[Dixielandjazz] The Good Old Days Were Not So Squeaky Clean.

[Ron L'Herault]

Since you brought it up, I can add that Bruce Young is a friend of mine, and
a fellow antique phonograph collector.  I had a hand in the CD.  Bruce
needed to get his cylinders recorded in digital format for inclusion on the
CD and I have the necessary equipment.  It was quite a shock but also a real
hoot to hear them.

Ron L

-----Original Message-----
From: dixielandjazz-bounces at ml.islandnet.com
[mailto:dixielandjazz-bounces at ml.islandnet.com] On Behalf Of Steve Barbone
Sent: Monday, July 09, 2007 9:51 AM
To: lherault at bu.edu
Cc: Dixieland Jazz Mailing List
Subject: [Dixielandjazz] The Good Old Days Were Not So Squeaky Clean.

Not OKOM so delete now if you are 100% focused on OKOM only.

It is however, IMO (to avoid "blanket statement" accusations) a very
interesting read about pop profanity and recordings. Guess what? Rap and Hip
Hop didn't invent recorded smut, jazz didn't invent recorded smut. Seems it
was there from the very beginning of records.

Howard Stern, Imus, Snoop Dog? Shoot, they're more than 100 years behind the
curve.

Cheers,
Steve Barbone  




There Once Was a Record of Smut ...

NY TIMES - By JODY ROSEN - July 8, 2007

IN 1997 Bruce Young, a collector of memorabilia from the early phonograph
era, placed a newly acquired 100-year-old wax cylinder record on his Edison
Standard Model D player and heard a surprising sound: a young man saying
filthy words. It was a 2 minute 25 second poetic recitation, suggestively
titled ³The Virtues of Raw Oysters,² written in the voice of a sexually
voracious woman. ³I never had it but twice in my life/Make me, just for
tonight, your dear little wife,² went one of the few lines suitable for
newspaper quotation on a recording laced with curse words and hair-raising
sexual slang. 

³My wife and I just stared at each other in disbelief,² Mr. Young said,
recalling that first listening session. ³We were just amazed that that kind
of language ‹ what you think of as very naughty late-20th-century schoolyard
talk ‹ would exist in the 1800s.² Mr. Young realized that he had stumbled on
one of the earliest examples of audio indecency: a 19th-century record
worthy of a parental advisory sticker.

Today it has one. ³The Virtues of Raw Oysters² is one of 43 profane
monologues, skits and other spoken-word curios on ³Actionable Offenses:
Indecent Phonograph Recordings from the 1890s,² the newest release from
Archeophone, a small label devoted to early sound recordings.

The album provides a new vantage point on sound recording history and offers
some contemporary lessons as well. The zeal with which phonograph pioneers
took to indecent material is a reminder that, from the Victrola to the
Internet, smut peddlers have always been among the earliest and savviest
adapters of new technologies.

These days there is a seemingly permanent culture war over pop profanity.
Episodes like the recent controversies surrounding offensive speech by shock
jocks and rappers are invariably viewed as evidence of America¹s moral
decline. But ³Actionable Offenses² shows that the good old days were not all
that squeaky clean: that the brash, bawdy forebears of Don Imus and Snoop
Dogg flourished in an age of horseless carriages and whalebone corsets.

The past several years have seen a burst of scholarly interest in the music
of the so-called acoustic era: the rags and minstrel songs, parlor ballads
and opera arias, novelty tunes and vaudeville comedy ditties that companies
like Edison and Columbia pressed onto wax cylinders and 78 r.p.m. discs in
the years before the advent of electric recording. But until now few people
were aware that the story of the record business¹s 19th-century origins was
told, in part, in four-letter words.

³Actionable Offenses² features several other pieces donated to Archeophone
by Mr. Young, starring the same anonymous narrator of ³The Virtues of Raw
Oysters,² almost certainly a hobbyist who made the recordings at home. And
it includes a dozen commercially released cylinder records, which mix coarse
language and sexual farce with topical references to Grover Cleveland and
the Spanish-American War.

³We have long thought of the phonograph as something that simply reproduced
music,² said Patrick Feaster, a historian and co-author of the ³Actionable
Offenses² liner notes. ³But early uses of the phonograph were incredibly
experimental. People were trying pretty much everything, trying to figure
out what they could put on these recordings to make a buck, everything from
hymns and prayers at one extreme to obscenity on the other end.²

And occasionally a bit of both. ³Actionable Offenses² includes a version of
³I Sit Here Thinking, Will, of You,² a staple of 19th-century anthologies of
bawdy verse that tells of a church parishioner¹s deflowering in ³Deacon
Foster¹s pew.² That poem is recited by the home-recording artist, with the
barely contained glee of a man who knows he¹s making mischief.

Prankster he may have been, but he performed a valuable service, leaving
behind the earliest oral renditions of texts well known to folklorists. His
repertory includes ³He¹ll Win in a Walk, B¹Jesus,² a scatological ballad
about a day at the horse track; several dirty variations on ³Mary Had a
Little Lamb²; and off-color limericks like the one that begins ³There was a
young lady from Alaska.² (Let¹s just say the punch line involves John Jacob
Astor.)

The recordings from Mr. Young¹s collection are charmingly rough, and not
just because of a century¹s worth of accumulated crackle and hiss. They are
audibly the work of an amateur experimenting with a new machine. The other
dozen cylinder records on ³Actionable Offenses² are a good deal more
polished. Made in professional studios and commercially released sometime at
the tail end of the 19th century, the cylinders languished unheard for at
least 50 years in the vaults of the Edison National Historic Site in West
Orange, N.J., one of the world¹s largest repositories of early recordings.

The cylinders were packed away in a box with a handwritten tag attached:
³Not for mixed company.² Other jottings identified the performers as Cal
Stewart, Russell Hunting and James White, three of the best-known
turn-of-the-century recording artists, famous for their humorous monologues
and ethnic dialect comedy.

The routines on ³Actionable Offenses² are striking for their similarity to
the period¹s straight comedy records; they are blue burlesques of the
performers¹ signature acts. Stewart earned wide fame for his character Uncle
Josh Weathersby, a bumbling rube from the fictional backwater of Punkin
Centre, Vt. ³Actionable Offenses² includes ³Learning a City Gal How to
Milk,² in which Mr. Stewart voices the parts of two farmers marveling at a
city girl¹s cow-milking prowess and speculating on her related skills in the
amorous arts. 

Both Hunting and White specialized in Irish dialect routines, and they can
be heard on several tracks, reeling off ribaldries in exaggerated brogues.
The most brazenly pornographic record on the CD is White¹s ³Dennis Reilly at
Maggie Murphy¹s Home After Nine O¹Clock,² three-plus minutes of simulated
intercourse, complete with comically dirty banter, cries of ecstasy and
squeaking bedsprings.

Record companies were discreet about such material, issuing the cylinders
pseudonymously (Hunting¹s aliases included Manly Tempest and Willy Fathand)
and marketing them to saloons, amusement arcades and other gathering places
with nickel-in-the-slot phonographs. But the recordings did not go unnoticed
by guardians of public morality. Journalists railed against ³the abuse of a
great invention.² Soon Anthony Comstock, the crusading founder of the New
York Society for the Suppression of Vice, was on the trail of indecent
cylinders, chasing down distributors and even performers. On June 24, 1896,
one of Comstock¹s detectives came to Hunting¹s Manhattan home, posing as a
fancier of naughty songs. Hunting custom-recorded two cylinders for his
visitor, was promptly arrested and was sentenced to three months in prison
for violating obscenity ordinances that normally governed written literature
and visual images. 

In 1899 a new law was enacted, promising stiff fines and lengthy prison
terms specifically for purveyors of phonographic profanity. The scarcity of
the recordings today is in part explained by the chilling effect of this
legal crusade. ³People went to jail for making these cylinders,² said David
Giovannoni, the co-producer of ³Actionable Offenses.² ³These are the
artifacts that caused the law to change.²

The album¹s liner notes include a photograph of Comstock glowering above a
mutton-chop mustache, the very picture of Victorian rectitude. But the CD
debunks the cliché of Victorian America¹s pervasive primness. You won¹t hear
a smuttier record this year than ³The Whores Union,² an extravagantly
detailed menu of brothel services (³All night, with use of towel and
rosewater: $5²), bellowed by Hunting in the voice of a prostitutes¹ union
president. 

Ribaldry may even have surfaced in that sanctum of audio science, the Edison
workshop. Thomas Edison claimed that the first words he ever recorded, in
1877, were ³Mary Had a Little Lamb.² But conflicting accounts have Edison
and his assistants shouting ³Mad dog² into the machine, then running it
backwards to hear the phrase ³God damn.² And others have claimed that far
more colorful language flew around Edison¹s all-male laboratory and wound up
on those earliest recordings. It¹s known that Edison¹s rival, Alexander
Graham Bell, proposed developing a ³swearing top,² a spinning toy that would
blare curse words. Beneath their funny hats and furrowed brows, it seems,
our Victorian cousins had minds as dirty as ours.

But ³Actionable Offenses² offers something besides history lessons: laughs.
Once you get past the records¹ shock and novelty value ‹ and acclimate your
ears to the primitive sound ‹ you¹ll hear some very funny stuff. Stewart and
Hunting were terrific joke tellers and raconteurs, bringing years of
trial-by-fire training in vaudeville to the creation of a comedic art in a
new medium. It¹s hard to resist routines like Mr. Hunting¹s ³Gimlet¹s
Soliloquy,² a gonorrhea-theme riff on Hamlet¹s ³To be or not to be² speech,
delivered in a mock-aristocratic British accent full of lustily rolled r¹s.
The best jokes on ³Actionable Offenses² still kill.

The most haunting voice, though, belongs to that nameless amateur whose home
recordings Mr. Young unearthed a decade ago. It¹s an odd experience,
listening to a record that was in all likelihood made for private
delectation; you feel at times that you¹re invading someone¹s privacy. Then
again, maybe the guy had heard the cylinders of Stewart, or ones like them,
and figured his filthy routines were as funny as the pros.

Would he really have bothered to preserve his act if he didn¹t want someone
to hear it? More than 100 years after uttering the unspeakable into a
phonograph horn, he has his audience: a 19th-century potty mouth, with jokes
to scald 21st-century ears


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