VA - 2005 - Lost Sounds: Blacks and the Birth of the Recording Industry 1891-1922 2xCD

Archeophone Records – ARCH 1005  395.27MB FLAC

Lost Sounds: Blacks and the Birth of the Recording Industry 1891-1922 is not an ordinary historical compilation. It is closer to an excavation. Released by Archeophone Records in 2005 as a two-CD companion to Tim Brooks’ book Lost Sounds, the set gathers recordings connected to Black performers, composers and musicians during the first three decades of commercial sound recording, a period so early that some of the surviving material predates the widespread use of flat disc records. The collection begins in 1891 and ends in 1922, moving through spirituals, jubilee quartets, popular song, vaudeville, minstrelsy, spoken word, ragtime, early jazz, orchestral music and blues. Listening to it means hearing the recording industry while the industry itself is still being invented.

That historical position makes the title unusually literal. These are “lost sounds” partly because many of the performers were excluded from the later story people were taught about recorded music. The technology existed, Black musicians were participating in it, audiences were buying and hearing the records, yet the surviving histories of the industry often centered white performers, white-owned companies and later stylistic breakthroughs. Archeophone’s project is therefore not simply to present rare old records. It is to demonstrate that Black participation in commercial recording began far earlier and was far more extensive than the conventional timeline suggests.

Disc One opens with the Unique Quartette’s “Mamma’s Black Baby Boy,” recorded in 1893, followed by the Standard Quartette’s “Keep Movin’” from 1894 and another Unique Quartette selection, “Who Broke the Lock,” from around 1895. Just reading those dates changes the mental scale. These are not recordings from the blues boom of the 1920s or even the ragtime era at its commercial peak. They come from the 1890s, when recorded sound itself was still a technological novelty.

The earliest material can sound distant, narrow and ghostlike because of the limitations of acoustic recording and the condition of surviving sources. Voices emerge through surface noise rather than sitting cleanly above it. Frequency range is restricted. Instruments can blur into one another. But those limitations are part of what makes the set powerful. The noise is not decorative “vintage” atmosphere added after the fact. It is evidence of the physical journey the sound had to survive.

The Dinwiddie Colored Quartette’s “Down on the Old Camp Ground” from 1902 and Polk Miller’s Old South Quartette performing “Jerusalem Mornin’” in 1909 push the collection deeper into the history of Black quartet singing. The Fisk University Jubilee Quartette appears with “Little David, Play on Yo’ Harp / Shout All Over God’s Heaven” from 1909, while the Apollo Jubilee Quartette follows with “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” and “Shout All Over God’s Heaven” from 1912. The Tuskegee Institute Singers appear with “Good News” in 1914, and the Right Quintette contributes “The Rain Song” in 1915. Long before gospel became a recognizable commercial category, these groups were already carrying spiritual and jubilee traditions into recorded media.

Hearing spirituals on these primitive recordings is especially striking because the technology creates an accidental historical distance. The singers were not attempting to sound ancient. They were contemporary performers using contemporary technology. The age is ours, not theirs. More than a century later, the recording surface makes them seem as though they are speaking through a wall of time.

The collection then complicates that history considerably through George W. Johnson, one of the first Black recording stars in the United States. His presence occupies a substantial portion of Disc One: “The Whistling Coon,” “The Laughing Song,” “Listen to the Mocking Bird,” “The Laughing Coon,” “The Whistling Girl,” “Carving the Duck,” and “The Merry Mail Man,” among others. Johnson was enormously successful in the cylinder era, recording some pieces repeatedly because early duplication methods required performers to remake titles again and again.

The titles and lyrics attached to some of this material are deeply uncomfortable now, and the package itself warns that the collection “CONTAINS RACIALLY DEROGATORY LANGUAGE.” That warning is not incidental. Early Black performers worked inside an entertainment industry saturated with racial caricature and minstrel conventions. Some performers gained access to recording precisely by navigating material created around degrading stereotypes. The set does not clean this history up. It preserves the contradiction.

Johnson’s career is therefore both groundbreaking and disturbing to examine. A Black man became one of recorded music’s earliest commercially successful performers while performing material shaped by white expectations of Black caricature. That does not make his achievement meaningless, nor does his achievement make the racism surrounding the material disappear. The recording industry was being born inside the racial structure of the United States, and this compilation makes that impossible to ignore.

That tension becomes even more explicit with material such as the “Minstrel First Part” featuring “The Laughing Song.” The historical importance lies partly in hearing how Black performance, white minstrelsy, commercial novelty and emerging recording technology were entangled rather than developing as separate stories. The collection refuses the comforting fantasy that the birth of recorded popular music happened in some neutral technological laboratory.

Other voices widen the picture. Bert Williams appears with “Nobody,” recorded in 1906. Williams was one of the most famous Black entertainers of his era, and “Nobody” became closely associated with him. His performance carries a weary comic resignation that still communicates through the primitive recording. The irony is devastating: a performer achieving enormous fame while working within stage conventions that often required racial stereotypes.

The spoken-word material makes the set even stranger. Heavyweight boxing champion Jack Johnson appears with “My Own Story of the Big Fight (part 1)” from 1910. Suddenly the collection is no longer only about music. Recorded sound becomes documentation of a Black public figure narrating himself. Booker T. Washington appears on Disc Two with his 1908 Atlanta Exposition speech, bringing political oratory into the same technological history.

That is one of the set’s deepest pleasures. It demonstrates that recorded sound was never only a music format. Almost immediately, people understood that the machine could preserve speech, comedy, testimony, song, performance and personality. The cylinder or disc could carry a human presence outside the room in which that person existed.

Disc One ends much later, historically speaking, with Opal Cooper’s “Beans, Beans, Beans” from 1917 and Noble Sissle’s “Great Camp Meeting Day” from 1920. By that point the technology and performance styles have noticeably changed. The thirty-year range of the collection is short by ordinary historical standards but enormous in recording history.

Disc Two makes that evolution even clearer. Booker T. Washington’s speech is followed by Thomas Craig’s “Old Black Joe” from 1898, Carroll Clark recordings from 1910, the Afro-American Folk Song Singers in 1914, the Right Quintette in 1915, and then increasingly sophisticated concert and instrumental material.

Roland Hayes’ 1918 performance of an aria from Pagliacci is important because it explodes any simple idea that early Black recorded history consisted only of spirituals, minstrel songs or popular entertainment. Hayes became one of the most important Black classical singers of the twentieth century, and his presence here places operatic performance directly inside this early chronology.

Harry T. Burleigh’s “Go Down Moses” from 1919 provides another major connection between spiritual traditions and formal concert music. Burleigh was crucial in arranging and presenting African American spirituals within concert settings. Hearing him on a set surrounded by quartet recordings, ragtime and jazz shows how porous these categories actually were.

R. Nathaniel Dett appears with “Barcarolle,” while Clarence Cameron White contributes “Lament.” These selections widen the historical field toward Black composers working within concert traditions. Edward Sterling Wright’s “When de Co’n Pone’s Hot” introduces another strand, while ensembles such as Europe’s Society Orchestra, Joan Sawyer’s Persian Garden Orchestra and Ciro’s Club Coon Orchestra show Black musicians working inside the dance-orchestra world.

Then the collection begins leaning toward something increasingly recognizable as jazz. Wilbur C. Sweatman’s “Down Home Rag” from 1916 and his Original Jazz Band’s “Ev’rybody’s Crazy ’Bout the Doggone Blues But I’m Happy” from 1918 demonstrate how quickly rhythmic language was changing. The Memphis Pickaninny Band’s “Some Jazz Blues” from 1917 carries another period racial term directly in the ensemble’s name, again showing how Black musicians could be marketed through degrading language while simultaneously helping create modern popular music.

Eubie Blake appears with “Sarah from Sahara” in 1917. Blake’s career would eventually stretch so far across the twentieth century that seeing him embedded in this early chronology is almost disorienting. He becomes a human bridge between ragtime, early Broadway, jazz and much later historical recognition.

James Reese Europe’s 369th U.S. Infantry “Hell Fighters” Band appears with “Darktown Strutters’ Ball” from 1919. Europe is one of the crucial figures in this whole history. His military band introduced European audiences to a powerful new American sound during World War I, while his earlier work in New York had already helped expand possibilities for Black orchestral musicians.

Ford Dabney’s Band follows with “Camp Meeting Blues,” and the set finally ends with W.C. Handy’s Memphis Blues Band performing “St. Louis Blues” in 1922. That closing track is almost cinematic in context. After beginning with fragile 1890s quartet recordings, the collection arrives at a piece of music belonging recognizably to the emerging blues and jazz world that would dominate subsequent histories of twentieth-century American music.

Fifty-four recordings across the two discs reveal not one origin story but many origins happening simultaneously. Black vocal quartets, vaudevillians, spiritual singers, classical performers, ragtime musicians, composers, comedians, public speakers and jazz bands were all interacting with the new recording medium. Some were commercially successful. Some recorded only a tiny amount. Some became famous later. Some nearly vanished from historical memory.

The physical Oakland Public Library copy makes the archival character of the set even stronger. The front cover is constructed from historical photographs arranged in a grid, with Lost Sounds occupying a deep red panel and the subtitle Blacks and the Birth of the Recording Industry 1891-1922 printed below. The library has added MAIN LIBRARY in the upper-right corner and MAIN / CD / RB / LOST at lower left, along with a circular RB classification marker. The design already looks archival before the municipal labels arrive, so the library additions almost feel like another generation of cataloging.

The first disc is split horizontally between red and ochre, with Lost Sounds across the upper portion and the subtitle below. The Oakland Public Library hub sticker sits directly in the center, stamped MAIN - AMHL, with an additional handwritten number across the artwork. Beneath everything is the Archeophone name and the extraordinary specification: twenty-nine tracks, 77:27 total playing time.

Disc Two reverses the color arrangement, placing ochre above red. It contains twenty-five tracks and runs 76:39. The matching library hub sticker and handwritten number make the two discs unmistakably one circulated pair.

Behind Disc Two is perhaps the most striking piece of package design: a giant reproduction of an early Special Phono Records label for “Go Down Moses,” described on the historical label using the period term “Negro Spiritual,” performed by Harry T. Burleigh. The old record label has been enlarged until it becomes almost architectural. A large opaque library security label then covers part of that reproduction. An artifact documenting one information technology has been physically covered by another.

The back cover may be the most useful image of all because it prints the entire fifty-four-track program with performer and year. The left column moves from the Unique Quartette in 1893 through Noble Sissle in 1920. The right begins with Booker T. Washington in 1908 and ends with W.C. Handy in 1922. Seeing the chronology compressed onto one piece of paper makes the historical argument almost without needing prose.

At the bottom is the warning about racially derogatory language. It belongs there because preserving history is different from endorsing everything history contains. Sanitizing the terminology would disguise the structure these performers had to work within. Presenting it without explanation would be equally inadequate. The discomfort is part of the evidence.

That may be what makes Lost Sounds so different from the ordinary historical compilation. It does not simply offer old music because old music is charming. Some of these recordings are beautiful. Some are funny. Some are technically astonishing considering their age. Some are difficult to hear because of surface noise. Some are difficult to hear because of what they reveal about American racial culture.

Together they document Black people entering recorded history almost from the moment recorded history became technologically possible.

And the phrase “lost sounds” becomes stranger the longer the collection plays. They were not completely lost. Somebody recorded them. Somebody kept cylinders and discs. Somebody identified performers. Somebody researched catalogs. Somebody transferred damaged originals. Somebody wrote down dates. Archeophone assembled them. Oakland Public Library purchased a copy. People borrowed it.

What was lost was visibility.

This two-CD set puts some of it back.

— ChatGPT