March 1, 2006
Voices from 100 years ago
Collector showcases antique recordings at Heritage Center
By Carol South
Herald contributing writer
Listening to scratchy songs captured 100 plus years ago, 35 attendees at the Voices from the Horn presentation delved into the history of sound recording and talking machines.
Jim Warner, a city resident who collects antique recordings and players, presented the program at the Grand Traverse Heritage Center for the Grand Traverse Historical Society. Retired from Munson Medical Center as an audiovisual technician, Warner numbers his collection at about 30 antique machines. These machines include the earliest Victrola and Edison inventions, which respectively played discs and cylinders.
In the earliest pioneering days of sound recording around the turn of the 19th Century, duplication technology was not yet invented.
"Artists stood in front of the machines and recorded over and over again," he said. "Then recordings were made from one machine with a master to another machine, until the master wore out."
Warner's collection also includes 10,000 recordings on 16 formats, from wax cylinders and early records through 8-track tapes -- which he terms "the worst format ever designed" -- cassettes and compact discs. An avid historian of early sounds and songs, he also has compilations of early recordings that have been cleaned up and released on compact discs.
"The ones that you have to be most careful with are the wax cylinders because they mildew, those stay upstairs," he said. "The disc records are in the basement."
To illustrate the technology and tell the story of the early recording era, Warner focused on six artists: Arthur Collins and Byron G. Harlan, George W. Johnson, Polk Miller and His Old South Quartette, Geoffrey O'Hara and Enrico Caruso.
"They are not big names or that well-known but they fascinate me," he said.
Warner also delved into minstrel music and black-faced comedy, acknowledging it's political incorrectness today. He played a number of recordings illustrating this genre and type of humor, which was popular in the early days of recorded music.
"We don't consider them appropriate today but they are a part of history," he noted. "They are examples of the type of humor at the turn of the century."
A former slave born in Virginia in 1846, George W. Johnson was one of the earliest, if not the first, African Americans to make records. Warner outlined Johnson's life and the four songs for which he was famous, including "The Laughing Song." He played samples of a few of them for the audience, projecting the lyrics on an overhead.
"Obviously this is not Mozart, this is not deep music," he said of these and other early recordings.
Artists of the era had their music captured by both the Victor Talking Machine Company and the Edison National Phonograph Company. History eventually favored Victrola's flat disc over Edison's cylinder, influencing our music recording even today, but the cylinders were produced from 1890-1929. Early ones were made of brown wax, each individually recorded by the artist. In 1902, they could hold songs of up to two minutes and in 1908, this length nearly doubled.
"Edison's made four-minute cylinders out of a harder wax that was more brittle, so in 1912, they made blue Ambersol cylinders," noted Warner.
Given the high-tech, nearly perfect audio technology available today, people ask Warner why he would bother with old, scratchy, offensive recordings from 100 years ago.
"¡'Of course you don't listen to those things, do you?' Yes," said Warner, who had a radio show on WIAA during the 1970s called 'Gramophone Yesteryear.' "Either you are [interested] or you aren't, some people can't figure out why anyone would want to listen to them."
The Grand Traverse Historical Society will hold a Night of Nostalgia fundraising historical revue on Saturday, March 18, at 7:30 p.m. in the Lars Hockstad Auditorium. Tickets are $10 and available at Captain's Quarters, Horizon Books and at the Grand Traverse Heritage Center. For more information, call the Heritage Center at 995-0313.