ain't it grand: london popular music pre-1930

Maybe Jody Rosen, expert on pre-1930 American music can help.

http://theanachronist.blogspot.com/

Jody Rosen mentioned this on his blog:

http://www.venerablemusic.com/catalog/TitleDetails.asp?TitleID=1986

oh! looks interesting:D

bear family stuff is always so expensive:/

I've been to the house Harry Lauder lived in when he got old. it's in Glenbranter, Argyll. there was smoke coming from the chimney but i was too shy to knock.

"Sir Harry Lauder was the highest-paid performer in the world, pocketing the equivalent of £12,700 a night plus expenses. In 1929 he received £114,700 for singing three songs in his first radio performance, which was broadcast on 40 radio stations across America."

More Rosen on old American music in the NY Times:
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/19/arts/music/19rose.html?pagewanted=print

Here's an excerpt--

March 19, 2006
Music-NY Times
How Pop Sounded Before It Popped
By JODY ROSEN
FOR a couple of months now my iPod has been stuck on Stella Mayhew's "I'm Looking for Something to Eat." It's a lurching little waltz-time pop tune, drawled over brass-band accompaniment. The lyric is hilarious, the lament of a gal on a diet who can't stop eating, and it climaxes with a glutton's soul cry: "I want some radishes and olives, speckled trout and cantaloupe and cauliflower/ Some mutton broth and deviled crabs and clams and Irish stew." I can't get it out of my head — so far, it's my favorite record of 2006.

As it happens, it's also my favorite record of 1909. It is an Edison Phonograph Company wax cylinder, recorded 97 years ago by Mayhew, a vaudeville star who liked to poke fun at her considerable girth. In certain ways, the song is up to date: the satire on dieting is plenty relevant in the early 21st century, and Mayhew's slurred talk-singing is a bracingly modern sound. But the noisy, weather-beaten recording is unmistakably a product of the acoustic era — the period from about 1890 to the mid-1920's, before the advent of electric recording — when musicians cut records while crammed cheek-by-jowl-by-trombone around phonograph horns in rackety little studios.

Mayhew's record is just one of several thousand cylinders, the first commercially available recordings ever produced, that have recently become available free of charge to anyone with an Internet connection and some spare bandwidth. Last November, the Donald C. Davidson Library at the University of California, Santa Barbara, introduced the Cylinder Digitization and Preservation Project Web site (cylinders.library.ucsb.edu), a collection of more than 6,000 cylinders converted to downloadable MP3's, WAV files and streaming audio. It's an astonishing trove of sounds: opera arias, comic monologues, marching bands, gospel quartets. Above all, there are the pop tunes churned out by Tin Pan Alley at the turn of the century: ragtime ditties, novelty songs, sentimental ballads and a dizzying range of dialect numbers performed by vaudeville's blackface comedians and other "ethnic impersonators."

For decades, these records languished unheard by all but a few intrepid researchers and enthusiasts. Now, thanks to the Santa Barbara Web site and the efforts of a small group of scholars, collectors and independent record labels, acoustic-era popular music is drifting back into earshot, one crackly cylinder and 78 r.p.m. disc at a time. These old records hold pleasant surprises, but they also carry a larger lesson about gaping holes in the story of American pop. "

I like this Rosen bit re rockist thinking...

"And while scholars and critics have lavished attention on early roots music recordings — no rock snob's record collection would be complete without Harry Smith's "Anthology of American Folk Music" and an Alan Lomax field recording or two — they have almost completely ignored this other recorded legacy. Pop critics are currently in the throes of post-"rockist" revisionism, thinking through their longstanding biases against commercial pop music. Maybe it's time to look at how those same prejudices, projected back into history, have distorted our vision of pop's distant past.

The truth is, beneath their quaint rhythms and lyrics about "spooning" under stretching boughs, acoustic-era songs are thematically quite similar to rock and even hip-hop, awash in sex and dancing and a cheery anti-authoritarianism. (Little wonder that moralists of the day thundered against Tin Pan Alley's "suggestive" songs and the pernicious moral effects of ragtime.) You hear that spirit in the Columbia Quartet's 1911 recording of Irving Berlin's "Everybody's Doing It Now," in the salacious relish with which the singers deliver the lines "Everybody's doing it/ Doing it?/ Doing what?" Berlin's song is nothing less than an anthem of youth rebellion, an ode to kids going nuts doing racy dance moves — precisely the kind of song that, according to conventional wisdom, did not crack the pop mainstream until sometime around 1954."

But yeah, Bear Family collections are so expensive.