Documenting Recorded Music’s History With Archeophone Records

Originally published September, 2004, Discoveries magazine

“All Coons Look Alike To Me” was the cleaned-up name of a song recorded in 1902. What was the title deemed too controversial for public consumption? “All Pimps Look Alike To Me,” the p word being considered obscene at the time. “Coon,” as a word and as a subject, was not only acceptable, it was highly popular and it represented a musical category unto itself. This particular “coon song” was the ironic biggest hit written by Ernest Hogan—a black Kentuckian who often billed himself as “The Unbleached American.”

There are obvious reasons that this genre and era have been poorly represented in the social history of America and its music. But offensive as they are, “coon songs” are part of our history, and so are all recordings of many other types made before radio, before jazz, before film. And all history aside, some of them were just great music.

A century later, Richard Martin and Meagan Hennessey are working to archive what they can before all such recordings are irretrievably gone. With their Archeophone Records label, they are transferring 78s and cylinders to the CD format, compiling tracks and artists into a cohesive historical record. Virtually all of their focus is on the music from the 1890s through the 1920s, and the dozens of compact discs that they’ve created thus far are available through www.archeophone.com.

The idea sprang from their mutual passion for this forgotten piece of music’s past, and from personal interest came a determination to preserve it. Now, their collection has a higher purpose than it had as a hobby. “We’ve got a collection of three or four thousand 78s and a few hundred cylinders,” says Martin. “It’s a small collection by collectors’ standards. And it’s really more of an accumulation than a collection, because when we started [the label] it was ‘Get everything, because you may never see it again.’”

The title of one of their compilations, Before Radio, captures the essence of the Archeophone concept entirely. The ability to record and distribute music came three decades before radio, but little remains of the audio from that time. These records and cylinders were it. They were the only recorded source of audio before radio, which changed all aspects of western culture in the 1920s. The remnants captured by the scrappy collecting efforts of Martin and Hennessey represent an important overlooked window of time, three decades, between the revolution of recorded audio and the revolution of radio broadcasting.

“One of the things that Archeophone is very committed to doing is documenting history,” says Martin. “We want to understand the time and the people and what they were doing. And they were listening to these records.”

Together, they’ve been collecting material that has been of great interest to record collectors, but of little interest to everybody else—at least on their original formats, that is. With hope and idealism, Archeophone has reached into public domain material to preserve acoustic recordings representing a documentation of America’s oral (and aural) history available to anyone who will listen.

But beyond such lofty ambitions for the preservation of early recordings is the simple reality of music: It exists for us to enjoy. And Archeophone has found plenty of songs, singers, and players who brought great joy to the people of their time. As for these tracks in our time, says Martin, “they’re all in one place, they sound better, and you can listen to them in the car.”

Stomp And Swerve, the signature compilation thus far in their series, captures early and rare recordings of American music as it began to swing in the quickly growing and changing country. For the first time, music could be recorded in one city and shared with people hundreds of miles away, uniting the people and diversifying their culture in ways that had been previously inconceivable.

Many styles of the time are represented on the disc.
Big brass bands, long popular at community events, were committed to vinyl by John Phillip Sousa’s group and the Edison label’s own studio unit, the Edison Concert Band. Ragtime had proved a great success in sheet music, and now it was recorded, hot and jumping, for the pleasure of families without a piano (several Scott Joplin tunes recorded by other artists are included). Dixieland banjo rags swung to great effect in the Teens, like “Circus Day In Dixie” by the Versatile Four. And the beginning of jazz itself made it to vinyl before radio, as the historic “Livery Stable Blues” by the Original Dixieland Jass Band demonstrates (the new genre being so young, it did not yet have any Zs in its name).

The rarity of such recordings can be attributed to the attitudes of the time regarding this new form of communication. The technology was fun and fascinating, but the records and cylinders themselves were viewed as ephemeral. Even to the listening public, the songs were disposable novelties, nothing to be taken seriously. “Things that didn’t used to merit attention and discussion now are looked at as indices into the personality of an entire people,” says Martin. “That was not thought of back then. It was more of a guilty pleasure. That fact is a big part of the reason why we don’t know about them today. We have been taking The Beatles quite seriously for forty years, and the power that has been accorded them in their own time and beyond will speak for many years. These people are of interest, but unfortunately a hundred years have passed, so the links are very tenuous.”

So tenuous, in fact, that some of the most important musical figures have been all but forgotten, even by music history buffs and record collectors. Take, for instance, the case of the Denver Nightingale, Billy Murray. “The biggest artist of the first half of the century was Bing Crosby, no question about it,” contends Martin. “And the biggest of the second half would be Elvis. And the second biggest [artist] in each half of the century would be on the one side, Billy Murray, and the Beatles on the other. That’s really where he belongs. We’re not trying to fight for his rehabilitation; it’s just the simple fact of the matter. There was nobody that equaled him in popularity.”

Yet in preparing the extensive song notes for the label’s Billy Murray Anthology, Hennessey’s daunting research task proved as tedious as an archeological dig. “In a Bing Crosby biography we only found a couple of references to Billy Murray, and he was just getting dissed.”

Murray was an enormously popular singer, particularly in the early years of the Twentieth Century, during which time his appealing Irish voice covered many pop standards, including some of George M. Cohan’s best-loved songs, like “Yankee Doodle Boy” and “Give My Regards To Broadway.” But timing, as always, had everything to do with his recognition, even during his highly successful musical career.

In Murray’s heyday, records were vehicles for songs, advertisements for sheet music, which was a hotter consumer product than a record. The era of the performer as a star would come when movies and radio made them so accessible. Americans began to see what Eddie Cantor and Bing Crosby looked like. And that, of course, changed everything.

The memories of Murray’s important recordings were already fading even in his own lifetime (he died at 77 in 1954). In 1941, Time magazine published an article about Billy Murray at the time of a professional comeback. Martin found the article that talked about the thousands and thousands of records, including all of Murray’s masters, that were thrown in the dumpster by Victor in the 1920s. “They were already facing the problem that we’re facing today, which is this guy who was the biggest singer in decades [was] basically forgotten—in 1941.”

Murray’s career is exemplary of another aspect of recorded music’s evolution, according to Hennessey. Acoustic recording meant singing through a horn directly to the vinyl master being cut, without benefit of an electronic microphone. The auditory requirements were different then, and so were the voices. “It wasn’t that they had good voices necessarily, they had voices that recorded well and sounded good. Billy had a very nasally voice, which apparently cut into the records well. When they started experimenting with electrical records, a lot of them didn’t sound as good. It’s analogous to the silent film starts whose voices didn’t work in the talkies.”

After electric microphone technology took over, singing into a horn seemed so completely obsolete, even quaint. Skillful vocal enunciation was no longer relevant.

Chicago’s Benson Orchestra represents another fascinating story of music that had fallen by the historical wayside. As Louis Armstrong and his peers were inventing jazz, exploring the improvisational and offbeat elements that would make it the most American of musical forms, there were hotel dance orchestras keeping music vibrant and energetic for people who, well, just didn’t get jazz. The Benson Orchestra represented a sort of counter-counterculture, keeping music alive but in a less chaotic rhythmic setting (mostly fox-trots and one-steps).

The Benson Orchestra swung; they just did so without freewheeling instrumental experimentation. In other words, they had a good beat, and you could dance to it.

Like all Archeophone discs, the Benson compilation includes extensively researched liner notes, putting the music and its musicians in the context of the times. But research is not easy when dealing with lost histories. Hennessey and Martin both hold Master’s degrees and a devotion to telling the story of the music that has captured their imaginations just as it had for others so long ago.

In the case of studying Benson, that included poring through genealogical microfilm to piece the musical lives together, along with thorough study of Variety and other magazines that had been preserved. The interesting image that Hennessey was able to piece together of Edgar Benson was that he was responsible for polite and sweet dance music, though the man himself seemed to lack any sense of politeness or sweetness. That dichotomy, of course, makes his story and his music even more fascinating.

Despite the Benson Orchestra’s obscurity today, they sold records. Says Martin, “If you’re interested in collecting 78s, [looking in] every flea market and barn and antique store and warehouse with thousands of 78s you’re gonna find a bunch of Benson 78s. They were popular.”

And they were mostly popular among whites. Racial divisions were not only pronounced, they were seemingly embedded in all Americans, black and white. What emerges from the Archeophone releases (many of which are compiled by year or decade) is something that is difficult to grasp from books or movies about racial relations in America. What those media can’t capture and reflect is the degree to which Americans thought about race. Its ubiquitous presence as musical subject matter rivaled romance.

When listening to the label’s phonographic yearbook collection of the 1890s, the very dawn of recorded music, one encounters frequent reference to darkies, niggahs, black crows, and coons. Their mystifying lifestyles fascinated white America, enough that there was even a market for coon songs originating from black performers.

George Washington Johnson, a black man born into slavery in the 1840s, is one of the more interesting vocalists. For several decades, he enjoyed great success with a ditty that he happily sang and whistled for white consumption: “You may talk until you’re tired but you’ll never get a word, from this very funny queer old coon / He’s a knock-kneed, double jointed hunky-punky moke, but he’s happy when he whistles this tune.”

Johnson recorded “The Whistling Coon” literally thousands of times direct to cylinder, each recording sold individually in the days before mass production.

But not all songs were so appallingly demeaning. Bert Williams was a more sophisticated and sincere black humorist / vocalist who, despite being half of a duo act named “The Two Real Coons,” was able to capture in song the black and blue experience much earlier than Louis Armstrong. In his 1906 signature song, “Nobody,” Williams used wry humor to address the ironies of a racist society: “When winter comes with slow and sleet and me with hunger and cold feet / Who says ‘Here’s twenty five cents, go ahead and get yourself something to eat’? / Nobody. I ain’t ever done nothin’ to nobody, I ain’t ever got nothin’ from nobody.”

Archeophone is working to compile Williams’ entire output, and like the rest of the label’s product, racial issues represent only one aspect of a career as intriguing and aesthetically pleasing as that of Bert Williams.

And according to Martin, race was not the only embarrassing factor that led to the disappearance of so many early recordings. “The industry itself in 1925 and 1926 said, ‘We’re doing electricity now, so nobody’s ever gonna want to hear that garbage again.’ So they threw out all their masters. It’s kind of like eight tracks, in the sense that it was good while you had it. Why would you want to be listening to “Hey Jude” and have it split in the middle? You throw all that in the dumpster and you say never again.”

That quality-over-content mentality continues today in the world of the audiophile collector and enthusiast, despite the fact that many of these tracks from that previous turn of the century are quite audible now on a compact disc.

In one fascinating respect, the acoustic recordings that were sung directly into a horn are more real, more genuine than any modern audio source. The amount of technology, in many layers, required for delivering Dan Rather’s voice from his mouth to a viewer’s ear at home, is an amazing feat that we all take for granted.

But equally awesome are the lack of technology and the absence of multiple audio generations that still allow our modern ears to hear a performance of “My Old Kentucky Home” that predates the invention of the automobile. The seemingly primitive recordings represent an alarmingly close link to another time. Thanks to Archeophone’s efforts, they are preserved not only for history’s sake, but for the sake of the American song.