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Many people have observed that as we get older, time seems to pass more quickly - and it seems natural to apply this to civilization in general. But while it's true that technology has had some disorientating lurches forward over the last century - going from the first flight to the first space flight in just over 50 years for example - I would say that (n terms of culture) we seem to be if anything slowing down now, partly for the simple reason that it's difficult to shock your mum if your grandad was a punk, but also because this longevity means the careers of artists and entertainers are now significantly longer. Artists from the 1960s and even the 1950s are still touring, and plenty of young people are turning up to see them. This might seem unremarkable, but taken from the vantage point of the Edwardian era, it's a massive shift. The popular artists of the 1900s were not the popular artists of the 1920s. Why? Well, many (if not most) of them were dead, for a start. So let's take a look at three of our featured artists who would not be around in a few years, and one group who you can go and hear even now.

British listeners will probably be familiar with the name of George Formby, a huge star in the 1930s and 1940s, but may not be aware that his father was also called George Formby, and was if anything an even bigger star in his day. Born to an alcoholic prostitute mother and a coal miner father in Ashton-under-Lyne, Lancashire, then neglected, mistreated and malnourished, George often had to sleep outside because his parents were being held in police cells. In order to raise some money for food, he began singing on street corners for pennies, and was good enough to get real work in a singing duo in his teens. Touring music halls, George developed stage characters, including "John Willie", described by Jeffrey Richards as "the archetypal gormless Lancashire lad ... hen-pecked, accident-prone, but muddling through" - and whose costume served as inspiration for Charlie Chaplin when he was creating his Little Tramp. Formby's health was never strong - he gained the nickname of "The Wigan Nightingale" after incorporating his bronchial cough into his act, and had to retire from music hall after a stage accident in 1916. He contracted influenza in the pandemic of 1918/19 and a bout of pulmonary tuberculosis finished him off in 1921 at the age of 45. In the 1909 recording featured in this mix, he is a mere 33 years old, but sounds much older.

Billy Williams was another big name in 1900s music hall, but his accent might be harder to place than Formby's - it was in fact masking the fact that he was from Australia rather than Northern England. He worked with songwriter Fred Godfrey to create a "song factory" - Godfrey would create personalised character songs and Williams would perform here. The selection here has a young Billy finding a coin, buying a packet of cigarettes and lying down to smoke them on some tramway lines - this was wholesome family entertainment at the time. Billy Williams was rumored to be an overindulger, and this perhaps led to his premature death in Hove in 1915 from septic prostatitis, at the age of 37.

Across the atlantic, Polk Miller had a much longer life, but was so much of a late bloomer that his recording in this mix comes just four years before his death. The son of a Virginian plantation owner, he learned to play the banjo from his father's slaves and took time out from his work as a druggist to fight for the south as an artilleryman in the Civil War. In the reconstruction era he became a successful businessman, launching the Sergeant brand of pet care products which survives to this day. It wasn't until the 1890s that he began playing music professionally, and not until the 1900s that he began touring nationally with his "Old South Quartette." This backing group consisted of four black singers and the music presented was "Storie