[78-L] First country recording?

[David Sanderson]

On 1/31/2012 2:18 PM, Malcolm - Venerable Music wrote:
> Wow, unbelievably I just came across one of these Barton sides in a stack of
> stuff I was listing for the next auction cycle!
> Just a strange coincidence so I went ahead and scanned the label here -
> http://www.venerableradio.com/VICT_16303B.jpg
>
> I ran a quick mp3 of the side (Lena) here -
> http://www.venerableradio.com/uploads/Lena.mp3
>
> I suppose it does bear a slight resemblance to Jimmie Rodgers and what would
> later be called Country, but I'd have a hard time calling it Country without
> feeling like I'm stretching.
>
> If anyone is interested in the record, it'll be on the list that starts in
> mid February.
>
> Malcolm

Here's a scholarly dose that mentions several of these early recordings, 
from a Journal of American Folklore article that turned up in a Web search:

Looming large in these early cylinders and flat discs was the
nineteenth-century actor, singer, and composer, J. K. Emmet (1841-91), who
died shortly before the recording industry was firmly established. Singers
such as George P. Watson, Frank Kamplain, Pete LaMar, and others recorded
a number of songs that he had either written or popularized. Emmet (whose
name is often spelled Emmett on the recordings) also helped to establish the
tradition of comic German stereotypes, so-called “Dutch” characters, 
heard in
recordings by Watson and Frank Wilson. Significantly, some of his yodel
melodies entered the yodeling oral tradition and reappear in many songs of
this and later periods.
Emmet’s most popular songs, judging by the number of subsequent
recordings, were the “Lullaby to Lena” (1878) and “The Cuckoo Song” (1879).2
The latter’s yodel melody was interpolated into many other songs by other
composers and performers and remained popular well into the depression
era. Emmet’s “Sauerkraut is Bully” (c. 1872) was also recorded at least 
once by
Watson (1905). Both Watson and LaMar made various recordings with
Emmet’s name in their titles, such as “Emmett’s [sic] Favorite Yodel” 
(Watson
n.d.) or “Medley of Emmett’s Yodles [sic]” (LaMar 1903), so he was clearly a
significant influence.
Some of George P. Watson’s other recordings were based on actual
German folksong, played with a vigorous Teutonic oompah-pah, such as the
mountain-themed Wanderlied “Hi-Le-Hi-Lo” (1910, 1913), which he recorded
on several occasions. His 1910 recording combines that song with “Hush-abye
Baby,” a song recorded later under various titles by early country music
performers.3 Watson also recorded “Doctor Eisenbart” (1904), an old German
student song, and the folksong “Zu Lauterbach,” but he plays these for
laughs. In the latter recording, simply titled “Lauterbach” (1905), he 
switches
to comic stage accent after one verse of German to sing the English verses
written for this tune by Septimus Winner in his “Der Deitcher’s Dog” (“Oh
where, oh where ish mine little dog gone?”); Watson yodels the tune printed
in Winner’s sheet music (1864), which according to Richard Jackson is an old
Bavarian yodel (Jackson 1976:268). Thus, the “Dutch” characters of Watson
and Wilson kept alive a sometimes comical “old country” association of
yodeling, an association that eventually would be erased with the hillbilly
blue yodel.4 Interestingly, the same yodel tune Winner used shows up again
much later in Patsy Montana’s 1936 recording of “She Buckaroo” (2001).
The popularity of “Roll On, Silver Moon” during this era is also plainly
evident: George P. Watson (1906), May McDonald (1908), Frank Kamplain
(1920), and Charles Anderson ([1924] 1997) recorded it, and it makes up the
first half of a recording titled “Jere Sanford’s Yodeling and Whistling
Specialty” (1910). That “Roll On, Silver Moon” appears in LaMar’s 1903
recording called “Medley of Emmett’s Yodles [sic]” suggests that a yodeled
version of this tune had been popularized by J. K. Emmet himself, although
he was not the composer.5 Matt Keefe, who was very influential, recorded 
it at
least twice in the 1910s; his 1917 version—obviously the model for Slim
Whitman’s honky-tonk sock rhythm revival of it in 1955 (1996)—is available
on the recent release by Archeophone titled Monarchs of Minstrelsy (2006).
Another of Matt Keefe’s songs, “Mountain High” (1914), was later recorded
in 1934, 1939, and 1947 by Elton Britt as ”Chime Bells” (1997), but 
credited to
Britt and Bob Miller. It became Britt’s best known song and was often
recorded by others.
Particularly significant was the song “Sleep, Baby, Sleep,” a lullaby
written and published by John Handley in 1885. This song was often
recorded during the acoustic era and became a favorite of the later southern
rural singers: both Riley Puckett and Jimmie Rodgers recorded it, in 1924
(n.d.) and 1927 respectively, and Rodgers was not alone in interpolating its
yodel melody into other lullabies and songs with nostalgic or sentimental
themes.
Ward Barton is a transitional figure who actually sounds modern,
despite old-fashioned repertoire like Canning’s 1886 “Rock-a-Bye Baby” and
waltz-time songs such as “I’m Dreaming of You” (recorded in 1916 and 1915,
respectively). He deserves mention as the first yodeler on record to use
ragtime rhythms, for example in “When the Moon am Shining” and
“Hawaiian Love Song” (both 1916). The latter is particularly noteworthy: 
after
a dreamy verse it breaks into a spirited syncopated section culminating in a
crazy cut time episode driven as much by Barton’s rhythmic guitar-tapping as
by his and Frank Carroll’s wordless singing. Yodeling gets nothing quite 
this
eccentric again until the De Zurik Sisters in the 1930s.
These early acoustic recordings are worth exploring both to gain
insight into song genres that for the most part pre-date Tin Pan Alley 
and to
appreciate the sources of melodic material heard in later yodel songs. The
continued appearance of a small corpus of yodel tunes is striking. 
Regularlyrecycled
themes include the “Sleep, Baby, Sleep” yodel, J. K. Emmet’s
“Cuckoo” yodel, and two melodies that can be identified by the scale degrees
of their incipits: 5-6-5-3-1-5 (for example, Barton’s “Rock-a-Bye Baby”) 
and (5-
6-7-) 1-1#-2 (for example, Keefe’s “Yodel Song,” also called “Mountain
High”).6 Recordings of “Roll On, Silver Moon,” moreover, demonstrate that
yodel songs did not always involve rapid switching between registers or
vocables.7
Recordings of George P. Watson, Frank Wilson, Pete LaMar, Matt
Keefe, Frank Kamplain, and Ward Barton can be heard on the Internet
Archive (http://www.archive.org/index.php) and the Cylinder Preservation
and Digitization Project (http://cylinders.library.ucsb.edu/index.php), 
and one
of Watson’s several recordings of “Sleep, Baby, Sleep” is on Christoph
Wagner’s excellent compilation, American Yodeling 1911-1949 (1998). The
extant recordings of the African American singer Charles Anderson are
available on two discs from Document: Eddie Heywood & the Blues Singers,
1923-1926 and Male Blues of the Twenties, Vol. 2, 1923-1928.
Hillbilly Yodelers
By the time the southern rural singers began to be recorded around
1925, yodeling had been firmly established in North American music for
about seventy-five years. And as their repertoire was filled with 
traditional
songs, it is no wonder that many of these were yodel songs. Indeed, one 
of the
first hillbilly recordings to feature a yodel was Riley Puckett’s version of
“Sleep, Baby, Sleep” ([1924] n.d.). He also recorded Emmet’s “Sauerkraut is
Bully,” calling it “Sauerkraut” ([1926] 1998). Yet it was Jimmie Rodgers who
became the most significant and influential yodeler among the white,
southern, blues-influenced singers. Rodgers recorded a broad range of
material and added yodeling to virtually all of it (109 out of 112 
recordings).
Yodeling was thus integral to his music making, and his influence on very
many performers appearing in his wake is discernible in the shared
repertoire, melodic devices, rhythms, and even yodeling vocables.


This is helpful in identifying yodel-related early recordings you may 
find, like the Barton side.

-- 
David Sanderson
East Waterford Maine
dwsanderson685 at roadrunner.com
http://www.dwsanderson.com