New Years at Old Trinity

[Taken from a forthcoming article co-written with Patrick Feaster]

Film scholars have typically taken film editing as the primary gauge of measuring narrative expression in early cinema. Dramatic routines heard on early phonograph records reveal sonic analogues to some much-discussed cinematic editing techniques. In the case of the Haydn Quartet’s New Years at Old Trinity (Victor 1904), a group of young men are heard to gather outside a church in downtown New York City in the moments before midnight on New Year’s Eve. One of the men addresses the group: “Say boys, I’ve got a good story to tell you,” he says, “you know that Jones girl with the black eyes?” He is interrupted by one of his friends, who jokes, “who gave ’em to her?” The group laughs, and the conversation stops as we hear the sounds of revellers in the background. After a moment, a voice announces, “Hold on boys, the chimes are going to play.” We hear the sound of the church chimes, and the young man returns to his story. Before long, he is interrupted again, this time by an Irish policeman who says, “Move along there, don’t block up the sidewalk.” Later the men are narrowly missed by a passing car that hits a dog, and then by Columbia University students singing their school song. “Say, will you ever finish that story?” one of the men asks. The answer is no, as after the group sings “Auld Land Syne,” the record ends with the sound of the church clock striking twelve and the eruption of noisy celebration at the arrival of the New Year.



The young man’s never-finished story becomes a unifying narrative theme joining together disparate bits of ethnic humor and scenic interest, but note how the shifting back and forth between multiple scenes can be heard as a sonic analogue to crosscutting or parallel editing: editing which moves between simultaneous events in separated locales. The impression created by the intercalation of the young man’s storytelling and the various events surrounding and interrupting it is not so much that these events are unfolding in linear time as that they are different, virtually simultaneous events taking place in a larger contiguous space. Like crosscutting, the sonic narrative technique heard here provides a heightened sense of suspense, since it builds the listeners anticipation of hearing the end of the young man’s story, as well as the arrival of midnight. The richness and diversity of audio story-telling techniques heard on early recordings captured in a “single shot” suggests an over-reliance on editing as the guiding consideration for narrative development in the modern media. Phonograph records such as New Years at Old Trinity, Night Trip to Buffalo, Trip to the County Fair, and Muggsy’s Dream were developing their own complex and compelling narrative language for depicting multiple times and spaces, as well as various subjective states.

1942 Lifebuoy radio ad

One day in the late 1930s, Gilbert H. Wright was shaving with an electric razor, when he noticed that “queer sounds came out of his mouth” when the razor passed over his Adam’s apple. He soon discovered that by silently articulating words with his mouth and lips, the sound of the razor was formed into speech. From this initial observation, Wright developed a device that he dubbed the Sonovox, whereby a sound recording was fed into two hand-held speakers that would be placed on each side of the throat. Whatever sounds were on the recording were transmitted to the larynx, so that they came out of the throat as if produced there, and could then be shaped into speech by articulating the desired words. Sounds could thus be made to speak, or as a 1939 Time magazine article put it: “a grunting pig, relayed through the human voice-box, can be made to observe: ‘It’s a wise pig who knows his own fodder.’” What practical applications could be found for Wright’s bizarre invention in the early 1940s?

The Sonovox found one of its most lucrative implementations in the field of radio advertising. Wright’s Sonovox made its broadcasting debut in September 1941, a time when the radio industry was debating the role of spot advertisements. A widespread radio advertising technique of that time was the musical jingle. Advertisers had learned from market research that the repetition provided by jingles was an important form of brand identification. The Sonovox was thought to provide some of the same sonic attributes and benefits, and Wright’s brother-in-law, James L. Free, who worked in radio advertising, actively shopped the Sonovox to the industry. The Sonovox’s distinction in the field of radio advertising, one article stated, was that it could “make a vacuum cleaner talk.” On radio ads of this time, Wright’s invention sometimes made musical instruments speak commercial messages: in a Shell ad, an organ said, “Stop at the sign of the Shell”; a Colgate ad featured a Novachord playing the tune of “Good Night, Ladies,” which was made to say, “V-E-L, my hands feel so soft and smooth with Vel. Vel swell, ladies.” The Sonovox also made objects speak: “pots and pans…sang that they just loved to be washed” in an advertisement for dish soap; a chugging locomotive became the words, “Bromo Seltzer”; and a car horn was made to say, “Better Buy Buick.” A 1942 radio spot for Lifebuoy soap begins with two long blasts of a foghorn.



Sonovox spot ads spurred the imagination of writers and advertisers who described a world of the not-so-distant future in which brand name goods would speak to consumers at every turn: one article gushed that a day would come “when sound will talk and sing on every side – not merely in the movies and on the air but all over the place, with bus horns proclaiming the name of the bus company, delivery trucks calling out their wares as they honk, and train whistles announcing the name of the train. Once it would have been regarded as exotic if milk trucks could moo. Thanks to Sonovox, they can now moo the name of the dairy.” Such fantasies may not have materialized, but Sonovox radio spots were certainly precursors to well-known animated television ads of the 1950s that depicted square-dancing Lucky Strike cigarettes, marching Rheingold beer bottles, and singing Muriel cigars. In his famous description of the commodity fetish, Karl Marx offered the image of a table that, as soon as it becomes a commodity, changes into a thing that “stands on its head, and evolves out of its brain grotesque ideas, far more wonderful than if it were to begin dancing of its own free will.” The Sonovox seemed to provide commodities the chance not only to come to life, but to articulate some of those “grotesque ideas” directly to consumers.

Silent George(s)

Rudy Ray Moore, who just passed away last October, is best known for his starring role in the “Dolemite” blaxploitation films of the mid 1970s, but he first achieved media notoriety as the creator of a series of party records that featured recitations such as “The Great Titanic” and “The Signifying Monkey.” Some of Moore’s records were re-makes of earlier under the counter “blue discs” or “party records”. Consider Moore and his collaborator Lady Reed’s version of a blue disc entitled “Silent George.” The source text of Moore and Reed’s adaptation was released anonymously on a 78 rpm record circa the 1930s, and begins with a man’s half-whispered voice.



“Silent George” stands out among pre-1950s blue discs because of its female narrator and breathless performance of passion. But equally notable is the record’s subsequent appearance in African American culture. Swing bandleader Lucky Millinder released a musical version in 1950, and Rudy Ray Moore’s version of “Silent George” was released on the album “The Rudy Ray Moore House Party Album, The Dirty Dozens, Vol. 1” (Cherry Red Records). Moore and Reed stick closely to the earlier version of “Silent George,” but Moore’s remake does more than duplicate the blue disc. Note that it is Moore in the role of Clotia, narrating the sexual action in an exaggerated falsetto voice: both an instance of female impersonation and vocal whiteface that “signifies” on white performance. Meanwhile, Lady Reed complicates the listener’s engagement with the interaction between George and Clotia by making sardonic comments as she secretly watches the amorous couple.



By simultaneously presenting a recording of a past era and Reed’s sly commentary on it, Moore’s “Silent George” feels a bit like an audio version of “Mystery Science Theater 3000.” But more than nostalgia or cynical irony, Moore and Reed’s performances send up mainstream white erotica, and by extension certain white sexual preoccupations. For example, blue discs typically only provide verbal descriptions of female bodies. Recall the introductory framing material on the blue disc version of “Silent George,” in which a male speaker colludes with the audience and asks that we visualize “a beautiful young girl.” Lady Reed’s commentary on “Silent George” displays an open and unabashed appreciation of the male body: it is Lady Reed who colludes with listeners and encourages us to visualize George. Where the blue disc of “Silent George” ends with Mary Jones’ calls for her “Daddy,” Moore and Reed’s record returns to the introductory narrative frame, as the two friends leave the lovemaking couple to walk back to the party. This framing narrative depicts a platonic male – female friendship that contrasts with the ridiculously empurpled George and Clotia, and so broadens the scope of the routine beyond the heterosexual couple. To put it another way, Moore and Reed’s revisions make us hear blue discs such as “Silent George” in a considerably whiter shade of blue – that is, they make us hear the white, middle-class origins of much “blue” material.

Lt. Rudder

Under-the-counter recordings of erotic material – referred to as either “blue discs” or “party records” – have circulated since at least the 1930s, but attained a new degree of cultural visibility in the 1950s and ‘60s, when they were often intended for a culture of male hi-fi aficionados. Many American men developed an interest in high fidelity audio equipment after World War II, in part because of the extensive electronics training they received in the armed forces. Risqué records provided a means of bringing frank discussions of sex and the rough language traditionally associated with men into the home. Military themes are prevalent on postwar party records, from Fax’s series of “Wild Service Songs” albums to blue discs that dramatized the experience of American soldiers. For example, a record from the late 1940s entitled “Lt. Rudder” features a routine that circulated amongst soldiers during the final years of World War II. The routine was described in a 1945 Associated Press article:

Someone got weary of reading the honeyed accounts of America’s returning air warriors and wrote a parody account of the homecoming of such a gay, cocky, young flier that has half the European theater of operations in stitches. The pilots, themselves, think it is wonderful, because they think the acclaim that greets their exploits is sometimes false and foolish and smacks of mock heroics.

The newspaper article could only reprint what it called a “heavily censored” version of the routine, with apologies to the original anonymous author, “in whatever pub or opium den he lies dreaming.” The under-the-counter recording of the routine however, was free to unleash Lt. Rudder in all his gay, cocky glory.
The “Lt. Rudder” skit articulated soldiers’ ambivalent feelings about re-integrating into civilian life, where very different social rules held sway than in the homosocial context of the military. The record begins as an elaborate send-up of radio: following a fake commercial, we hear an earnest announcer declare that he is taking us to LaGuardia Airport for a special broadcast to welcome home Lt. Ronald Rudder, one of “America’s leading aces” overseas. Listen to the two sides of the record here:





The “Lt. Rudder” record mocks the platitudes and clichés of “false and foolish” accounts of male wartime experience – accounts that are associated both with feminized domestic life as well as broadcasting. Unlike radio and television, bawdy phonograph records such as “Lt. Rudder” and “In Hawaii” (a blue disc that dramatizes the adventures of two “lovable Marines” on leave in Honolulu), could present the rough, frank talk of soldiers, while also providing a means of virtual escape from a postwar domestic space increasingly devoted to family togetherness.

Doing the Bard

American improvisation comedy is typically traced to Chicago’s Compass Theater, formed by David Shepherd and Paul Sills in 1955. The Compass encouraged an interactive and spontaneous relationship between performer and audience akin to European cabaret. The two most famous practitioners of the Compass school of improv were known to the American public in large part though LP records: Mike Nichols and Elaine May. Nichols and May were not the first Compass graduates to find success in the record business. Shelley Berman got his start as an entertainer at the Compass, where he was often teamed up with Nichols and May. Berman set out on his own as a stand-up comedian, and his much-imitated telephone monologues were part of an act that helped to invent what is now called “observational” comedy. Berman’s LPs, which were soon followed up the charts by the albums of Jonathan Winters and Bob Newhart, marked the beginning of the comedy LP’s economic and cultural renaissance and helped to tip the industry balance toward the LP market.
Mike Nichols and Elaine May also began at the Compass, and like Berman, set out on their own in the late 1950s. An important break came when they appeared on the television show “Omnibus” in 1958, doing skits that they had developed on stage at the Compass. Though it was a television appearance that rocketed them to celebrity, the duo maintained a low profile on television even at the peak of their success, putting their creative energy instead into stage shows, radio appearances, and the release of chart-topping LPs. Not only did they concentrate on other media forms, but Nichols and May were known for a somewhat critical stance towards TV, and even turned down potentially lucrative network development deals. When they appeared at the Emmy Awards in 1959, May praised the men who “year in, year out,” were “quietly producing garbage.” Nichols played the winner of the “Total Mediocrity” award, and assured viewers that “no matter what suggestions the sponsors make, I take them”. The popular team was scheduled for a return performance at the 1960 Emmy Award show, but the sponsor, Proctor and Gamble, rejected their sketch just hours before the broadcast, and Nichols and May refused to replace the censored bit with old material. The sketch was to have featured Nichols presenting May with the “David Susskind award for contributing to the maturity and dignity of television.” After vigorously denying charges that television was controlled by advertisers, May was to remove a wig and make a plug for a home-permanent application. NBC and Proctor and Gamble found the bit to be “inappropriate,” particularly as it was to be immediately followed by an ad for the sponsor’s Lilt home-permanent.
Similar barbs at TV sponsorship can be found on a “Monitor” sketch called “Doing the Bard,” on which we hear Nichols recite a soliloquy from Hamlet until he is interrupted by May, who plays the representative of a beer company sponsoring the production.



Critiques of network sponsorship like the one found here, and their well-publicized experiences with the Emmy Awards show how comedy LPs could function in the 1960s and ‘70s as a potent medium for television criticism.

Cinderella, and A Trip to the Circus

It can be argued that the history of the children’s phonograph record begins with the history of recorded sound itself, since the oft-repeated “creation story” of the phonograph has Thomas Edison reciting the nursery rhyme “Mary Had a Little Lamb” into his tinfoil recording device. Phonograph historian Patrick Feaster has suggested that this heart-warming anecdote is quite probably a re-write of history: given Edison’s penchant for salty humor, the first test was likely to have been quite different. Nonetheless, from the very beginning, the phonograph was cast as a device with a certain affinity for children’s entertainment. In fact, one of Edison’s earliest intended uses for recorded sound was to make children’s dolls that could speak. In 1890, Edison outfitted his West Orange, New Jersey laboratory as a production line for dolls containing tiny phonograph players. The dolls did not sell well, and the company folded in 1891, by which time the market for entertainment phonograph cylinders had begun to take off. Though the phonograph would not speak to American children through dolls, the major phonograph companies actively marketed their wares to children as early as the 1890s and 1900s.
“Juvenile records” were made by performers such as pioneer recording artist Len Spencer. On his Columbia 1899 recording of “Cinderella,” we hear Spencer say, “Now children, draw your little chairs near the Graphophone Grand, and Uncle John will tell you the story of Cinderella and the glass slipper.” At the end of the tale, Spencer says, “there now, wasn’t that a nice story? Run off to bed now little ones, kiss Uncle John ‘good night.’”



Gilbert Girard was the premiere vocal mimic of the early phonograph industry, and frequently applied his talents to making records for children. On titles such as “A Trip to the Circus” (Victor 1901) and “Auction Sale of a Bird and Animal Store” (Edison 1902), Girard and Len Spencer presented animal mimicry, auctioneer performance, and broad jokes: a range of offerings that could appeal to both children and adults. “A Trip to the Circus” (Victor 1901) is introduced as a “descriptive selection for the little folks,” and then we hear Spencer announce, “Now children, hold tight to my hand, and don’t get too near to the animals.” “Oh, see the elephants,” Spencer declares, and Girard provides a loud trumpeting sound.



We tend to think of the widespread introduction of television as the turning point in the marketing of media products to children because of the way in which it allowed advertisers a more direct link to children. But these records indicate, along with other recent scholarship on the history of children’s consumer culture, that children were seen as an important part of home media consumption decades before Disney, television, and even radio.

Flogging Scene From Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and The Crushed Tragedian

Early phonograph records are a wonderful resource for understanding the acting styles of the turn of the century. Acting on the English and American stage before the late nineteenth century has frequently been described as featuring a “presentational” style with formulaic poses and gestures that were tied to specific expressive meanings. As the actor’s body was ostentatiously displayed in codified expressions, so too was the voice. Voice instructional manuals from the 1890s charted out connections between specific pitches and timbres of the voice and their meanings on the stage. In one manual from 1891, we are told that a “Bright” tone of voice relates to “Cheerfulness or Vitality,” a “Pure” voice to “Beauty,” and a “Gutteral” voice to “Hatred”. Performances found on some phonograph recordings from the turn of the twentieth century provide examples of how a voice trained in this manner might have sounded. Consider two recordings featuring Len Spencer, one of the most prolific phonograph artists in the 1890s and 1900s. A remarkably versatile performer, Spencer recorded comic skits, songs, as well as famous speeches and dramatic scenes. An example of that last category can be heard on Spencer’s “Flogging Scene from Uncle Tom’s Cabin” (Edison 1904), which also features a stark contrast between a “pure” and “gutteral” vocal style. The record begins with Tom’s low, rich voice slowly intoning, “I’ve come at last to the veil of shadows. My heart sinks and the tears roll from my poor old eyes.” Spencer then quickly shifts to a high-pitched, raspy sneer for the cruel overseer, who tells Tom, “Quit that howlin’. So you’ve made up your mind to run away, huh?” For the rest of the record, Spencer alternates between these two characters and their starkly defined vocal styles.



Spencer’s vocal performance of each character is steady and consistent: the patterns of the voice do not so much adapt themselves to the meaning of particular lines, as represent the unwavering moral nature of the characters. One might even say that, in some regards, the lines become superfluous, or, as Simon Frith has stated in regard to the singing of popular music, the words function primarily as the “signs of a voice.”
By the turn of the century, this presentational approach to acting was in the process of being eclipsed by a more modern style and vocal training was one of the primary ways in which a shift in the acting styles of the late nineteenth century was understood. The new representational style of acting featured an attempt at a more “natural” style with fewer gestures, posturing and raised voices. The kind of vocal training outlined above would have been inappropriate for the psychological, drawing-room dramas coming into vogue at this time. Another record featuring Len Spencer can illustrate that the conventions of the stage voice were becoming outmoded by the early teens. Some of Spencer’s most famous work was done in conjunction with Ada Jones, one of the first female recording stars. In “The Crushed Tragedian” (Edison 1911) Spencer plays a pompous actor named Richard Chatterton who encounters a street-smart city girl played by Jones.



The girl’s distinction between acting on the stage and in films nicely demonstrates how the status of motion picture performers at this time was unclear. Chatterton becomes a laughable figure to the extent that he has fallen in love with his own voice, as can be heard by his extravagantly rolled r’s and grandiose tones. Those affectations are thrown into stark relief by Jones’ comparatively natural Bowery dialect. This record suggests that the vocal conventions of the histrionic stage were becoming all too audible as conventions to many listeners: a stylistic shift in which new media like cinema and the phonograph were playing an important role.