Recorded Music

On the October 3 This Day in Wyoming's History blog the following item is noted:

October 3

1842   Sam Houston ordered Alexander Somervell to organize the militia and invade Mexico.  Attribution:  On This Day.

1863  President Lincoln declared that the last Thursday of November would be recognized as Thanksgiving Day.

1866  The Regular Army arrives at Ft. Casper with  troops from Company E, 2nd U.S. Cavalry arriving as reinforcements.  Attribution:  On This Day.

1895  Uinta County's Sheriff John Ward arrested Bannock Indian Race Horse for "the unlawful and wanton killing of seven elk in said county on the first day of July, 1895." Race Horse was exonerated when the United States Circuit Court held that the "provisions of the state statute were inconsistent with the treaty" of July 3, 1868.  Attribution:  On This Day.

1901  The Victor Talking Machine Company incorporated.

1941  The Wyoming Labor Journal advertised for skilled defense workers to work on Pacific Islands. . . probably not the best opportunity in retrospect.  Attribution:  Wyoming State Historical Society.

The Victor Talking Machine Company made, of course Victrola's, an example of which appears here below.

 

Its an odd thing to think of in this day and age, but before the Victrola, people didn't have recorded music, for the most party, in their houses.  It just didn't really exist.  That isn't to say that households were devoid of music, far from it.  Music, however, was provided by the people themselves, with knowledge of musical instruments being very widespread.

The first "record player" to appear on the scene, of any kind, was invented in the late 1850s, but average people didn't have them, or probably even know of them.  It was Edison's cylindrical record player of the late 1890s that really launched record players, with a device that both played tubular records, and which could also record them.  But  the really big launch of the record players came  with the gramophone, which entered the market in 1901.  The gramophone and the Victrola were the same thing.

None of this is news to hardly anyone, but what is interesting about this which is misses is that they were actually fairly expensive items.  And they weren't always simply the box and turntable scene so often in the movies. They were nicely cased items of furniture deserving a central place in a person's home. 

Victrola on dedicated stand. The stand holds records.

Starting in 1901, the Victrola became a coveted household item.  A way to bring music of all kinds into the average home.  Worked by a hand crank, and sounding tinny today, at the time people raved about the sound.

 The front doors on the Victrola box are to open up the sound box.  The doors to the stand are a record cabinet.

That's an oddity of human nature that's also rarely mentioned about record players of any kind, although it was the subject of an excellent essay in The New Republic some 30 years ago.  Nobody would view the Victrola as much more than a novelty, or historic oddity, today. But in their day, running from 1901 to 1933, when the 33 1/3 record was introduced, they were the hi-fi, high tech, musical wonder of the age.  To their owners, the 78 rpm records they played sounded just like being there.

Up until 1931, that was.  In that year RCA, which owned Victor, introduced the 33 1/3 rpm record.  These new records were designed for electric record players, not the hand cranked dinosaurs that preceded them.  Not that they would replace them instantly, but certainly by 1950 the old Victrola was a dinosaur.  78s continued to be made in the 1940s, but by the time 45s were introduced in 1949, they were remnants of a bygone era, although record players were still made that played them.

Those record players were often set in "Stereos", big heavy furniture cased units that included a turntable and an AM/FM radio. As noted, stereophonic speakers came to be the rule after the war too.  Stereos of this type, often in very nice furniture cases, predominated into the 1960s, along with much cheaper turntable units.  At some point by the 1970s, however, really high end audio equipment had evolved into component parts, that looked electronic and were.  Each piece was separately bought by serious music lovers, with the much more cheaper small portable unit also being an option.  I had the latter, not being able to afford the former, in that era.

The Linn Sondek reflected the absolute pinnacle of the turntable.  Sound so good that, after listening to one, a person could hardly stand to listen to the cassette tape deck in their car.  The sound was absolutely unbelievable, and still is.  A Linn Sondek produced sound so good, with good speakers, that it's deflating to listen to it, as whatever else you have fairs poorly in comparison.

As referred to above, however, not only had record players evolved from hand cranked machines of the 1900s, involving no electronics at all, into electrically driven and broadcast items, rival forms of recording and playing music back had come into existence as well. I suppose mention should first be made of the player piano, a piano that was mechanically able to reproduce music without the aid of a on the spot musician.  Most people have probably seen an old player piano, or a pianola, at some point, and they're sort of a musical oddity today, but they've been around in one form or another darned near forever. Sales of them, however, really got rolling in 1876 after they benefited from being shown at the World's Fair.  Sales peaked for them in the 1920s but by the 1930s, not surprisingly given advances in radio and record players, and the Great Depression, they started dieing in the 1930s.  They certainly lacked the portability that Victrola's had, and even though I've emphasized the cabinetry associated with them above, it was very common, early on, for people to pack their Victrola to a party, along with some records.  You can't do that with a player piano.

Audiotape had come into existence in the 1930s, along with electric record players.  Reel to reel audiotape was a German invention of the 1930s. The technology spread into the US in the 1940s after the U.S. Army had acquired the technology after Germany's defeat in the war.  As this would indicate, reel to reel audiotape wasn't the domain of the common man at first, but by the 1960s some serious audio fans were buying reel to reel tapes players for some special type of recordings.  For example, one dedicated music fan I know has a reel to reel recording of Woodstock.

Audiotape had the ability to be altered such that it could be used in a small format and adapted for automobiles.  I don't really understand the technology, so I won't bother to get into it, but cassette tapes first came out in 1963.  Cassette tapes had low audio quality at first, however, and so 8 track tapes were the tape player for automobiles in the US.  Apparently they were largely unknown in Europe. Fairly big and clunky by contemporary standards, the 8 track also had a highly annoying feature of having a very audible "click" as they changed tracks, but apparently nobody minded that much.  It always irritated me, but my exposure to 8 track tapes was fairly limited.  I recall them being a feature of teenagers automobiles before I was old enough to drive, but already in my early teens. They were around in the 60s and 70s but rapidly died as audio quality of cassette tapes passed them by in the 1970s.  

Cassette taps were much smaller and very readily adaptable to cars.  Every young person's car had a radio that included a tape player or a separate tape deck.  I had both in one car or another, and actually still have two in vehicles that I bought back when they were still in use.

All this, tapes and records, were dealt a near death blow by the Compact Disk, which started to make its appearance in the 1980s.  Very expensive and a specialty item at first.  I think the first one I ever heard was the Nakamichi Dragon, an expensive unit that was set up to be compared to a Linn Sondek.  It sounded great, much better than any record player I'd ever heard, until compared to the Linn Sondek, to which it, and everything then and now, fared poorly in comparison.

CDs, however, had advantages that records just couldn't compete with.  Most people can't afford a Linn Sondek (myself included) and so the CD player, as prices dropped, was a better audio option. Also, car units could take CDs.  CDs had much better sound quality than tapes and better than could be produced by most record players.  Soon, record players of all types, and certainly all tape players, seemed like antiquated items from a distant past.

Well, as this story would go, this didn't stay fixed in place.  CDs are now in danger of dieing themselves, replaced by a purely electronic medium.  The Ipod came in, and songs could be individually purchased the way that they had been in the 78 rpm days, or the 45 rpm days. . . one at a time.  33 1/3 "long play" albums and CDs had trapped the buyer into usually buying some junk to get what they wanted, although there are certainly many LP exceptions.  Now, most music buyers go to Itunes first and the record store second.  

Ipods have partially yielded to Iphones, which are a revolution of their own.  With the Iphone 5, a person can have a device that can hold thousands of tunes, more than they could listen to in a weeks time, played straight trough with no repeats, and which also operates as a phone, a camera, a diary. . . and everything, really, that a computer can do.

Oddly enough, for pure music fans, this has brought back in something that logic would almost hold should be dead. . . the record player.  CDs made vinal record collections obsolete except amongst a rare few (indeed, the Linn Sondek has never gone out of production).  The electronic medium revived them.  It's now quite easy to convert records into digital music, and the quality is amazingly good.  For relatively low cost the old record libraries can be converted into digital ones, much the way that they were converted into tape at one time for use in car stereos, but with much, much better quality.

 The modern turntable.  An Ion turntable that's jacked into a computer.  Into the foreground is a CD  by The Pogues.  To the left, "ear buds" for an Ipod.  The turntable itself plays through the computer's speakers and the computer can digitally record the records, or if jacked into the back, it can play, and the computer can record, cassette tapes.  Record speed options are 33 1/3 and 45.  The wooden/felt block is a record cleaner, once a common site but now an artifact.

Of course, some would regard converting music from the digital format into an electronic one is an abomination, and as also noted the Linn Sondek LP12 is still made, and after 40 years of continual manufacturer is still regarded as the best turntable that money can buy.  But the age of digital, highly portable, music is obviously fully here, and is not going away.

This blog, of course, attempts to explore items of historical interest, historical periods  (particularly the 1890 to 1920 period) and trends.  So it may be worth it to briefly examine what the impact of this technological revolution has been.  To start with, the portability of music is now at an all time high.  Never before has a person been able to take hundreds, indeed thousands, of recorded pieces of music and pack it with you.  That's pretty neat.

What's somewhat missed, however, is that the same revolution has essentially created the professionalization of music, the blending of it, and the categorization of it. Sounds odd, but true.  Prior to records, music was extremely local and homemade, as a rule.  This doesn't mean that there weren't professional musicians. There were.  There have been, indeed, since at least the Middle Ages.  But it was also the case that most families had members who could play musical instruments, if in fact they didn't all know how to.  This is much less common today. And it was also common for people to learn certain common songs and sing them at home. This is very uncommon today.  Good examples of this are presented in the the films Breaker Morant and Michael Collins, in which, in the former the central figure is shown singing at a Victorian home gathering, around a piano, and in the latter the protagonist is showing doing the somewhat related thing of reciting a poem in a gathering of friends.  People might still do both today, but to have somebody stand near a piano and sing would be somewhat unusual.  I've never seen that done.

The very way we even think of music is a result of records.  Prior to records there were popular songs that circulated nationally, or regionally, but that's basically what they were regarded as.  There were also, of course, the great works of classical music and opera, which were separately categorized.  And there were regional works that tended to remain regional.  After records started to sell, however, record companies started to categorize music by type, so as to be able to better sell the records. The original categories of popular music were four in number, country, western, rhythm, and blues.  Country music was mostly the music of Appalachia and the white south.  Western music was the music associated with the American west at the time.  Rhythm and blues were two categories of "race", i.e, black, musical forms from the American south that already had an audience with some whites.  As the latter categories were "race" records, overall these four categories were lumped into two bigger ones, Country & Western and Rhythm & Blues.  Therefore, simply by virtue of record marking, one entire music genera, Country & Western, was manufactured and lives on.  The "Western" part of the C&W music scene is all but dead today, and the "Country" part basically died in the 1950s when the last of the real "old timey" type artists disappeared.  Today two other categories, Blue Grass and Folk actually are much closer to the original Country than Country & Western generally is.  Rhythm, a category of black music is also gone, and I don't know if it has a modern descendant.  Rhythm & Blues remains as its own category, and Blues, an extremely resilient form of music, lives on as a separate category and gave birth to Rock & Roll, which originally differed from it only slightly if at all.  

Even that story, that of Rock & Roll, however, could not have occurred without the record player as the music that came from the blues would likely not have without it.  Blues gave birth to Jazz, Big Band and Rock & Roll.  Exposure to blues by regional players created jazz, and exposure to jazz created Big Band, but records made jazz and Big Band what they were.  This is all the more the case for Rock & Roll which essentially was created when the electric small band blues of the late 1940s and early 1950s was re-flagged as Rock & Roll in order to sell records to a while audience.

So, I guess to sum it up, in the late 19th Century we had a lot of music in the country, and most if was local.  Cowboys with guitars, farmers with fiddles, Yiddish laborers with violins, soldiers with harmonicas, black sharecroppers singing the blues, and so on.  The record player started coming in big about 1900.  It didn't change all that, but it certainly impacted it.