Rateyourmusic top singles Part 1 - 1888 to 1937

some great stuff here, went with Blind Willie

1926 - Jelly-Roll Morton
1927 - Duke Ellington
1928 - Blind Willie Johnson
1930 - Geeshie Wiley
1931 - Skip James
1932 - Duke Ellington
1933 - Art Tatum
1935 - The Carter Family

Love all these. I wish the Hot Five's "West End Blues" had made it for 1928. Louis Armstrong's playing is a majestic peak of human civilization.

Mamie Smith & Her Jazz Hounds

Misread this as "Jazz Hands".

I have “Mama’s black Baby Boy” running through my head than is probably healthy. Much as I love a lot of the rest of this list.

It's a remarkable song for 1893.

Rhapsody in Blue

Another vote for "Rhapsody in Blue"

Carter Family

Ellington may suffer from vote splitting

Vess L. Ossman even more so

Shocked that Mr. Ossman thought he could get away with "A Fuck Band Contest" in 1901, relieved to find it was a racial slur instead

It was one of the most well-known standards of the early ragtime era, for some reason it didn't translate into the revival era

https://secondhandsongs.com/performance/1245919/versions

Don’t sleep on the Fisk Jubilee Singers

yeah, they'll kick you out of the cemetery

They're still going today! - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fisk_Jubilee_Singers

None of these Ellington or Bessie Smith songs are favourites, but "Hard Time Killin' Floor Blues" stands in for the 1930s in my head.

you couldn't go anywhere without hearing it on the radio as i recall

or a passerby would be playing it on their wind-up Victrola that they carried on their shoulder

until Spock knocked them out

Went with Blind Willie Johnson as it sounds like the hard earth yawning itself awake from a nightmare.

"or a passerby would be playing it on their wind-up Victrola that they carried on their shoulder"

A while back I was reading about the tanks used in Kelly's Heroes - a mixture of converted Shermans and T-34s supplied by the Yugoslav army - and one thing the page points out is that Oddball's lead Sherman has a huge loudspeaker. They play music when they go into battle. It calms them down.

But how? Where would the music come from? They didn't have tape decks in those days. The Germans had only just invented them. Oddball's platoon is shown to have a wind-up record player in this classic scene:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mlr6m2AWskg

Which has some truly sublime "ye gods this is degenerate" facial expressions from Clint Eastwood, but there's no space for a record player inside a Sherman's turret and in any case the vibrations - the negative waves - would have scratched the record. I suppose it's just an example of suspension of disbelief in a film that otherwise has a bizarre mixture of spot-on technical details and anachronistic oddities. It's one of those films that takes place in its own world. As if, yes, it had been hallucinated by AI.

But it wasn't hallucinated by AI. It was hallucinated by Troy Kennedy Martin. Who through a quirk of fate had his last screenwriting credit fourteen years after he died, because Ferrari had an incredibly long production cycle.

I was struck by Orchestra Goldberg's "Kleftico Vlachiko", firstly because it's lovely - it's a kind of drone ambient piece, from 1903(!) - and also because if you google the name in quotes there are no results at all, and yet it does exist, e.g.:
https://www.discogs.com/release/7542794-Various-Klezmer-Music-Early-Yiddish-Instrumental-MusicFirst-Recordings-1908-1927

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

There's so many interesting ways to spin and narrow down the pre-40s or pre-50s charts and discover stuff I didn't already know about. My friend is currently working hard to try and add (and presumably rate) tons of music hall records, as its coverage there has always been very patchy. But all I really need to do is favourably rate one single from 1912 and it's almost in the top 100 automatically and it's those sparse parts of the charts that intrigue me the most.

This poll needs more Billy Murray.

Bert Williams still slaps

I once bought the complete Bert Williams singles from Archaeophone Records and thoroughly enjoyed it.

Gotta go with one of the Bessie Smiths, probably "Nobody Knows You." But tons of greatness here obviously.

I fell away from this thread but I did a concert in Chicago as part of a bill with the Fisk Jubilee Singers about 14 years ago, they were pretty spectacular

the country doesn't deserve it but stars and stripes forever is a complete banger. even tho these days i prefer the vladimir horowitz piano version (it sounds like he has at least 3 hands)

Don't sleep on Zabelle Panosian's proto-4AD Armenian-American lament, the only thing here that could possibly top East St. Louis Toodle-o

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5nSGpSz6RFc

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

oops I didn’t vote

unimpeachable top 3, I'm not so sure abt Sousa sorry