“Home, Sweet Home,” with a melody by Sir Henry Bishop and a text by John Payne, predates Edison’s phonograph by at least fifty years. It predates Cros by a little less, and Scott’s lampblack waveform recorder (phonoautograph) by at least twenty-five years. When, in 1822, Payne penned the text for his opera “Calri, or the Maid of Milan,” the world still had twenty five years to wait for the birth of Thomas Alva Edison. Oddly enough, Edison was born in a town called Milan, in the US State of Ohio. The Edisons soon moved to Port Huron Michigan. It was mostly in Port Huron that the Edison boyhood of legend unfolded. Did he consider Milan his home? 

Edison had a fondness for the song “Home, Sweet Home,” as did Lincoln. Given the prominence of the tune in the repertory he famously micromanaged to death, I suggest that the ‘old man’ was obsessed with this piece. Not only does the Edison catalog feature recordings of “Home, Sweet Home” for solo voice, numerous ensembles and combinations of voices, so many other songs in the catalog cross reference the song, both melodically and textually. In a more general sense, Edison was fond of songs that reflected a similar sentiment. His musical taste, an area of his intellect that reflected his background in all its home-schooled, auto didactic glory, was more complicated than this suggests, since Edison also liked bawdy ditties and so-called ‘coon songs.’ Edison famously called Rachmaninoff ‘a thumper,’ and insisted that his artists perform with a ‘pure tone,’ without vibrato. Caution is needed when assessing what we think of as the failings of prior generations. The historical context must be considered before issuing a condemnation. Nevertheless, we think of Edison as musically unsophisticated. 

Because the Edison catalog of recordings reflects this unsophisticated personality, it represents a sui generis  repertory. What of “Home, Sweet Home”? Edison referred to songs like this as songs with heart, or ‘heart songs.’ With heart, or from the heart, what is really meant by this? In the dictionaries, ‘sentiment’ is defined as appealing to the ‘tender emotions, such as love, pity, or nostalgia.’  “Be it ever so humble, there’s no place like home.” This is nostalgia, a longing for something lost, something that may no longer exist, or may never have existed. Home is a place in memory, a place where we were happy, loved, secure. We are aware that it may not have been much in terms of consensus reality, in terms of the sophisticated world. We have experienced pleasures, the song says, and palaces. Home exists in parallel, in imagination. There’s no place like it. (Quite possibly, by implication, there never was!) As a person uprooted, aware of his lack of sophistication, one can see why Edison would like this sentiment, would become obsessed by it.

The song as offered here is the Harry MacDonough recording on Black Wax (Edison Gold Molded), from about 1902. It has the number 1515, and George Gaskin recorded the song under this number earlier on. It is another peculiarity of the Edison catalog that songs and numbers stay paired but performers come and go. The cult of the performer, which the phonograph record helped to perpetuate and inflame, came later. It is not so much that performers had not been celebrated earlier. It is more that recordings became specific performances by specific performers. Techniques of reproduction, not only in the sense of repeatable recordings, but also in terms of duplicatable recordings, made the concept of the master record what we understand it to be now. Earlier on, a number in a catalog represented a piece which performers had to duplicate by repeating the performance to satisfy demand. Thus, innumerable takes and interchangeable performers serviced a numerical place in a catalog. The process of creating a master record by gold molding (electroplating) ended this system gradually. Edison reluctantly parted with his system. By the time, in the ’20s, the old man parted somewhat with his overweening authority, and gave up some control of his catalog to sophisticates, his time in the business was nearly up. The Edison company never did give in completely to jazz age tastes, and made ‘needle cut’ (lateral) records for only six months before Edison Inc. abandoned the record business in the summer of 1929.

This, among other things, leads me to resist the idea, often promoted by Tesla fans, of Edison as an ‘heartless businessman.’ A true businessman would not have been so deeply in the grip of his demons. I cannot help but admire Tesla, but I don’t enjoy rekindling a rivalry that was foolish even at the time. Brahms versus Wagner anyone? Both pairs of men are accomplished enough, and dead enough, to be treated individually. But back to the topic at hand…

The interchangeable performer upholds a tradition. The arrangement, tempo, feeling, and most musical parameters other than minor details remain the same in these remakes. The pace of this recording of “Home, Sweet Home” is much like the recording of “Hard Times Come Again No More.” It takes its own sweet time. There is a supremely unhurried quality to the performance. The string (or harp) pizzicati in the chorus gently rise in pitch on their chords, wafting the melody to heaven. This particular cylinder is near the end of its useful life. Some of the holds one hears are the needle repeating a groove until the feed screw urges it along. Ah! The beauty of a feed screw! We are familiar (those of us who remember, those who play records on vinyl or shellac) with the act of nudging the stuck needle along. The cylinder phonographs – and Graphophones – do this automatically. 

This recording of “You’re As Welcome As the Flowers in May” sung by Harlan and Stanley is in nearly pristine condition – especially compared to the copies of ‘Home’ and ‘Hard Times.’ 

Note the reference in the text to ‘home sweet home.’ This piece is a classic Edison ‘heart song,’ beautifully rendered in the plain style, almost as though the singers were performing from the sacred harp. Taken together, this trio of songs demonstrates a facet of the Edison catalogue that is one of its principle defining characteristics: the sentimental piece plainly and clearly rendered without guile, hurry, or self-consciousness. This is a mode that is lost to us, preserved in wax like fossil butterflies. We can (I can) enjoy these recordings, but we can’t quite get to the heart of home.