If you’ve always had trouble finding a “greatest hits” recording for 1920, search no more. The good folks at Archeophone have produced a typically excellent package in Even Water’s Getting Weaker, which they plan as the first in their “Phonographic Yearbook” series.
Archeophone is a small Bloomington, Indiana, label that specializes in restoring and releasing music and other material from the recording industry’s early years.
The year 1920 seems a good place to start their “yearbooks,” because much earlier than that, you won’t find many pop songs with which today’s public is familiar. But in 1920, with The Great War (as they called it then) just over and America’s doomed experience in temperance about to begin, we see the beginnings of the 20th century’s explosion of popular music.
Al Jolson ruled the pop music world, with several immensely popular songs in 1920, including “Swanee” and “You Ain’t Heard Nothing Yet.” Irving Berlin was coming into his own with humorous songs like “I’ll See You in C-U-B-A” and catchy dance tunes like “Tell Me LIttle Gypsy.” W.C. Handy’s “St. Louis Blues” was still going strong, and lovers everywhere were spooning and crooning “Let the Rest of the World Go By” and “I’ll Be With You in Apple Blossom Time.”
But the real topic on everyone’s minds and lips was Prohibition. Several of the songs here touch on the topic, including “The Moon Shines on the Moonshine,” a humorous ditty by Bert Williams, an African American baritone. The CD’s title comes from a line in this song.
Other songs on the theme include the duet “All the Boys Love Mary” by comedy singers Gus Van and Joe Schenck; Nora Bayes’ “Prohibition Blues,” which she co-wrote with the novelist Ring Lardner; and Berlin’s “C-U-B-A,” which alludes to the fact that Americans of means were starting to vacation in the island off the Florida coast, where they could still drink alcohol. “Wait Till You Get Them Up in the Air, Boys,” by tenor Billy Murray, advocates taking women up in aeroplanes to get them giddy since you could no longer ply them with champagne.
Some other major social trends were reflected in pop music of 1920 as well. The album’s opener, a Berlin song performed by Jolson, “I’ve Got My Captain Working for Me Now” demonstrates some of the tensions facing the nation in the aftermath of World War I. And “Swanee” was one of numerous songs focusing on nostalgia for the South, reflecting the migration of thousands of Black and white southerners to the North during and after the War years.
Some of the best tracks on this album are instrumentals, including the smash hits “Dardanella,” “The Love Nest,” “Whispering,” and “The Japanese Sandman.”
Marion Harris, a popular “comedienne” of the era, turns in an excellent “St. Louis Blues.”
Be aware that some of this material is offensive by today’s standards, particularly in the areas of racial and sexual relations. Of course Al Jolson performed in blackface makeup and mimicked what were stereotypical notions of “Negro” mannerisms. And Bayes’ “Prohibition Blues” is a “coon song,” a vaudeville style in which Blacks were often maligned as ignorant, shiftless and lazy.
The liner notes point out that the latter song is a late example of the style that mostly had faded by the 1920s, and “stands out as a quite late recollection of the recording industry’s dark history.”
Archeophone places a disclaimer paragraph in all of its recordings to the effect that these CDs are intended as serious historical documents, not as nostalgia items. It says, in part, “In order that we might understand the role of recorded sound in reflecting and perpetuating the best and the worst our social history has left to us, Archeophone will not shy away from presenting controversial and difficult material. We want to offer historically-conscious persons of good will the opportunity to sift through and examine critically these actual sources of our cultural heritage.”
As with other Archeophone releases, the packaging is exemplary. Each track is fully documented, and a general essay sets the music in historical context. The sound has been “cleaned up” as much as possible without unduly eliminating what fidelity it originally possessed.
The beginnings of jazz and the blues, Tin Pin Alley ballads and hummable show tunes — they’re all represented here in this excellent CD. I look forward to future “yearbook” releases.
(Archeophone, 1999)
