Bo-Weavil Blues- Ma Rainey

(Folkways, 1949)

(Paramount, 1927)

UNITED STATES

By my count, the boll weevil is the second most popular historical subject of blues records made between 1920 and 1943. Only John Henry, the ballad of the apocryphal steel-driver who died of exhaustion after beating the steam-powered rock drilling machine as they blasted a railway tunnel, was recorded more often. Runner-up is not bad for an ugly, quarter-inch beetle.

The boll weevil gorges on cotton, laying its eggs inside the buds. Larvae feed, pupate and then emerge as adult beetles. In optimal conditions, the cycle can repeat itself up to ten times in a season. A pair can produce two million progeny in a matter of months.

The American South of the early 20th century was the perfect theater for the beetle’s conquest. Crossing the Rio Grande into Texas in 1892, by 1920 the boll weevil had swept the Cotton Belt. In much of the Deep South, cotton accounted for 10-30% of farmed acreage, and was a major cash crop. The boll weevil, estimates suggest, reduced cotton production by 50% in many counties, and depressed production for a decade or more after first contact. No pest wrought more destruction in the history of US agriculture.

Combating the pest, with insecticides, resistant strains, early harvesting and systematic destruction of stalks after harvesting, favored the largest farms and mechanization. The boll weevil helped shake lose the strictures of the Jim Crow South, encouraging migration to unaffected areas and away from the land to northern factories. Yet demand for cotton only grew, pushing up prices and sustaining investment. Acreage and yields increased once again, but it was only in 2006, after decades of eradication efforts and over a hundred years after the beetle’s ignominious arrival, that most of the South was declared boll weevil free. The United States remains a major cotton producer- third after China and India- and the leading exporter. The country produces more bales of cotton today than at the peak pre-World War I.

That the boll weevil impacted poor blacks more than whites in the South may be evidenced by the fact that the blues discography of 1920-1943, dominated by black performers, lists about twenty recordings about the beetle. The equivalent country music discography records just one. Blacks were far more likely to be working the cotton fields; both working for whites and for themselves. Cotton was long the farming staple of freed blacks after the Civil War.

Today’s big farm cotton industry has not been kind to most black landowners, most of whom relied on smallholdings. Black Cotton is an initiative to raise awareness of this heritage, and to escape the jaws of mass production and wafer thin margins. Recasting cotton as culture, Black Cotton sells high-end t-shirts and bouquets.

Leadbelly’s song, this version recorded a year before his death in 1949, is a conversation between the farmer and the boll weevil. First the farmer sees one beetle. Next time he looks, the beetle’s “family” is there. The beetle shrugs off heat and cold, and all efforts to combat the infestation. When the boll weevil is through, the farmer is refused credit at the store (“got boll weevils in your field”) and has to sell his “Cadillac 8”. “I hope you burn in hell” says the farrmer. The thump of the 12-strong guitar is the beetle’s relentless march.

Leadbelly, born Huddie Ledbetter, in 1888 on a Louisana plantation, went on become one of the most versatile and celebrated folk performers of the 1930s and 1940s. A musician from his teens, soaking up a range of blues and folk styles and mastering various instruments, Leadbelly led a restless and itinerant life as a young man. From this late 20s, Huddie was in and out of prison multiple times for violent crimes, including killing a relative in a fight. A song is said to have hastened his release on more than one occasion, the second time in 1934 into the care of John Lomax, after the folklorist recorded the incarcerated singer.

Lomax helped Leadbelly record commercially, and the singer was Lomax’s driver for a while, but the two did not always get along and eventually parted company. The media took up the story of the “singing convict”, helping to keep Leadbelly in the public eye. John Lomax’s son, Alan, then a budding folklorist in his own right, took Leadbelly under his wing, getting him radio and concert appearances in the nascent New York folk scene. Leadbelly knew hundreds of songs, and make famous folk staples such as Goodnight Irene and Midnight Special. His Last Sessions, from which this song is taken, an open-ended recording session where the singer jumped from song to reminiscence, is a fitting demonstration of his breadth, skill and power.

Ma Rainey’s Bo-Weavil Blues, was the b-side to her first recording in 1923, and the insect’s first appearance on shellac. But unlike Leadbelly’s version, Rainey’s references to the beetle are rather inscrutable, and married with more conventional blues fare. Here are the lines that refer to the beetle:

Hey, bo-weavil, don't sing them blues no more
Hey, hey, bo-weavil, don't sing them blues no more
Bo-weavil's here, bo-weavil's everywhere you go

I'm a lone bo-weavil, been out a great long time
I'm a lone bo-weavil, been out a great long time
I'm gonna sing these blues to ease the bo-weavil's lonesome mind

Are the bo-weavil’s “blues” whatever drove his grinding destruction? But then why is the swarming insect described as “lone”? Is Rainey in fact singing about herself? Is the the true lyric that it is Rainey who is “alone”? This is consistent with the final line that has Rainey pitting her blues against the bo-weavil’s blues. The idea of a blues singer turning her art to calm the rapacious afflictions of the silent beetle is testament to the power of the blues and the power of the beetle. Alternatively, since it is often said that blacks had a grudging respect for these feisty creatures that brought down the mightiest white planters, Rainey may be identifying with the beetle, awed by its numbers and potency.

For Ma Rainey (1886-1939- born Gertrude Pridgett in Georgia, or perhaps Alabama), a famed tent-show singer, almost 40 in 1923, was a song about the boll weevil a nod to a major news story- as the beetle continued to ravage the cotton belt? Later known for raw lyrics about everything from domestic violence to alleged lesbianism, perhaps Bo-Weavil Blues was an early foray into risque territory- in the second half of the song Rainey worries about a man poisoning her- muddled with the topicality of the marauding beetle. Subtle allusion, or hasty composite- it is impossible to tell.

The lyrics end with:

I don't want no man to put no sugar in my tea
I don't want no man to put no sugar in my tea
Some of them's so evil, I'm afraid they might poison me

I went downtown and bought me a hat
I brought it back home, I laid it on the shelf
Looked at my bed, I'm getting tired of sleeping by myself

The bo-weavil has vanished. The sinister figures are now “evil” men who might poison Rainey. The “sugar” in “my tea” reference may be sexual, or perhaps literal. Heartache and abuse may be the “poison”. A hat bought downtown, to cheer the singer up, then just evokes her loneliness.

Of course, another possibility is that Rainey, who was illiterate, simply forgot her words, and improvised. Nervous at her studio debut, on a freezing December day in faraway Chicago, without the props and cadence of the tent show, the stalwart performer may have stumbled. Perhaps the engineer liked what he heard, or was unsure what to expect from what to him may have seemed a most unusual artist. Maybe there was no time for another take (two takes were recorded).

My version of this record is a 1927 reprise, towards the end of Rainey’s brief but very successful recording career. Her fame was receding, as newer styles crowded in, and her tent-show, vaudeville persona seemed ever-more antiquated in the face of radio and talkies. Returning to one of her first records- dubbed New Bo-Weavil Blues, even though the new version is very close to the original- just slower and in a deeper register- was a sign of stress. In 1928, Paramount cancelled Rainey’s contract, forcing her to rely on a series of financially rickerty, backwards-looking touring shows. The great blues singer retired in 1935- taking up residence in a house she had built for her mother in her hometown of Columbus, Georgia, and living off her ownership of two local theatres.

My record is on the Paramount label, but issued in the late 1940s by John Steiner, a prominent old-time music enthusiast who bought the Paramount rights long after the company folded in the early 1930s.

As well as the evocative and mysterious lyrics, Bo-Weavil Blues is graced by Rainey’s down home, drawn-out phrasing, and the backing of her Georgia Band, which over the years included jazz luminaries such as Fletcher Henderson, Buster Bailey, Don Redman and Coleman Hawkins. This particular record is thought to feature Shirley Clay on cornet, Albert Wynn on trombone and Artie Starks on clarinet.

Sources: National Cotton Council of America, Federal Reserve Bulletin, Lange et al (2008) The Impact of the Boll Weevil 1892-1932.

Old World Music Classics #17

Flop-Earned Mule- Gid Tanner and the Skillet Lickers

(RCA Victor, 1934)

UNITED STATES

So much can go wrong. The record may be scratched and worn, the vocal muffled or the performance uninspired. String band music, no longer novel or familiar, can often seem tame or trite to modern ears.

Flop-Eared Mule, by Gid Tanner and the Skillet Lickers, one of the most prolific string band artists in the 78 rpm era, is an exception. A late recording, without accomplished former members such as Clayton McMichen and Lowe Stokes and the Skillet Lickers’ trademark three fiddle sound, Flop-Eared Mule is still rollicking and inventive. My copy is bright and clean.

James Gideon “Gid” Tanner was born in Dacula in central Georgia, in 1885. He spent most of his life in neighboring Gwinnett County, working as a chicken farmer. A capable fiddler as a teenage, Gid began to enter- and sometimes win- contests, such as the Georgia Old-Time Fiddlers’ Convention held in Atlanta from 1913-1935, and was loved for his comic turns and vocal showmanship. Indeed, some say that joking masked a mediocre fiddler. Riding the wave of the country music recording boom of the mid-1920s, Tanner went on to cut over 100 sides backed by his Skillet Lickers, an assortment of talented guitar, mandolin, banjo and fiddle players, as well as singers.

As the Depression bit, recording studios emptied. The Skillet Lickers had last recorded in October 1931 when they were recalled in 1934 for what were to be their final sessions. Up to this point, aside from some early sides in NYC, Tanner had always recorded in Atlanta. Perhaps a sign of tough times, the group hauled all the way to San Antonio, Texas for their last hurrah. Dropped by Columbia in 1931, the Skillet Lickers made their return on the Bluebird Label, a cut-price RCA-Victor subsidiary.

Flop-Eared Mule was recorded on the final day of Tanner’s final recording session- Friday March 30, 1934. It was the group’s farewell dance tune, followed by two records featuring sketches and music excerpts, another style Tanner was known for. The Depression was still playing out, and the record business was a shadow of its former self, so Tanner’s final exit is not surprising. What is odd is that another recording from the Skillet Lickers’ last sessions, the day before, Down Yonder, is said to have sold a million copies*. In an economic tailspin, that is an extraordinary figure, not least for string band music. Why didn’t the record company bring Tanner back to the studio? Perhaps it was cheaper just to push some of his old numbers.

My copy is a reissue on RCA Victor itself- one of the last shellac appearances of Gid Tanner.

Whether Tanner or his band members saw much money from their big hit or other tracks is doubtful. In those days, performers were paid a one-time fee for each recording. The record company and retailers made all the money from sales. Tanner kept working on his farm, continuing to perform on fiddle contests and on radio, but never recorded commercially again. The folk revival of the 1960s, when numerous old-time performers were rediscovered, came just too late for Gid Tanner, who died in 1960.

Flop-Eared Mule is a popular breakdown known by many names, with versions credited to Irish and Ukranian musicians as well as those in the southern United States. My copy is from an RCA-Victor reissue, perhaps the very last Gid Tanner 78 rpm record run.

Mules, a cross between a horse and a donkey, were the engines of the pre-industrial south, particularly in the Cotton Belt. Known for their long ears, mules were also famed for endurance and good temperament. Cotton was planted quite close together, hence the smaller size and greater agility of the mule was important, as was its tolerance of hot weather. Charles Darwin, commenting in the 1879 account of his voyages, thought it strange that a man-made hybrid should possess such qualities. “The mule always appears to me a most surprising animal. That a hybrid should possess more reason, memory, obstinacy, social affection, powers of muscular endurance, and length of life, than either of its parents, seems to indicate that art has here outdone nature.” Perhaps the same could be said of Gid Tanner, part fiddler and part comic.

*Murrells (1978) Book of Golden Discs, p19. According to Murell’s, Down Yonder was the lone million seller in the nation in 1934, and one of only five between 1929 and 1935.

Old World Music Classics #16

Le Rêve - Roland Hayes

(Columbia, 1939)

UNITED STATES

There were few guarantees for African Americans in the first decade of the 20th century. That a black man might command the stage of the finest concert halls, entrancing audiences with his rendering of the classics, would have seemed to many not aspirational but ridiculous. Born to tenant farmers, former slaves, in rural Georgia in 1887, Roland Hayes, armed with no more than raw talent, luck and determination, managed just that.

His father died when he was 11, and after working for two years to pay off their farm debt, the family moved to Chattanooga, Tennessee. Roland and his two brothers walked the 55 mile journey, barefoot, with a cow pulling their furniture. Schooled in the church, young Roland sang in a baptist church choir in the city, and caught the attention of a visiting music teacher who persuaded his month to pay for vocal lessons. Roland attended school and worked in a local foundry.

Aged 18, Roland moved to Nashville to study music at Fisk University, the institution founded for freed slaves after the Civil War. In the 1870s, barely viable, Fisk had dispatched some student singers on a fundraising tour. A program of classical and popular airs left audiences lukewarm, but so-called Negro Spirituals sparked a reaction. The Fisk University Jubilee Singers, as the group became known, went on to rapturous success in the north and across Europe, sang for royalty and prime ministers, and saved their alma mater.

The spirituals, a hybrid of slave sentiment and parlor refinement, struck the right note for freed blacks striving for dignity and advancement, and pushed many whites to see blacks as equals. For Hayes, Fisk must have represented a powerful idea- a university both rooted in black culture and one seeking to emulate the strictures of the European concert hall. Not content to repudiate the former nor be limited by the latter, Hayes wanted both.

The story goes that, when Roland was at Fisk, working as a butler for a prominent family, he heard a Caruso record. “That opened the heavens for me. The beauty of what could be done with the voice just overwhelmed me.”

Roland became a member of the Fisk Jubilee Quartet, which first recorded, without Hayes, in 1909. Hayes was first tenor in a quartet line-up that cut a handful of sides in 1911. The quartet, not least through recording, emerged as one of the most prominent and highly-regarded black artists of the day, but Hayes wanted more. Stopping in Boston during a tour, Hayes decided to stay on.

Supporting himself as a waiter, bellboy and messenger for an insurance company, Hayes began to find his way in this nexus of American high culture. Arthur Hubbard, an operatic bass, agreed to tutor Roland but only on condition that he visited his house discretely and not when the singer’s white students were present. Hayes’ reputation grew within the black community but no white manager was willing to take him on. Rather than wait to asked, in 1917 Hayes saved two-hundred dollars to hire Boston’s Symphony Hall, something unprecedented for an African American. The concert of lieders and arias was a sell-out and a critical success.

Hayes undertook a self-managed American tour but in 1920 sailed for Europe. Just like the Fisk singers in the 1870s, Hayes found Europeans more open-minded and he soon became a celebrity, performing for the great and good across the continent. Returning home in 1922, Hayes reception in Europe propelled him to fame and fortune in the states, becoming one of the country’s highest paid singers in the 1920s.

The ensuring years were a mixture of triumph and ambivalence. Hayes played to both integrated and segregated audiences, seeing his presence and art as a force for good, but was sometimes criticized by civil rights groups. Acknowledged as a rare talent, Hayes still never won a male lead in an opera; the idea of a black man and a white woman in a staged liaison was still too much for American audiences, and for many in Europe. Interrupted by the Depression and World War II, and overshadowed by popular acceptance of black jazz and gospel performers, Hayes still toured and recorded, and taught at Boston University, giving his final concert aged 75 in 1962.

In the 1940s, Hayes bought the land his parents farmed, but sold it after his wife and daughter were turfed out of seats reserved for whites while visiting a shoe store in nearby Rome, Georgia. Hayes protested and spent a night in jail. The case was widely publicized, and the police officer fired, but for Hayes the incident reaffirmed his move north. Langston Hughes’ 1942 poem, How About it, Dixie, is said to have been inspired by the Hayes family’s experience in Rome.

Hayes died in Boston in 1977. He was not the first black singer in the US to find success on the concert stage- Sissieretta Jones, known as the Black Patii, was a star in the 1890s, and toured the world; but Hayes was the male pioneer, clearing the way for Paul Robeson and others.

This piece is from a 1939 Columbia album “A Song Recital by Roland Hayes”, with pianist Reginald Boardman. Hayes performed a range of classical pieces, as well as two spirituals. Le Rêve (or En fermant les yeux as it is sometimes known) is from the opera Manon by Jules Massenet (1842-1912), the French romantic composer, first performed in Paris in 1884.

An opéra comique, Manon tells the story of a chance romance between a young nobleman and an innocent bound for a convent. They escape to Paris, but the nobleman (Grieux) fails to convince his father that they should marry. Manon is distracted by some of Grieux’s unscrupulous acquaintances, who want Manon for themselves, throwing the nobleman into despair. When Manon hears that her love has become a monk she rushes to the monastery, and the two are reunited. Grieux’s father has cut off his inheritance, and the former nobleman is persuaded- by his rivals- to gamble to raise a fortune. He is tricked, accused of cheating and carted off by the police, and Manon is whisked away for being a loose woman. Grieux’s father intervenes for him, but not for Manon. The girl is condemned to deportation. Grieux’s finds her at the port, the two declare their love, but Manon, sick and weak, dies in his arms.

Le Rêve is from Act 2. After Grieux’s rivals dazzle Manon with boasts about their wealth and property, turning her head, Grieux sings of his dream of a simple cottage in the woods- and all that is missing is Manon. The girl is his.

By closing my eyes, I see

There ... a humble retreat,

A house

All white in the depths of the woods!

Under its tranquil shades

The clear and happy streams,

The foliage sings with birds!

It's heaven! ... Oh no!

Everything is sad and gloomy,

Because one thing is missing,

There is still Manon!

Old World Music Classics #15

Defte Lavete Fos, Christos Anesti- Milton Kazis

(Columbia, 1928)

GREECE

This hymn, in ancient Greek, marks the pivotal moment of Holy Week in the Greek Orthodox Church. At the stroke of midnight, in the first hour of Easter Sunday, the church is in darkness, as if in Christ's tomb. The priest lights a candle from the vigil light, which symbolizes the eternal presence of the Holy Sacrament, and lights the first candle in the congregation. As light spreads through the building, the priest and people sing "Come ye and receive light from the unwaning life, and glorify Christ, who arose from the dead". The candle is emblematic of each believer's faith in the Resurrection. 

Then the priest sings: "Christ has Risen from the dead, by death trampling upon Death, and has bestowed life upon those in the tombs." Christ's willingness to die for man conquers death itself. 

The hymn is sung by Milton (Miltiadis) Kazis, who had a brief recording career in NYC in the late 1920s. What is unusual is that on this record Kazis takes the role of the priest, while most of his other recordings sound secular. Indeed, his last four recordings were with Gus Papagikas' Oriental Orchestra. It is not surprising, in the 1920s, for an otherwise conventional singer to take up a religious song, but curious that a layman would tackle one of the centerpieces of the Orthodox faith. Perhaps Kazis was ordained and, like some Jewish cantors of the period, recorded both sacred and secular material. Yet the record label names him "tenor" rather than priest, a personage who would normally be called "Reverend" or "Father". 

It is also notable that the recording includes an organ. Traditionally, the Greek Orthodox church banned any instrumental accompaniment but by the 1920s some innovators were challenging the status quo, not least in America. The Orthodox History site quotes a 1923 Washington Post article on a Greek service: “On this Greek Easter Day the choir of St. Sophia’s, L and Eighth Streets, N.W., is of unusual interest, there being only five Greek Orthodox churches in the world having mixed choirs and an organ.” The music of the dominant Protestant and Catholic churches in America may have influenced the Greek-Americans, alongside growing use of English. 

Archbishop Athenagoras Spyrou, who became head of the Greek Orothodox church in North America in 1931, and who was a proponent of organs, may also have had an impact. Father Athenagoras was a lover of music and introduced the instrument to his flock in the Greek island of Corfu. The parishoners were enthusiastic but the church hierarchy condemned the move, and in 1928 brought a case against him in the Holy Synod. Citing ancient precedent,claiming that a similar musical instrument had first been used by the Byzantines in Corfu's Church of St. Sophia, Father Athenagoras held out until the case was dropped. News of the controversy may have reached New York.

Perhaps Miltiadis Kazis added an organ to his recording to signal his desire for change. The very idea of a layman- if that is what Kaziz was- singing the Hymn of Redemption, accompanied by an organ, and selling a gramophone record, may have been far from an orthodox thing to do. An organ would have heralded that this was not a strictly religious performance, both deference to authority and a wink to reform. Its possible that Kazis was rallying for greater lay participation in religious services, something that would have been routine inside the storefront Protestant churches of Manhattan. 

I have been unable to unearth any biographical details for Miltiadis Kazis. His religious recordings may have been an act of devotion, a protest or evidence of an inner religious struggle. Indeed, Kazis sings with utter conviction, if seeming to waver on certain notes and phrases. 

I found this record in Whistlin’ Willies, the 78 rpm branch of the incomparable Jerry’s Records in Pittsburgh.

Old World Music Classics #14

Reign Massah Jesus by The Cleveland Colored Quintet

(Sacred Records, 1947)

UNITED STATES

For the dominant culture, in this case whites, the price of dominance is cultural anxiety. Blacks are derided for poor social accomplishments and integration but lauded for a sharper cultural edge. The two are intimately related- it is often precarious social standing that produces musical innovation that is truly disruptive rather than merely progressive. Today, at least for middle class whites, there is a nervousness that affluence and authenticity are at odds. It is all nonsense, of course, but palpable nonetheless.

But what happens when black musicians self-consciously take up elements of white musical sensibility? There is the case of The Cleveland Colored Quintet.

Rummaging through a used record store in Las Vegas, of all places, I came across two 78s by the Cleveland Colored Quintet on the Sacred label. The group’s name and track titles suggested material in the tradition of the early gospel artists, such as the Fisk Jubilee Quartet. Indeed, once I heard the records, such as On the Jericho Road and Reign Massah Jesus, it was clear that these pieces were antiquated even at the time of recording- Sacred Records did not begin production until after World War II. I was intrigued and looked for more information. 

The Cleveland Colored Quintet (CCQ) fall into the category of black musicians who made early recordings but whose music was judged “not black enough” to be included in the first three editions of the landmark Blues & Gospel Records discography. The CCQ were a male vocal group with a repertoire that spanned both African-American spirituals and late nineteenth and early twentieth century white religious fare. Formed in 1914, the group enjoyed some success touring the north east United States and Canada with various preachers. The CCQ made about twenty recordings between 1923 and 1926 in Columbia’s Personal series, for sale at church gatherings. The recordings appear under the name of The C. & M. A. Gospel Singers or Quintette, referring to The Christian & Missionary Alliance, the church group the members were associated with. The CCQ did not record commercially before the 1940s.

Most of the 1920s recordings were reissued on the Document label in 1997, but the notes make no reference to the Sacred Records discs I had found. Recorded too late for the Blues & Gospel Records 1890-1943 discography, the CCQ’s subsequent records turn up in the companion volume The Gospel Discography 1943-1970 by Cedric J. Hayes and Robert Laughton. The latter lists 28 sides, all recorded in 1947, on Sacred and a number of other labels, and all issued commercially. The earlier discography makes no reference to later recordings, such allusion being standard practice, and the later discography is silent on earlier ones. The group’s two names may be to blame- the 1920s recordings using the church affiliation, and the later ones The Cleveland Colored Quintet. According to Colin J. Bray, the author of the notes for the Document CD and drawing on the 1937 book The Cleveland Coloured Quintette, the second was the group’s “correct” name.

The abrupt end to recordings in 1947 appears to have been due to the sudden death, on stage at a church event in Erie PA, of a heart attack, of Alexander E. Talbert, the group’s bass. This is a reminder of the group’s vintage. The men were born in 1876 (Talbert), 1881 (Parker), 1884 (Hodges), 1889 (Lacy) and 1896 (Jones). These early dates, and the fact that 20 years separated the oldest and youngest man, explains the CCQ’s devotion to a variety of late 19th and early 20th century styles of gospel singing, honed by the group before the race record explosion in the 1920s.

Prior to that period, much white interest in black music in America was a matter of “refining” the latter in the manner of the former- harmonizing spirituals for the parlor piano and the like. But the effort was not one-way. The original Fisk Jubilee Singers from the 1870s embarked on a concert tour to raise funds for the recently founded yet impoverished Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee, an institution designed to advance higher education for freed slaves after the Civil War. The Singers found most success with renderings of old-time religious music molded by slaves from scraps of white Christianity and African legacy. In a climate of newly-found dignity for blacks, the combination of “roughly-hewn” spirituals and well-educated singers harmonizing in the European concert tradition seemed most fitting, from the perspective of many blacks as well as whites. The minstrel show, the most prominent portrayal of black music in America at the time, was generally much less positive and nuanced.

The Singers sparked a “jubilee craze” raising large sums for the University and prompting many imitators, both genuine and otherwise. Relatively few such performers made recordings prior to 1920, but a later group of Fisk singers, the Fisk Jubilee Quartet, first recorded in 1909, was positioned as a valuable exclusive for the Victor Company. According to estimates by Tim Brooks, author of Lost Sounds: Blacks and the Birth of the Recording Industry, the Fisks sold two million records over a decade, on both Victor and Columbia, and were probably the second biggest-selling black recording artists prior to 1920, after Bert Williams.

In the 1920s, with the surprise success of early jazz records and blues singers such as Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith, the “jubilee” sound began to seem old-fashioned. The appearance of country blues records later in the decade further sidelined the jubilee style. All these developments turned the jubilee logic on its head, finding success with less “managed” black voices, with any non-black influence more marginal. The gospel sound evolved too, with more personal lyrics, more complex and forceful vocals and more contemporary music. The 1930s saw a new breed of quartets, such as The Heavenly Gospel Singers, Golden Gate Quartet and Dixie Hummingbirds.

So it perhaps not surprising, but intriguing nonetheless, that even by the 1940s, the CCQ were still firmly in the jubilee vein. The 1947 records make no attempt to keep with the times, and may have traded on a nostalgia among older folks. Indeed, some of the CCQ’s 1947 recordings appear to be one of only a few times certain pieces were captured commercially post-war. Like the Fisks, the CCQ travelled to the UK and Europe, in the 1930s, no doubt finding audiences for whom their singing was unfamiliar and revelatory. The 1937 book about the group was published by supporters in Scotland.

Reign Massah Jesus, the 1947 CCQ recording featured in this article, closely resembles the same side by the Fisk University Jubilee Singers, captured almost 30 years earlier, and the sheet music of the 1870s transcribed by Ella Sheppard (1851-1915) of the original Fisk Jubilee Singers.

What I’m most interested in is how groups like the CCQ have been viewed since their demise. These artists go entirely against the grain of how black music in America has been regarded, by blacks and especially by whites, who emphasize what is perceived as primitive, earthy, raw, etc. Indeed, much mainstream western popular music since the 1950s is premised on judicious use of this black American “edge.” Widespread white adoption of black musical features is either praised or taken for granted, whereas black “imitation” of whites is often looked askance at.

The fact that groups like the CCQ performed black and white music in equal measure is often seen to imply that the performers were “too middle class” to be sufficiently in touch with their roots, in thrall to white values, trying to please white audiences or some such argument. Of course, the CCQ’s “colored” label is one more reason to for us to feel uneasy. Given the reaction, you might think it inconceivable that the CCQ members actually appreciated both styles or had legitimate reasons to want to appeal to different audiences. Just as white middle class affluence and U.S. industrialization prompted a longing for a simpler past, so the constrained existence of most blacks prompted interest in progress and sophistication. Jazz, city blues and modern gospel represented such change, but so did more direct black fascination with non-black styles.

Census records show that none of CCQ’s members were born into affluent families but might be characterized as members of the fragile black lower middle class. Until the 1930 count, the men reported work as store porters, mail carriers, car mechanics and truckers. Only by 1930 and 1940 were occupations given as “singer” and “evangelist”. Born in various parts of the Upper South- North Carolina, West Virginia, Washington DC (Parker was born in Canada- the son of an escaped slave from Kentucky who purchased land in Canada set aside for former slaves)- desire for economic betterment and greater freedom drove each man to migrate to Cleveland, Ohio, long an abolitionist center and then a hub of industry and opportunity. In the 1920s, Cleveland was briefly the fifth largest city in America.

One could argue that groups like the CCQ were actually remarkably well-rounded and pioneering, sidestepping rigid racial divisions and embracing musical diversity. The contributions of middle class blacks like the CCQ should be regarded as just as significant and interesting as those of their more numerous less fortunate brethren. For the prevailing culture to ultimately value black music as a symptom of second class status, and dismiss other black paths as suspect, puts a disturbing slant on our artistic fascinations.

The likes of the CCQ were grudgingly included in the latest edition of Gospel & Blues Records 1890-1943. Some of this music does sound somewhat staid to modern ears, used to “raw” as the standard, but I think we are far from a full assessment of early black recording artists that tried to transcend as well as embrace the status quo.

Floyd Lacy and his wife, Lillie Lacy (nee Calendar) continued to tour and record after the demise of CCQ, moving to California, and returning to the UK for an encore. Floyd Lacy died in Hancock, Ohio in 1969.

There is a video about this track, with commentary and vintage photographs, on my Music Atlas YouTube Channel.

Old World Music Classics #13

'A Festa 'E Munte Vergine by Eliseo & Co.

(Columbia, 1918)

ITALY

Long a place of pilgrimage, today the site attracts over two million visitors a year. One of many Black Madonna's across Europe and elsewhere, the image is associated with sympathy for physical labor and the outsider, including homosexuality in this particular case.  Legend has it that in 1256 two homosexuals, cast out from their town, feared exposure on the bleak mountain but were saved by beams of holy light from the Virgin. The story, which even recounts that the couple then consummated their love with no divine retribution, has proven a lifeline for many Catholic homosexuals looking for accommodation in the Church. Like many Christian shrines, the Madonna di Montevergine was founded on a site of pagan worship, in this instance to the goddess Cybele, one of the great mother figures in the Near-east pantheon. This association, along with the Madonna's embrace of the two men, leads some festival goers to blur a Christian and pagan outlook. Today, the festival draws both a traditional and less traditional audience, to the point that one year the Abbot exploded in anger at some of the celebrants, driving them away from the sanctuary. But his outburst proved no less controversial, and gays continue to flock to the site.

This record, recorded in 1918 in New York City, features powerful yet far from refined singing. The piece evokes the so-called ‘a fronna 'e limone type of southern Italian singing, free and florid, and featuring two or more singers who parry their vocal gymnastics. This is the only Italian 78 I've ever found that features this style.

Akin to the Spanish Saeta, literally an "arrow to God' in sung prayer during Lent, the piece leaps and curls with intensity as each of four singers, two male, two female, take turns. Final notes hang longer than expected, and are greeted with shouts of affirmation. There is no instrumental accompaniment, except faint, occasional drumming or tambourine, which is consistent with descriptions of the contemporary festival.

“Festa de Montevergine” is a dramatic staple, captured on a number of early 20th century discs before Eliseo & Co.’s rendition, but I have not been able to locate any audio examples. I asked an Italian friend if he could decipher the lyrics on this 78 but he said the Neapolitan dialect was beyond him.

Research suggests that Eliseo & Co. is associated with Pasquale and Pietro Eliseo, father and son owners of Eliseo & Sons, a phonograph, “music rolls and sounds recordings” store at 2241 1st Avenue in East Harlem, Manhattan, a large Italian immigrant neighborhood for much of the 20th century. Pasquale Eliseo was born in 1859, and Pietro in 1888.

One of the Eliseo men- it is not clear which- played the mandolin, recording a few additional sides, with an A. De Vivo on guitar, in 1916 and 1917. 'A Festa 'E Munte Vergine, the first of three “spoken” sides by Eliseo & Co. recorded in March 1918, was quite a departure. ‘A Festa 'E Munte Vergine is credited to “P. Eliseo”, implying that either the elder or younger man decided on the details of the scene, drawing on precedents. The bulk of the family emigrated in 1907 from Nola, east of Naples and less than 40 miles from Montevergine, so were familiar with the site and festivities, and the dramatic tradition.

In the July 18, 1918, edition of L’Italia, an Italian language newspaper published in San Francisco, an advertisement for Columbia records features the two other Eliseo & Co. sides but does not mention ‘A Festa 'E Munte Vergine. Perhaps the latter’s rustic tone missed the mark for rapidly urbanizing Italian-Americans.

The Paese Milo Bello: Historical Italian-American Recordings 1911-1939 CD set on JSP which came out in 2012, billed as the "first reissue of its kind", does indeed stand out as a rare compilation of Italian 78s. The set supports my experience that truly "rustic" or other-worldly Italian 78s are very much the exception. A few examples are included (e.g. A Fronna Limone by Papele e Giovanni, and the Christmas piece, featuring Zampogna, local bagpipes, which I also have a copy of) but much is quite urban and modern by comparison. Low interest in such compilations may reflect contemporary boredom with much historical Italian fare, typically lacking the "rawness" favored by today's collectors.

None other than “P. Eliseo” is credited with composition of A fronna ‘e limone by Papele e Giovanni (see the second Columbia ad below), although doubtless the track is a re-working of traditional material. This pair, perhaps part of Eliseo & Co., recorded only this one disc (in 1917). If only taste and timing had combined to commit more antique Eliseo stylings to shellac.

Discographical information is taken from Richard Spottswood's Ethnic Music on Records, Volume 1. 'A Festa 'E Munte Vergine is also available from the Internet Archive, as part of their extensive online archive of 78s, but the accompanying information is minimal.

I can’t remember where I found this record!

Here is a video about this track- on my Music Atlas YouTube Channel.

Old World Music Classics #12

Garrot Bounce by Lord Nelson

(Camille Records, 1973)

TRINIDAD & TOBAGO

This track captures Trinidadian Calypso at the peak of its powers. Calypso, the music of carnival and social commentary, sweet, assertive and knowing, rarely holds it all together. Antique dance music seems leisurely to modern ears and many songs are no more than vehicles for foxy lyrics. By the 1960s, the pace had picked up but a growing “party, party” mentality excused the lazy and mediocre, before the genre dissolved into Soca in the 70s.

First recorded in 1962, the year of Trinidad’s independence, Garrot Bounce was the A side on Robert Nelson’s inaugural 45, and remained the Calypsonian’s calling-card throughout the decade. It was reissued several times, and then extended over two sides on a 1967 release. The version I have, which is the extended take, is from a 1973 LP of Calypso hits by various artists.

Garrot Bounce gets almost everything right. The pace is snappy, and Nelson jumps in with gusto, playing with a line long after other singers would have quit. With Soca looming but still unimagined, the studio is crowded with musicians. The horn section is crisp and numerous, the drums sweating and tight, never mind guitars, piano, bass, congas. Odes to “real” music and “real” musicians can be overdone, but it’s hard to figure how a synthesizer could have done anything but slow things down. Making full use of its six-plus minutes, the track has multiple parts- cracking repeated horn break, reduction down to a piano line, and a gloriously drawn-out sax and brass battle that is endlessly inventive. 

The title appears to refer to the “Garrot” as the maligned small islander who bursts onto the scene with his “bounce” that wins over the big-timers in Trinidad. “Garrot” is a pejorative term for people from the small islands in the East Caribbean chain. Nelson was born in Tobago, Trinidad’s little sister island, so the title may reference the novelty of a small island Calypsonian. “You come from the island, and that is no disgrace“.

Nelson, who celebrates his 88th birthday in 2018, was never crowned Calypso Monarch and never won the Road March.  He spent time in the United States after high school, including a stint in the army. His Calypso career started late, giving him precious little time in the genre’s heyday, before Soca took over and made him seem old-fashioned and forced to play by someone else’s rules. Nelson’s material from the 70s onwards seems to pale in comparison to Garrot Bounce, but I haven’t heard his sole album and other singles from the 1960s.

Before Garrot Bounce, much Calypso seems quaint and dated; and afterwards collapsed into indistinct Soca and the reign of the DJ with speakers bigger than a man. After another overhyped Carnival or make-do party, I imagine Garrot Bounce blowing everything sky high.

I found this LP in a used record store in North London.

Old World Music Classics #11

Malay Malay Oya by Devar Surya Sena & Ensemble

HMV, 1939

CEYLON

This 78 is also notable in that it hails from Sri Lanka, then Ceylon, a country very rarely featured on compilations of old ethnic recordings. There are no entries for Sri Lanka on Excavated Shellac, and very few references online to 78s from the country. In my 25 years of collecting, I’ve encountered only a handful of old recordings on any format from this part of the world.

This record, Malay Malay Oya by Devar Surya Sena and Ensemble comes from the dominant Sinhalese ethnic group. Devar Surya Sena (1899-1981) was born Herbert Charles Jacob Peiris, the son of Sir James Peiris, one of Ceylon’s most prominent politicians. The name “Peiris” stems from Portugal’s part-colonization of the country in the 16th and 17th centuries. By the 19th century, the Peiris family, in naming, education and aspirations had embraced the mores of the British colonists, even while Sir James worked for the country’s independence. Herbert was sent to boarding school in England from the age of 12, then studied at the University of Cambridge. In 1923, he married Winifred de Silva, from another prominent Ceylon family. Theirs was said to be the first Ceylon society wedding in London.

Herbert was torn between his parent’s ambition that he should have a brilliant legal and political career, and his love of music. He studied for a time at the Royal College of Music in London. After working for some years as a barrister, Herbert and Winifred decided to return home. The case for greater self-government was building, and a new sense of Ceylonese identity and appreciation for local culture. Herbert and Winifred went so far as to change their names- becoming Deva Surya Sena and Nelun Devi. In 1931, after much lobbying, not least by Sena’s father, Britain granted Ceylon greater autonomy and gave citizens, women included, the right to vote. Independence did not come until 1948.

In 1928, Sena gave a concert to the elite of Colombo, devoting the first half to operatic arias and the like from Europe, but reserving the second for the music of Ceylon. According to Sena’s own account, this was the “first time in history” Ceylonese music had been performed in such a setting. The recital was a great success, persuading Sena to dedicate himself to showcasing Ceylonese music to a wider audience, particularly a Western audience. He conducted research across the island, gave concerts internationally, led radio programs and made records. His appreciation of both local and Western culture, his musical ability, and proper English accent made him a particularly effective ambassador.

I am unsure whether the apparent absence of any contemporary reissue of Sena’s recordings is an indication that he has been largely forgotten or that his approach has been called into question. While Sena was accomplished on a number of instruments central to Ceylonese music, he also made recordings accompanied by piano and violin. No doubt blurring the lines between Western and Ceylonese music was a tactic to engage Europeans, although it is certainly true that much so-called “traditional” creativity is precisely the appropriation of foreign influences. The western violin indisputably found new life on the Indian subcontinent, mingling with instrument cousins. The competing instincts of preservation and improvement lie at the heart of many folk music revival efforts of the period.

The piece included here, Malay Malay Oya, features vocal and violin that “sound Ceyonlese”, but piano that “sounds Western.” Today’s penchant for “raw” and “primitive” old recordings casts suspicion on anything refined or somehow tampered with. It would be wise to remember that “authenticity” is vulnerable to fashion and misreadings of how culture and change actually work. Sena’s blending of styles and instruments is really no different from various musical amalgams lauded today.

I find this piece thoroughly charming and arresting, just the effect Sena intended. The arrangement makes sense in its historical context, and given Sena’s background and ambition, and should be considered not redacted. Malay is said to be a boatman’s song, chronicling the sights and sounds of the river. The other side of the record might be judged more “authentic”, but is not as strong as Side 1, in my view.

I am not aware of any CD reissue of Sena’s work. In 2008, the Devar Surya Sena Trust published a compilation of Sena’s writing as Music of Sri Lanka. A CD accompanied the book but contains only five tracks, which appear to have been drawn from radio broadcasts and are sub-par in terms of sound quality. If anyone knows of a CD of Sena’s 78s, I’d be grateful to hear about it.

I found this 78 at the Portobello Road Market in London.

I created a video about this track, on my Music Atlas YouTube Channel:

Old World Music Classics #10

We Are Climbing/For A Long Time by Lockhart River Aboriginal Community

(Private Pressing, 1972)

AUSTRALIA

In the popular imagination, the music of Australia’s Aborigines means the didgeridoo, some sort of mystical communion with the land and not much else. In fact, the iconic instrument was once confined to northern Australia, and the word itself appears to be an onomatopoeia dreamed up by western observers. Today’s outsider reverence- from afar- for Australia’s indigenous peoples is a reaction against the woes of colonization but hides from the complexity of contemporary Aboriginal identity.

This piece of music speaks to that complexity; but first some background. The Lockhart River Aboriginal Community, where this recording was made in the early 1970s, is situated on the east coast of the Cape York Peninsula in Queensland. The area is very remote, about 800km from the nearest city. Near this site, in 1789, Captain Bligh, exiled from his ship The Bounty by the famous mutiny, spent a night ashore. During the 19th century, European contact was minimal, but there was growing interest in the region’s shells and sandalwood.

The early 20th century was the nadir for Aboriginal people, the national population falling to a low of 73,000 by the early 1930s from an estimated half a million pre-contact, victims of disease, displacement and neglect. Queensland, and much of the rest of the country, formally barred Aborigines from voting and denied them many other rights and privileges.

In the 1920s an Anglican bishop argued for a mission to the Lockhart area. Funding was provided for a priest and superintendent, and plans made to organize the community into villages and to enhance farming, education and healthcare. Steadily, a growing number of Aborigines moved under the wing of the Mission. In 1934, the state passed a law permitting Aboriginal communities to be moved at will to make way for settlers and industry. This brought more Aboriginal people to Lockhart. During World War II the area was used as a staging post for Allied troops to attack the Japanese in Southeast Asia, adding runways and bunkers. At the outbreak of war, the non-native Mission staff were advised to leave, amid fear of Japanese bombing. The Aboriginals were told to “go bush” to escape.

The Mission was revived after the war, and a series of superintendents tried to improve the community’s lot and viability. In the 1950s, Lockhart is said to have formed the first Aboriginal cooperative for shell harvesting, in an attempt to counter exploitation by outside concerns. By the 1960s, with the church loosing influence and Aboriginal rights gaining ground, and the community still plagued by unemployment and poor health, the settlement was handed over to the state government. Further attempted relocation encountered resentment and resistance, leading eventually to the granting of land rights and the establishment of self-government in 1987. Today, the Lockhart River Aboriginal Shire Council oversees a growing community of about 700 people. Over time, government officials and community members have begun to find common ground. Problems remain but facilities are much improved and growing tourism values traditional ways.

Lockhart has been shaped by both isolation and assimilation, resulting in unexpected hybrids; the Aborigines marrying traditional and Christian beliefs, and spanning pre-modern and modern life. This recording- in fact two short pieces- resembles an Anglican hymn but actually concerns observations about the land and weather, and is not religious in the narrow sense. Similarly, the tune and harmonies sound both familiar and distinctive, molding disparate components into something new. The style is not what might be expected of Aboriginal music. Such is fitting testament to the openness and perseverance of the people of Lockhart. The recordings come from a custom pressed LP that appears never to have been reissued. 

My wife found this recording at a used record store in the Melbourne suburbs.

Old World Music Classics #9

Tselio by Dimitrios "Jim" Sourmelis and The Costas Gadinis Orchestra

(Metropolitan, late 1940s)

GREECE

Costas (Gus) Gadinis was one of the most respected and prolific clarinetists of Greek extraction in the United States during the golden age of ethnic recording. Yet today he is something of a mystery- very few contemporary reissues of his work, little biographical information and only one grainy photograph. To add to the confusion, legend has it that Benny Goodman, perhaps the most famous clarinet player of the 20th century, was sufficiently impressed to give Gus the backhanded compliment of the "Greek Benny Goodman." The story goes that Benny's endorsement got Gus his first studio date but this seems far-fetched. Gardinis first recorded at least as early as 1926, when Benny was only 17 and a long way from stardom. 

The obscurity surrounding Gardinis is caused in part by the fact that many of his sides, post-1920s, were recorded under anonymous names such as "Jewish Orchestra" and "Popular Turkish Orchestra", blurring regional markers. This reflected the melange of eastern Mediterranean culture, and perhaps moonlighting for different companies. These titles were recorded in the aftermath of the Great Depression when the major labels were down on their luck and ethnic markets looked less attractive, perhaps favoring generic offerings. The man went by Gus, Costas and Kostas as well. 

Gus is said to have been born c.1885, in Macedonia, and fled to the U.S. around 1915 amid the death throes of the Ottoman empire. He first recorded for Victor, all 12". The company's willingness to invest in longer-playing, higher-priced records emphasizes the prosperity of the 1920s before the Crash and the robustness of ethnic markets. In 1929, Gadinis switched to Columbia Records and then vanishes until 1932, when he made a few more sides. He does not resurface under his own name until 1940. No doubt he was a session musician on many other recordings from the 1920s onwards. 

The present recording is from the later 1940s, on the newly founded Metropolitan label, part of a stable of Balkan/Greek etc labels based in New York City, signaling the transition of ethnic music from major to independent firms. The piece is slow and melancholy, featuring only vocal, clarinet and faint cymbolom. Indeed, the vocal is the lead, pleading and tugging at the complaint, finding rest only to rise in agitation once more. The words are sorrowful and anguished; the singer moans that even the trilling of the birds cannot lift the darkness. The singer is Dimitrios "Jim" Sourmelis, also a famed clarinet player. This is an example of "Kleftiko", a pan-Hellenic dance that commemorates the "thieves", or Greek resistance, under the long Ottoman occupation. "Kleftiko" is a circle dance that showcases the twists and leaps of the lead dancer. 

In the microgroove era, Gadinis shows up on some LPs but then seems to have disappeared. One source says he died as late as 1987, making him 100 years old or thereabouts. Ironically, the apparent single CD reissue dedicated to the clarinetist, on the Greek Falireas label, is trapped on a broken website, leaving Gadinis once again just out of reach. 

I found this record in the wonderful Vintage Music Company store in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Thank you to Vasiliki Mavroudhis for translation assistance.

Old World Music Classics #8

El Sueño (The Dream) by Carlos Spaventa

Bost, 1942

ARGENTINA

While little known today, many of the artists featured on Old World Music were famous in their time, at least among compatriots. By contrast, Carlos Spaventa played only a bit part.

Born in Argentina around the turn of the 20th century, Carlos is best known by association. His brother, Francisco, a struggling theater performer in Buenes Aires in the early 1920s, went on to achieve great but fleeting fame. He decided to try his luck in Spain where locals were intrigued by Argentina’s tango but had only limited access to authentic artists. Part of a troupe, that included Carlos, Francisco would end shows with a tango piece or two, billing himself as a fine interpreter of the art. Initially, audiences and critics were dazzled, but the exposure prompted better known performers to cross the Atlantic, pushing the Spaventas to the sidelines. Seeking to get out in front once again, the Spaventas and their colleagues moved on to France and elsewhere in Europe, and also toured Latin America.

In the early 1930s, Carlos Spaventa travelled to New York, riding the coat tails of Carlos Gardel, among the greatest Tango legends. Gardel, born in France in 1890 before his mother emmigrated to Argentina, is credited with the creation of Tango-canción, tango with lyrics, in 1917. This brought new life to the tango phenomenon, and broadened its popularity. By emphasizing the solo singer, Gardel also furthered the shift of tango from its origins as a working class dance influenced by former slaves to something more suave and "sophisticated". Known for his good looks and spotless tuxedos, Gardel became a major celebrity. He toured internationally, not least the United States, where later he was invited to makes two films. Carlos Spaventa joined Gardel in New York to help out.

While in America, Carlos Spaventa tried to establish a music career in his own right. Too late for the ethnic recording boom of the late 1920s, he arrived in the depths of the Great Depression but managed to record over 30 Tango-cancións and similar for Brunswick and Columbia between 1932 and 1935. Tragedy then intervened. At the height of his fame, Gardel, along with other tango luminaries, died in a plane crash in Colombia in 1935. Thousands paid their respects as his body lay in state in New York, Rio, Montevideo and finally Buenos Ares. Deprived of his famous associate, perhaps this derailed Spaventa’s career plans. Whatever the case, his recording run ended.

Yet Carlos Spaventa clearly did make at least a few more recordings in America. The present track is taken from a four-record set of 12” 78s on the short-lived Bost label in New York City, released in the early 1940s. The set is titled Latin-American Typical & Folk Songs, and features pieces from Argentina, Chile, Peru, Ecuador and Cuba. Carlos, on vocal and guitar, performs ten songs in all, five from Argentina and five from Chile. Perhaps Bost sensed the stirrings out what would soon become the folk revival in the U.S., offering “traditional” music rather than the polish of Gardel at the height of his renown.

This piece, El Sueño (The Dream) appears to have traditional origins but was also adapted by known authors over the years. Indeed, Gardel recorded the song on two occasions, in 1912 and 1927, the first with a different tune. Interestingly, both versions feature simple vocal and guitar, eschewing the slick orchestration for which he is best known. The lyrics have the forlorn lover, tossing and turning, dreaming of their beloved, delighting in fictions but with reality nagging in the background. Spaventa’s rendition of this beautiful song is quite charming, but is a close imitation of Gardel’s 1927 recording, leaving Carlos Spaventa in the shadows once again.

Soon after the Bost recordings, Carlos left for France, touring as a soloist. He later returned to America, said to have hopes for a film career. That did not pan out, and he retired to Los Angeles. He wrote a book about his interactions with Gardel. Carlos Spaventa died in 1977. 

I found this recording in the San Francisco branch of Amoeba Music.

Old World Music Classics #7

Maiden Yana is Benighted by The State Ensemble for Folk Songs & Dances

Balkanton, 1960s

BULGARIA

The very concept of “traditional music” embodies the outsider looking in; music characterized not by generic popularity or professional creativity but by longstanding practice in a certain location. And the outsider, at least a generation removed from the cultural isolation that gives rise to local styles, tends to be fixated on either preservation or refinement. For some, only “pure, authentic” traditional music is acceptable, while others see a marrying of traditional and modern elements as the way forward.

This recording is a great example of the latter. The State Ensemble for Folk Songs and Dances, with an all-female choir at center stage, was formed in 1951 by Philip Koutev (1903-1982), perhaps the most influential Bulgarian musician and composer of the 20th century. Launched only five years after the establishment of Communism in 1946, the Ensemble was part of a broader assertion of Bulgarian culture, following decades of missed opportunities as the country grasped at independence amid surrounding powers. In the 1950s, Bulgaria enjoyed rising prosperity and urbanization, an opportune moment to both cherish and enhance the musical legacy, with Communist bravado one more reason to show off.

Koutev held traditional music in high esteem but also worked for further sophistication, crafting something less crudely propagandist compared to folklore appropriations in other countries under Soviet yoke. The songs of the Ensemble feature few “Ivan glories in his new industrial tractor” type lyrics, and more timeless rural vistas. Yet state support was prominent- the daughter of Todor Zhivkov, the ruler of Bulgaria from 1954 until the collapse of Communism in 1989, championed national culture, encouraging the Ensemble and arranging many tours abroad. The measure of stability afforded by the Soviets was a chance to flex the nation’s cultural muscles, never mind politics.

The music of the Ensemble is very striking- bright, clear tones, and an arresting balance of harmony and dissonance, both studied and rustic. Koutev took a tradition of largely solo and two-part singing and rendered it polyphonic, polishing bedrock. This piece, “Maiden Yana is Benighted”, is from a 1969 Ensemble album that appears never to have been reissued on CD or online. The piece describes a young woman going out after sunset to meet her lover, a haidutin or fighter for Bulgaria's independence from centuries of Ottoman rule, which did not end until 1908. 

The Ensemble is part of a long line of Bulgarian female choirs, including the Bulgarian State Radio & Television Female Voice Choir behind the famous Le Mystère des Voix Bulgares albums, the first of which won a Grammy in 1990. In my view, “Maiden Yana is Benighted” is one of the most compelling examples of this style of music ever recorded. 

I inherited this LP from a great uncle who took many holidays in communist eastern Europe in the 1960s and 1970s, and brought back records. Thank you to Kamelia Valkova Turcotte for translation assistance. 

Old World Music Classics #6

Y'Seorev by Gershon Sirota

(?, 1908)

JEWISH

The Jewish Cantor (Hazzan in Hebrew) is heir to one of the most highly developed vocal arts. An unusual combination of religious devotion and creative freedom, at least since the 19th century, produced practice firmly anchored in tradition by joyous tracery. And to Western ears at least, the classic European cantor sounds “eastern” enough to be intriguing yet intelligible without special effort.

The Cantor has no true analog in modern Christianity. The Cantor leads the congregation in prayer and liturgy, but is distinct from the Rabbi who plays the role of Torah scholar, minister and counsellor. The Cantor harks back to a time of limited literacy, lining-out chants and hymns for adherents to follow, but in modern times emerged as celebrity- the gifted artist conjuring elaborate praise to the Almighty.

Indeed, cantorial recordings, which began in the early 1900s, speak to seismic shifts in American and European Jewry. Many considered the very idea of sacred music rendered outside the synagogue, records played by goodness whom and under what circumstances, blasphemous. Recordings were an extra incentive for innovation, adding organs and orchestras unheard of in orthodox worship, and some cantors even strayed into opera.

The present recording is by Gershon Sirota, the first cantor to record, in 1903. Born in Podolia, a western extremity of the Russian empire, in 1874, into a family of cantors, Sirota’s talents were soon in evidence. As choirboy, soloist, assistant cantor and then cantor in his own right, the young man emerged as perhaps the most talented hazzan of his generation. He was summoned to St. Petersburg to sing before Czar Nicholas II, and secured the position of cantor at the prestigious Tlomatzka Synagogue in Warsaw, at the age of 31.

It was Sirota’s recordings that spread his fame far beyond Poland.  As Jewish immigrants to America swelled to three million prior to World War I, cantorial recordings embodied both nostalgia for home and cultural dignity and progress. Sirota conducted his first U.S. tour in 1912, returning many times over the next two decades. As well as countless synagogues, he appeared at the Metropolitan Opera and Carnegie Hall. Sirota made his last trip to America in 1938, returning to Europe early upon learning that his wife was ill. As war began, Sirota and his family were trapped in the Warsaw ghetto, and died at the hands of the Nazis.

This piece, V’Seorev (or Weseorew), a prayer recited during Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, translates as something like "May it be pleasing". In Orthodox Judasism, the prayer is said before the kohanim bless the congregation. The kohanim are male descendants of priests, in a line going back to the biblical Aaron, designated by Moses as the first priest. The priest role came to an end after the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 AD but the Orthodox afford their descendants special status, often in anticipation of the temple being rebuilt. 

The present piece is unaccompanied, which despite being the norm in the synagogue was unusual on record. Many of the most famed cantors to record were deeply religious but regarded accompaniment as appealing musically and as a way to reach an urban and increasingly secularized audience. In this bare performance, stunning music and fervent prayer are fused. Sirota towers over everything, impassioned and pleading, even as he humbles himself before God.  

I found this recording at the Berkeley branch of Amoeba Music in California.

Old World Music Classics #5

Umtshado (Kuhle Kwetu) by Caluza's Double Quartet

Zonophone, 1930

SOUTH AFRICA

In the years leading up to the end of Apartheid in South Africa in 1994, the rallying cry of the African National Congress (ANC), the political party of Nelson Mandela, and its official anthem, Nkosi Sikelel' iAfrika, were heard around the world at demonstrations and concerts. The anthem is reminiscent of an English hymn, out-of-place betwixt the rocks stars lining up behind the cause, and served as a reminder that the struggle was an old one and music always played its part.

The present recording is of a composition by the man, Reuben Tholakele Caluza, responsible for the very first official anthem of the South African Native National Congress, the future ANC, before the adoption of Nkosi Sikelel' iAfrika. The piece showcased here exemplifies the musical melting pot that was South Africa at the time, combining elements of English hymns and American “ragtime”, as well as indigenous mores.

Caluza’s anthem, Silusapho Lwase Afrika (We are the Children of Africa), composed when he was a seventeen-year-old music student at the Ohlange Institute, was sung at the first SANNC gathering in 1913. Caluza was under the tutelage of John Langalibalele Dube, the Institute’s head and founder, the first black man to found an educational institution in colonial South Africa, and the first leader of the SANNC. The song protests the Natives Land Act of 1913, the latest legislative maneuver against black land rights, one of the cornerstones of what would become Apartheid.

Caluza was born in 1895 into a middle-class, Christian family in Edendale, near Durban. Edendale was an unusual combination of black land ownership and imported values. Established in 1851 by Reverend James Allison, a Methodist missionary, Edendale emphasized western farming methods, introducing men to cultivation (traditionally the preserve of women), and the inhabitants foreswore polygamy and traditional religion. Over the decades, the community, and the Caluza family in particular, produced a number of notable ministers, teachers and business owners.

Caluza showed musical talent, and threw himself into the choirs and choruses of Ohlange, participating in a number of fundraising concerts and tours. Upon graduation, Caluza took up a teaching position at the school and became a leading figure in the wider music scene, turning out a string of compositions commenting on everything from black migration to cities to the latest restrictive employment measures. The songs both look back to an idealized rural past of traditional black leadership and community, and towards a fuller realization of black, urban middle class aspirations, extolling tribal unity one minute and poking fun at his compatriots the next. Caluza began to publish his compositions, and in 1930 travelled to London with his double-quartet to made records.

The recordings, which number over 100, do not conform to any conventional conception of “traditional” African music, but do foreshadow the mbube choral styles prominent in later decades. Caluza’s compositions hark back to the late 19th and early 20th centuries when British influence was paramount in South Africa and the latest innovations coming out of black America were spirituals and the syncopation of early ragtime. The famous fundraising tours of the Fisk Jubilee Singers must have been an inspiration for Dube and Caluza. Strange as it seems today, Caluza’s concerts, enthusiastically received by predominantly black audiences, included black-face renditions inspired by minstrel shows.

Given the distance between Caluza’s day and our own, much of his music, with proper piano accompaniment, can seem rather staid and formal. The words, often fundamental to the piece but typically not in English, further inhibit comprehension. The present recording, composed to mark Caluza’s marriage, is an exception. It’s a delightful hybrid that sounds neither definitively South African nor European, neither black nor white, but truly composed music making creative use of diverse resources. The melody is multi-part and the harmonies and counterpoint very striking.

Caluza made little money from his recordings, although they sold well. He spent a number of years in the United States, on a scholarship at the Hampton Institute, another of the black American educational institutions that inspired Ohlange, and then at Columbia University. He returned to South Africa as a music teacher, before striking out as a small businessman. In his final years he helped establish music courses at the new University College of Zululand, founded in 1959. Caluza died in 1969.    

Twenty sides by Caluza’s Double Quartet, including this one, were reissued in 1992 on a Heritage CD, which is still available. 

I found this 78 rpm record at a flea market in Penge, South London.

Postscript. Vintage recordings evoke another time and place. Old World Music wants many more people to discover this music, but it was a shock to learn that the son of Reuben Caluza, leader of Caluza's Double Quartet, possessed not a single one of his father's recordings. I tracked down Joseph Caluza via a long series of emails to South African music experts and associations, looking for copyright information on this track. I was first put in touch with a cousin, then an uncle, and finally Joseph. Initially we communicated by text message- making email look like shellac. When we spoke by phone- connection and accents getting in the way- Joseph recalled his father playing the piano at home. This was the 1950s and 1960s, when Caluza had retired from performing and was working as a music teacher at a local college. Joseph said few people today remembered his father's music. 

Reuben T. Caluza was one of the first South African artists to record. In those days, there were no recording facilities in the country so in 1930 RT and colleagues were brought to London by HMV, one of the big record companies of the time. The novelty of a local performer meant the records sold well back home but by the 1940s his records were largely forgotten. But could it really be that South Africa's pioneering recording artist reached middle age with none of his own recordings?

On Joseph's account, no family member had any of the records, and were unaware of the sole CD reissue- the 1992 Heritage release. The family had no knowledge of any copyright in the compositions. Under South African and EU law, the recordings have long been in the public domain and the compositions, which retain copyright for fifty years after the composer's death in 1969, expire in 2019. Despite an extensive search, the copyright owner- whether RT, Lovedale Press (RT's publisher) or HMV- remains elusive. I sent Joseph a copy of the Heritage CD.

Finally, here is a video about this track, on my Music Atlas YouTube channel:

Old World Music Classics #4

Tout Le Monde Par La Main by J. O. LaMadeleine

Starr, 1930s

CANADA

The fiddle was one of the quintessential instruments of popular music in the pre-modern era. Light, portable and versatile, the fiddle shows up on innumerable early recordings, from the concert hall to the front parlor and lumber camp. Today, the instrument has fallen out of favor, prominent on few popular music recordings in the past fifty years. For most people, the fiddle is now associated only with scratchy seven-year-old timewasters, pompous classical virtuosi and a drunken turn on St. Patrick’s Day.

This affects our reaction to early fiddle recordings, many of which sound tame or trite to our ears. We don’t know the tunes, we’re not there to dance, we don’t appreciate the subtle turns of phrase and delicate trills. But occasionally, an old recording breaks through.

Joseph Ovila LaMadeleine was born in Valleyfield, south of Montreal, Québec, in 1879. Joseph worked as a lumber jack before moving to Montreal in 1915, where he later opened a music store. He did not record until the late 1920s, when he was nearly fifty, but went on to make over 100 sides. Recording was often a family affair, featuring his children, brother-in-law and even his father, himself a semi-professional musician.

This piece, Tout Le Monde Par La Main, is a reminder of the glories of the fiddle. The tune is bracingly straightforward yet strikingly original; the rhythm is compulsive, driven on by the stomping and whoops of the musicians. The title translates to something like “everybody take a hand”; and this piece is infectious to the point that you wouldn’t think twice even if you didn't know what the hell you were doing.

LaMadeleine made most of his recordings for the Starr label. From the 1920s, Starr featured many Canadian folk musicians. The label is associated with the Starr Piano Company of Richmond, Indiana, which got into the record business in the 1910s, and produced the Gennett label, famous for early jazz and blues recordings. The Starr company appears to have turned to the Compo Company, formed by Herbert Berliner, son of disc record inventor Emile Berliner, as a Canadian distributor. In the wake of the Great Depression, it seems that the Starr label and Starr business parted company, the former emerging as an independent Canadian record label.

La Madeleine died in 1973, at the grand old age of 93. 

I found this recording at a flea market in Montreal. 

Old World Music Classics #3

Chifte-Telli by Nor-ike Orchestra

Nor-Ikes, 1951

ARMENIA

This is side one of the second disc issued on the rare and short-lived "Nor-ikes" label, formed by Armenian-American musicians in New York in c.1951. With a blistering clarinet solo by Souren Baronian, who went on to become a celebrated artist in both Armenian and jazz circles, this recording signaled renewed interest in traditional styles. "Nor-ike" means "new dawn" in Armenian. 

The Nor-ike musicians were children of those caught up in the Armenian diaspora that followed the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. As a stateless, Christian minority in Muslim lands, Armenians long suffered second-class status, but as the empire tottered and Turkish nationalism reared its head the climate grew more ominous. A series of massacres, culminating in the genocide that began in 1915, killed at least 500,000 Armenians. Many survivors fled to the United States. 

This record was part of the burst of small, independent record labels in America after World War II, many devoted to regional or ethnic styles. Depression and war had more-or-less extinguished major label interest in ethnic music. Growing prosperity and increasingly accessible technology prompted entrepreneurs to enter the field, seeing a market in still numerous immigrant and first generation communities. Few of these labels survived more than a decade, victim of steady assimilation and reduced immigration. Up to the 1950s, there was a vibrant Middle Eastern club scene in Manhattan, centered on 8th Avenue between 23rd and 42nd street (see the Traditional Crossroads CD Armenians on 8th Avenue- site now closed?). 

This piece shows off the glories of Middle Eastern music- shifting tempos, shouts of joy and encouragement and the clarinet soaring to extremes. "Chifte-Telli" is a widespread dance form, with Turkish, Greek and other variants. Indeed, much "Armenian" music developed as part of a shared Turkish, Kurdish and eastern Greek culture over centuries.

Souren Baronian, now in his mid-80s, remains an active performer and teacher. His band Taksim, founded in 1975, is credited with original explorations of Middle Eastern music and jazz. He published an autobiography in 2012 entitled The Magic Carpet Ride. 

I found this record in a used bookstore warehouse outside Dallas, Texas. 

Old World Music Classics #2

No Debes Volver by Tony Zuñiga Y Su Orquesta

Corona Records- San Antonio, c.1949

MEXICO

In the old days, a "record store" could mean anything from a furniture showroom to an electrical repair shop. Buy a record player/radio combo and get some records thrown in; bring in your old phonograph to get fixed and pick up a few discs while you wait. 

In 1947, Manuel Rangel, owner of a small San Antonio electrical equipment and repair business, saw an opportunity. Hit hard by the Depression, major record labels had long turned away from regional music, but demand had never been stronger. The local Tejano population, Spanish-speaking Texans, was on the upswing, riding the post-WWII economic boom. San Antonio was a musical crossroads- the polkas and waltzes of longtime German and Czech immigrants blending with the corrido and mariachi of Mexico. Large military bases nearby turned up the sound of jazz and R'n'B.

Manuel serviced jukeboxes installed in neighborhood bars and restaurants, and acted as a distributor for Mexican records. When his supplier died, unsure where to turn for a replacement, Manuel decided to start his own label. His target was the swell of Tejano singers and bands popular in the clubs but hard to find on disc. Dubbed Corona Records- "Crown" in Spanish- Manuel set up a makeshift studio in the back of his store.

One of Corona's first recordings was of the accordionist Valerio Longoria, who went on to have a storied sixty-year career and is credited with inspiring the nueva generación of classic Tex-Mex conjunto (ensemble). But the piece featured here has a very different sound, and Tony Zuñiga Y Su Orquesta seem to have left no trace. Zuniga made a handful of records on Corona and other local labels in the late 1940s and early 1950s but then appears to have vanished. The accordion, so characteristic of the Tex-Mex sound, is absent, and instead guitar and saxophone take the lead. A bolero, at the time seen as a mark of sophistication among Tejano musicians, is another departure. 

"No Debes Volver" translates as something like "You should not go back". The singer says bitterly that he and his lover have tortured each other long enough, and should stay apart. 

I found this record in a used record store in Toronto, Canada.

Old World Music Classics #1

Madbhari Rut Jawani by Pankaj Mullick

? 1940

INDIA

One of the attractions of music from other countries is the allure of the exotic, but fantasies can quickly fade amid alien melodies and inscrutable words. The music of India often fits that description- colorful, shimmering, exuberant in short bursts but then disappointingly impenetrable, particularly once visuals are stripped away and it’s just you alone with the sound.

Indian film music raises this problem- the music is supposed to fold into the image, dialog and plot, and when removed may struggle to stand on its own. Yet the songs are a vital ingredient, both an inherent part of the experience but also separate; the soundtrack often appearing before the film’s release. Almost every movie since the country’s first talkie in 1931 contains numerous songs, so there is also inevitably much mediocrity to contend with. The Indian playback singer can relate- taking the voice of the actor but conceding the character; having to convincingly render multiple songs across an array of films.

This recording features one of the pioneers of playback singing, and one of the early mainstays of composition and orchestration from the dawn of Indian cinema. Born on Calcutta in 1905, Pankaj Mullick was classically trained in his youth but was drawn into the burgeoning local film industry. He became a music director in the silent era, conducting a live orchestra at movie performances. The advent of the talkie changed everything, turning film into a red hot combination of sight and sound that drove the public wild. The talkie also gave the music director much greater freedom, no longer hostage to live performance. The rise of playback singing, used systematically from 1935, fit this direction- separating actor and singer to achieve the best of both.

But Mullick was also versatile, working in front as well as behind the camera, acting as well as singing, and singing songs himself in addition to dubbing others. He was involved with dozens of films into the 1970s, and was featured on scores of 78s and LPs. He became known as a fine exponent of Rabindra Sangeet, the name for songs written and composed by Rabindranath Tagore, India’s literary giant, which whom Mullick interacted during the twilight of the old man’s life. It is said that Mullick is the only person to have put one of Tagore’s poems to music with his blessing, tracking him down at a college event and singing his composition on the spot.  

This recording¸ Madbhari Rut Jawani, is from the film Nartaki (1940). The setting is the 16th century, pitting a renowned dancer of the court against a stern ascetic who bars women from his temple. The dancer plots hedonistic revenge, seeking to seduce the priest’s son but then falls for him. Love wins out over the austerity of the temple and ease of the court. Mullick acts as well as sings in the film. In the scene, he sings as he watches the dancer twirl under showers of petals tossed by courtiers. The song shades from light to dark, airy and delicate then foreboding. This is early Indian film music at its finest.

Pankaj Mullick died in 1978. Today, his legacy is promoted by the Pankaj Mullick Music & Art Foundation, led by his grandson. 

I found this record in a tatty bargain bin at a flea market in south London.