To recap: I purchased an Edison Home phonograph at an antiques’ dealers going out of business sale. Yes. Well, in keeping with the tradition of these deals, I also ended up with a record to play on it. I didn’t think anything of it at first: I have a collection of several hundred cylinder records. Since this new machine had reproducer troubles, I used the record that ‘came with’ to try out my rebuild of the Edison Type C. This record was clearly abused already – a good chunk of groove was missing from the first few seconds of the recording. This sort of damage occurs when things go catastrophically wrong with either the phonograph or the operator. Rough treatment of recordings is normal. These records were, after all, made for immediate consumption, not posterity. Nobody donned lint free gloves to play these records back in the day.
This complimentary record blew me away from the first time I played it. First of all, the reproducer rebuild was astonishingly successful. It plays loud and clear. How compelling the recording, for all its damage! So it was that I first experienced Stephen C Foster’s “Hard Times Come Again No More” in its original 1905 recording. Yes, the record is in pretty bad condition. The announcement at the beginning is missing a chunk of groove and there are many stressed grooves throughout. Through the cacophony of noise, the quartette is strong, the orchestra beneath the voices sure and in tune.
Foster’s song has lived on. There are many recordings even now on youtube. Given the pummeling the American working class has taken in the time since the composer died in the gutter, the song is still relevant and its poetry mordant. Check out Bruce ‘the boss’ Springsteen doing “Hard Times.” The McGarrigle sisters, God love ’em, give us a lovely, heartfelt reading. The Edison QT, aka the Haydn Quartet, takes the prize. Why? One obvious reason is that the Edison QT is not a slave to the pulse. They are not rocking, there is no backbeat, and they are free to hold back on a pulse for expressive effect. They have only two minutes, but they sing it like they are not in a hurry, like they have all the time in the world! We, now, are in a perpetual hurry. We need to be comforted by the continual steady beat. Our need for ‘time,’ – our sense of time – is the curse of our time.
The Edison boys hold on, for a moment, in tune on a chord, to the word ‘oh.’ And oh my, how it hurts. At the end of the arrangement, the harmony surprises on a fermata that again makes a fool of time. The harmony, which we now call barbershop harmony, is deployed expressively. The singing is plain and plaintive. It serves Edison well, as he did not like fancy art, and had no use for vibrato. It serves the harmony well, since it emphasizes the close voicings. We are familiar with close voicing of more complex harmonic structures, an essential feature of R&B and Soul, often echoed in the backings of Rap and etc. The barbershop harmony is more dynamic, more urgent. It has somewhere to go. We have by now gotten accustomed to static harmony. We are in a relentless hurry to go nowhere. So it is that I can be swept off my feet by the mannerisms and cliches of the past. Play these records, especially on the old machines, and the time capsule is opened. The voices sing out, with natural commitment to making this music. It has not yet become encumbered by straw hats, striped shirts, and all of the cliches that sprang up later.
For me, the significance of these century old records is to teach us what we’ve lost. The meditation on the surprising survival of the fragile artifact includes the realization that everyday items taken for granted are transformed gradually by the passage of time and become relics. The emergence of new technologies and sensibilities is the motive force of our culture. We don’t really preserve traditions. For those with a willingness to actively look back, the relics, the collector’s items, open precious windows into entertainments once enjoyed and liberally consumed I’m happy to add this battered record to my collection.
Here it is:
I can’t summon up the sound and experience of the Edison Home Phonograph. It makes you stand (because the horn is high off the floor) with your drink in hand, hopefully a good stiff one, because, well, ‘hard times’ are abundant, as far as the eye can see… And salute. Because good music makes you understand what is to be human.