The American company Archeophone has released several more chapters in its “Phonographic Yearbook” series, including these two from watershed years early in the previous century. As with all of its releases, Archeophone has included a wealth of historic background in the CD booklets to help the listener place the music in context. Each of these discs has 24 tracks of vocal and instrumental music that reflects the spirit of the times.
1912: Waitin’ on the Levee
The year 1912 is perhaps best known now for the Titanic disaster of that year, and although the event has been a motherlode of popular culture ever since, it doesn’t appear to have been the topic of any recordings in either 1912 or ’13. Instead, if the songs on these two discs are an accurate reflection, Americans in those years turned to music for diversion, mostly of the romantic sort. One of the top songwriters just emerging was young Irving Berlin, and the most popular singers included Al Jolson, Billy Murray, Elsie Baker, Elsie Janis, and numerous duets and quartets, both male and female.
The 1912 disc, subtitled after a line in the song “Waitin’ on the Robert E. Lee,” has the most songs that remain current today, including many that became standards: “Down by the Old Mill Stream,” “Oh, You Beautiful Doll,” “I Love You Truly,” “Moonlight Bay,” “Whispering Hope,” and “Ragtime Cowboy Joe” among them.
Ragtime was making a comback from its initial popularity in the 1890s, and it had become more sophisticated. The syncopated ragged beat was worked into everything from marches to lullabyes, as in Jolson’s comic song, “Ragging the Baby to Sleep.”
Verbal sound effects were also popular gimmicks, even showing up in “Ring, Ting-a-Ling,” sung here by soprano Ada Jones, from the show “Over the River.” Phrases like “ting-a-ling” in a dotted-sixteenth-eighth-note pattern that fits well into ragtime’s syncopated rhythms, show up over and over in these songs.
1913: Come and See the Big Parade
The 1913 disc doesn’t contain quite as many songs that are still recognizable today, but they include gems like “When Irish Eyes are Smiling,” “That Old Girl of Mine,” “Sailing Down the Chesapeake Bay,” and “Peg O’ My Heart.” Also notable is Al Jolson singing Berlin’s “Pullman Porters’ Parade,” and one of his biggest hits, “You Made Me Love You,” in which he apparently first went down on one knee, flung his arms wide and wailed, “gimme, gimme, gimme what I want.”
Comic songs and silly love songs seem to dominate the era, with such fare as “Be My Little Baby Bumble Bee,” “I’m Afraid, Pretty Maid,” “If You Talk in Your Sleep, Don’t Mention My Name,” and the racily naughty “Row! Row! Row!” by Ada Jones. They were so common that Berlin parodied the form (and the prevalence of baby talk among lovers) in the Billy Murray song “Snookey Ookums.”
These are balanced by dramatic, drippily sentimental declarations of love, like “Till the Sands of the Desert Grow Cold,” “There’s a Girl in the Heart of Maryland,” “When it’s Apple Blossom Time in Normandy,” “Roamin’ in the Gloamin'” and “When I was Twenty-One and You Were Sweet Sixteen.”
The whole collection, and perhaps the era, comes into sharp focus with Berlin’s heart-rending ballad, “When I Lost You,” written after the death of his wife from typhoid fever. Henry Burr wrings every bit of emotion out of this sentimental song, which draws heavily (as do so many other songs of the era) on images of nature and its seeming permanence, in contrast with the poignant briefness of human life. The fact that “When I Lost You” sold more than 2 million pieces of sheet music testifies that this song spoke very directly to Berlin’s audience in these days before antibiotics, when life expectancy was so much shorter than it is today. And in fact this makes the popularity of the comic songs more understandable. There was a lot of sorrow in the world, life was still a lot of hard work for most people and many of them died early. Someone who could give voice to those sorrows in rhyming verse as eloquently and simply as Berlin was bound to strike a chord; and someone who could also make people laugh, giggle and dance was another kind of blessing.
The lyrical and musical themes set by the songs of 1912 and ’13 set the stage for much of what was to come in jazz, pop and even hillbilly music in the 1920s and ’30s — I think of yodeling brakeman Jimmie Rodgers’ “Peach Pickin’ Time in Georgia” when I hear “Apple Blossom Time in Normandy.” They also continue to reverberate in popular music today. In a time when so much of popular culture seems disposable, this kind of permanence, as rock-solid and dependable as the Model Ts that first started rolling off of Henry Ford’s production lines in those years, is a valuable commodity.
(Archeophone, 2001 and 2002)
