"Long-forgotten old-time music finds new audience" (singer, cd, album)

[delusianne]

Roots music from the early 20th century is experiencing a mini-revival with a series of new CD releases.

The Grammy category for Best Historical Album was launched in 1978 to little fanfare and designed mostly for compilers of big band or opera recordings.... This year, the category is split among a group of independent labels that are innovating how we listen to and appreciate early-century music, some of it predating electrical recording and performed by entertainers whose names are largely forgotten.

"It's good to remind yourself now and then what it is to be truly naturally musical," says [Andrew] Bird. "A lot of that stuff is social music, it served a purpose and was not part of the recording industry. That's a big thing for me. It's not one person's headphone symphony and not a personal ego project, it's part of a living culture."

Growing listener interest has created a demand for deeper excavation of sonic antiquity. Because Archeophone [Records] deals in the earliest era of recording, that process means salvaging archaic artifacts of a lost era (wax cylinders and heavy shellac discs), transferring them to CD, and packaging them with exhaustively researched booklets.

But no recent discovery is as special as a 10-second recording of the French folk song "Au Clair de la Lune," sung by a young child in 1860, 17 years before Thomas Edison's recordings that, until last March, were considered the first document of the human voice. [This recording - Sounds :: FirstSounds.ORG]

Long-forgotten old-time music finds new audience | csmonitor.com

[Truly Heartless]

Originally Posted by delusianne

Roots music from the early 20th century is experiencing a mini-revival with a series of new CD releases.

The Grammy category for Best Historical Album was launched in 1978 to little fanfare and designed mostly for compilers of big band or opera recordings.... This year, the category is split among a group of independent labels that are innovating how we listen to and appreciate early-century music, some of it predating electrical recording and performed by entertainers whose names are largely forgotten.

"It's good to remind yourself now and then what it is to be truly naturally musical," says [Andrew] Bird. "A lot of that stuff is social music, it served a purpose and was not part of the recording industry. That's a big thing for me. It's not one person's headphone symphony and not a personal ego project, it's part of a living culture."

Growing listener interest has created a demand for deeper excavation of sonic antiquity. Because Archeophone [Records] deals in the earliest era of recording, that process means salvaging archaic artifacts of a lost era (wax cylinders and heavy shellac discs), transferring them to CD, and packaging them with exhaustively researched booklets.

But no recent discovery is as special as a 10-second recording of the French folk song "Au Clair de la Lune," sung by a young child in 1860, 17 years before Thomas Edison's recordings that, until last March, were considered the first document of the human voice. [This recording - Sounds :: FirstSounds.ORG]

Long-forgotten old-time music finds new audience | csmonitor.com

You've peaked my curiosity about this subject matter!

[bchris02]

I have a collection of about 1500 recordings dated from about 1880 to 1920.

Anybody here heard of Billy Murray? Not the actor, but the singer who's time was roughly from 1903 through the late 1920s.

[bs13690]

Originally Posted by bchris02

I have a collection of about 1500 recordings dated from about 1880 to 1920.

Anybody here heard of Billy Murray?

Didn't he sing Star Wars? Those crazy Star Wars!