At Centuries of Sound I am making mixes for every year of recorded sound. The download here is only the first 55 minutes. For the full 170-minute version please come to centuriesofsound.com to stream, or patreon.com/centuriesofsound for downloads and a host of other bonus materials for just $5 per month. This show would not be possible without my supporters on there, so please consider signing up or sharing this with someone who may be interested.

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I have spent the last month inhabiting 2019, and it was a strange, alienating, disconcerting, but also surprisingly peaceful experience. As you will hear, it was hardly a lost age of innocence, but for a year which only finished 12 months ago it felt very distant indeed. So much has happened in 2020, and so much has already gone on in these few days of 2021, that the events of this recent period seem already to have disappeared prematurely into the memory hole. Maybe this is all for very good reasons and 2019 is the least interesting of all years right now. Maybe this mix will be ignored, and with good reason, which is a shame, as I think it may be one of the best so far, but it may be a few years before anyone feels like listening to it.

I should put a brief warning here - the mix not only contains swears and raunchiness, there are also some parts from about 1:17 to 1:22 which may be upsetting to just about anyone. It felt wrong to leave them out. I may get around to making a PG version, but it depends on whether I can find the time. So for now, consider yourself warned.

0:00:00 Hildur Guðnadóttir - 12 Hours Before

There will shortly be a full tracklist with samples used for completionists posted in the comments below

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This compilation of Christmas recordings spans an era which includes the entirety of WW1 and the influenza pandemic of 1918/1919, but of course you wouldn't guess it from the contents. The only reminder perhaps is the two different versions of "Silent Night", which was famously sung by opposing sides in the trenches at Christmas 1914.

I'm presenting this in two formats - a mix, which is on my main feed at centuriesofsound.com and as a compilation, which is only available to patrons. Join my patreon at patreon.com/centuriesofsound and get a load of bonus content like this, as well as helping this site to survive in these very difficult times.

Here is the tracklist, the same for both versions.

00:00 Harry E. Humphrey - Santa Claus Hides In Your Phonograph

Merry Christmas!

At Centuries of Sound I am making mixes for every year of recorded sound. The download here is only the first 45 minutes. For the full 160-minute version please come to centuriesofsound.com to stream, or patreon.com/centuriesofsound for downloads and a host of other bonus materials for just $5 per month. This show would not be possible without my supporters on there, so please consider signing up or sharing this with someone who may be interested.

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It almost certainly goes without saying that the great depression was difficult time for many people around the world, but in any reshuffling a few unexpected cards will come to the top of the deck. In this darkest year of the period, a few artists were at the apex of their success, and for whatever reason the music and films they made seem to have fixed themselves in the popular consciousness better than anything from the previous few years.

In our just-passed golden age, Cab Calloway hadn't been doing that well. After a few years of touring around the USA with his more successful band-leader sister Blanche, he'd set himself up in New York with his own group, but following a disastrous debut at the Savoy Ballroom, they split up. Forced to take a job as a singer in the musical Connie's Hot Chocolates, he found a new band, and by 1930 they were the star attraction at The Cotton Club, and about to release the first million-selling single by an African-American artist.

Minnie The Moocher was not entirely an original piece, in the way that nothing really is. The bulk of it was sourced from a much earlier song called Willie the Weeper, and many of the adaptations had already been made in a 1927 version by Frankie "Half-Pint" Jaxon. Even the sleazy, funky style of Calloway's band was lifted largely from his sister Blanche, who would also do scat singing not far from the "hi de hi de hi de ho" refrain. But there's no denying that Cab himself is an electrifying presence, even ninety years later - where Louis Armstrong is warm and welcoming, he's aggressive, preening and feline in a way we won't really get again until the birth of rock & roll. The song is pretty shocking too - beneath the flimsiest of euphemistic slang terms it's a story about cocaine and opium use and open displays of female sexuality, and you have to wonder how many listeners got that - I would wager the answer is "surprisingly many" — though perhaps not Al Bowlly, whose version I probably won't be including in the 1932 mix.

1931 was a bumper year for this sort of thing in Hollywood too. Though the censorship regimen The Hays Code was officially adopted in 1930, it wouldn't really be taken seriously until 1934, and it feels like producers were going as far as they could before someone stopped them. High profile movies this year include morally-ambiguous gangster pictures Little Caesar and The Public Enemy, stories about a secretary-turned-prostitute (Safe In Hell), lurid parties (Dance, Fools, Dance) and open mockery of religion (The Miracle Woman.) This was a massive year for horror movies too, with the release of the classic versions of Dracula, Dr Jekyl and Mr Hyde and Frankenstein, the latter directed by James Whale, an openly-gay British man whose career would later be derailed by his open conflict with Hitler a few years before the rest of the western world joined in.

Hollywood might have been having a golden age, but the same cannot of course be said about the record business - in fact movie musicals were really the only growth area for musicians this year. While some companies had remained afloat in 1930, further economic shocks from Germany had now done for what was left of their business. Of course important bandleaders were still being recorded, but the expeditions to record across The South had mostly withered and died.

The vital exception to this is the guitar blues coming out of the Mississippi Delta. Skip James from Bentonia, Mississippi and Son House from Lyon, Mississippi both managed to make their way to Grafton, Wisconsin, to record for Paramount Records - the songs they recorded were some of the final echoes of the explosion of 1927, but they resonated more than almost any others, and after 30 years away from the microphone for both performers, their discovery by blues fans in the early 1960s would make them a vital piece in the development of music in the remainder of the century.

Tracklist

0:00:23 Will Rogers - Bacon, Beans, and Limousines (Excerpt 1)

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James and Sean use their audio archeology skills to take you on another time travel adventure with original recordings from the distant past. This time we visit 1896 and 1897, hear the birth pangs of something not yet called ragtime, find out the true origins of ‘The Laughing Policeman’ and hear some jokes so rude that the performer was actually sent to jail.

Centuries of Sound is an independent podcast without any advertising, and it’s only with the support of my patrons that the show can survive. To download full mixes, get early access to the radio podcast, and a get host of other benefits for $5 (or local equivalent) per month, please come to https://patreon.com/centuriesofsound

At Centuries of Sound I am making mixes for every year of recorded sound. The download here is a cut-down 60 minute mix, for the full 180-minute version please come to centuriesofsound.com to stream, or patreon.com/centuriesofsound for downloads and a host of other bonus materials for just $5 per month.

MP3 preview download | Patreon | Apple | Mixcloud | Spotify | Castbox | Stitcher | Radiopublic | RSS

The crash has happened, then, the music industry has gone down with the Dow, and there's no sign of anyone reviving it. I therefore approached this year with low expectations. Perhaps we would have music of the standard of say 1925, just with higher production standards. I was wrong.

1925 is still a good year to look to though, these two mixes are linked by a common thread; Russian documentary film-maker Dziga Vertov. As the cut-up sound collages he made in 1925 influenced the jagged sound of that year's mix, so a series of samples from his documentary "Enthusiasm" - along with pieces from Walter Ruttman's pioneering audio montage "Wochenende" - form the backbone of this also fairly harsh / jagged mix.

This time, however, the explosion in sound film has given me a lot more in terms of audio samples to cut up and push together. By "a lot more" I mean that the diverse qualities and sheer volume of source material which has gone into this mix made it feel like a huge project on its own. I feel like I've just lived through 1930. It was a fascinating time, this might well be the best mix I've made, but I also feel exhausted and emotionally drained by the experience. I am confident that this feeling doesn't come through in the mix, by the way.

Normally here I would write a longer blurb, but this time, well, sorry, that's it, but here's the music, go listen to it.

Tracklist

0:00:21 MGM Studios - Lion's Roar

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James and Sean continue their voyage into the distant history of sound recording. This time we cover the years 1894 and 1895, a time of popular unrest, great literature, and a burgeoning wax cylinder market, with at least two songs bound to be familiar to listeners in the present day. Also, as ever, plenty of Americans with moustaches, middle initials and banjos.

Centuries of Sound is an independent podcast without any advertising, and it's only with the support of my patrons that the show can survive. To download full mixes, get early access to the radio podcast, and a get host of other benefits for $5 per month, please come to https://patreon.com/centuriesofsound

At Centuries of Sound I am making mixes for every year of recorded sound. The download here is a cut-down 45 minute mix, for the full 180-minute version please come to centuriesofsound.com to stream, or patreon.com/centuriesofsound for downloads and a host of other bonus materials for just $5 per month.

MP3 preview download | Patreon | Apple | Mixcloud | Spotify | Castbox | Stitcher | Radiopublic | RSS

It's rare for a decade to top and tail itself as well as the 1920s does. Ten episodes ago we saw the introduction of prohibition, gangsters and speakeasies, Mamie Smith, classic female blues and the race records boom. By 1929, whatever the feeling on the ground, everything sounds very different on record. We have sound film, radio stations and electrical recording technology. No longer is the record industry confined to New York - engineers are now travelling around the USA, recording sounds, spreading their influence across the world. And while we are not operating at quite the pace of 1927 now, as we head into 1929 there are few signs that anything is slowing down.

It is unlikely that most of the musicians here were watching the stock market, but as with all the other external factors above, it was about to have a huge impact on their work. In the summer of 1929 some financiers warned that the market was slowing down, though this was not thought to be a cause for great concern. Economist Irving Fisher, featured in this mix, commented that "stock prices have reached what looks like a permanently high plateau." By September, however, there was a clear downward trend, with the London Stock Exchange crashing on the 20th. On the 24th October, now referred to as Black Thursday, the New York Stock Exchange also crashed, though it was the still-unmatched 25% two-day fall of the 28th and 29th which saw the most damage done.

The effect on the music business was devastating. Some analyses have record sales falling by 95% over the next couple of years - and there was no way that the majority of labels were going to survive that sort of shock. For the majority of performers, for whom this was already a part-time gig, this was the end of their professional careers. Some would manage to move to radio, or the movies, the two still-profitable fields of entertainment during the great depression, but for many of these artists, these are the last records they would make.

So it's tempting to think of the music in this mix as something of an end-of-term party, but it isn't really true. As far as anyone was concerned, it was business as usual, and if anything most artists seem a little more polished, and in some cases even restrained - though there is still plenty of passion here. The relentless innovation and experimentation of the last two years is still present, but it's being recorded in a more careful, more deliberate way - from small-scale almost field recordings to professional studios, this is the absolute peak of engineering for quite a few years to come.

So that was the 1920s, then - maybe not the best decade for recorded music overall, but easily the one with the greatest improvement from start to finish.

Tracks

0:00:20 Movietone Newsreel - Trooping the Colour (Excerpt 1)

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More audio time travel adventures from James and Sean. This time we cover the years 1892 and 1893, the world’s fair in Chicago, a couple of notorious murderers, some rude jokes about Frances Folsom (the wife of the President of the USA), and some popular music hall songs, which may not be as innocent as they seem.

Centuries of Sound is a monthly mix of original music and sounds from a year in history. Right now we’re up to 1928. To download full mixes, get early access to the radio podcast, and a get host of other benefits for $5 per month, please come to https://patreon.com/centuriesofsound

At Centuries of Sound I am making mixes for every year of recorded sound. The download here is a cut-down 45 minute mix, for the full three-hour version please come to centuriesofsound.com to stream, or patreon.com/centuriesofsound for downloads and a host of other bonus materials for just $5 per month.

MP3 sample download | Patreon | Apple | Mixcloud | Spotify | Castbox | Stitcher | Radiopublic | RSS

In Chicago, Al Capone was at the height of his powers in 1928, but, as we always must, let's go on a wild tangent to look at the dull metal structures which loomed hundreds of feet over his head. In February, work began on a new transmitter site for WMAQ Radio in Chicago. WMAQ already had a powerful transmitter in the city, but since it was built in 1922 a brace of skyscrapers (The Chicago Temple Building, The Civic Opera House, The Pittsfield Building) had sprung up around it, reducing its reach to less than half the city. The new transmitter had five times the power of the old, fortunate for the city as this was also the year that WMAQ got hold of two white actors, Freeman Gosden and Charles Correll, to play the roles of Amos and Andy in a new radio sitcom. The show would soon become the biggest name in radio, staying on the air for over 30 years, and all the more notably so because its two lead characters were black.

It was, of course, not really in the spirit of the nascent civil rights movement to have this sort of audio blackface as the most mainstream of entertainments, but, despite the embarrassed moving-on of generations of musical historians, minstrelsy was still very much a visible force a decade into the jazz age. Godsen and Correll had come from that world, so had Al Jolson, and so had Emmett Miller, a more obscure figure, who still managed to straddle the worlds of minstrelsy (he wore and performed blackface), jazz (he sang blues songs and performed with jazz musicians) and country (his yodel predated that of Jimmie Rodgers.) Things at this time are messy - messy can be good, genre boundaries seem to stifle innovation more than guide it - and the wonderful and the repellent can be so entangled as to be inseparable.

Over in that other hotspot of the decade, New York, for example, Duke Ellington was performing at the legendary Cotton Club. The name of this establishment was chosen as evocative of the old days of the deep south - it was in fact no less than an antebellum-themed nightclub, with a whites-only policy as far as customers were concerned. Decorations on the walls presented black people either as slaves or jungle savages. On stage, of course, was an a-to-z of famous black performers - Ellington, Ethel Waters, Fletcher Henderson, and soon Cab Calloway, all performing for rich white New Yorkers.

Edward Kennedy Ellington was the resident bandleader of the club, encouraged to play "jungle music," yet he could not have fitted less the role if he tried. A classically trained upper-middle-class pianist from Washington DC, he was nicknamed 'Duke' by the friends he made when he ventured out into the world of jazz, a joke about his sophisticated clothing, which was hardly typical of a jazz musician.

Ellington may not have really made any "jungle music" but 'The Mooche' does seem to capture the dark, seedy underworld of the 1920s like nothing else. It's impossible for me to hear it and imagine a dull audience of rich white stiffs at their theme pub, it's more like the theme to a dingy speakeasy where something terrible is about to go down.

Tracklist

0:00:22 Rudy Wiedoeft - Radio Program (Excerpt 1)

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“Another journey into the history of recorded sound with James and Sean. This time we delve into the vaults for 1890 and 1891, explore the pop music of the gilded age, and hear the voices of P.T. Barnum, Florence Nightingale, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky and Alfred, Lord Tennyson.”

Centuries of Sound is a monthly mix of original music and sounds from a year in history. Right now we’re up to 1926. To download full mixes and a get host of other benefits for $5 per month, please come to https://patreon.com/centuriesofsound