Gramophone History 101

History is fascinating. Not so much the dates of past events, but rather the knowledge level and mindset of folks as well as the social environment they lived in. Music has always been a method of communication and entertainment. Early forms of music and poetry were attempts to pass on the knowledge of previous generations verbally since methods of writing and saving common language documents were still a long way from invention let alone practical use. It has only been a little over 100 years that mankind has been capable of recording the spoken word and playing those sounds back again. The early inventors and industrialists were unsure what to record, what would sell to consumers, how to even create a consumer interest. Thomas Edison is credited with discovering the method to record and playback sounds in 1876. He perfected recording on cylinders (about the size of a soda can). Emil Berliner discovered a way to record on flat disks. Early recording devices were mechanical knives attached to vibrating diaphragm of thin mica. When a sound was made, the sound waves vibrated in the diaphragm and 'wiggled' the cutting knives. Recording artists literally stood in front of the machine while playing and singing. The record was cut as they sang and played, mistakes and all. The choice of material to record and sell was limited to sounds that could be recorded in the crude methods of the time. Low pitched sounds from drums and tubas did not pick up well. Higher pitched sounds such as violin and cornet recorded much better. It was the discovery of recording that made the banjo such a common instrument. The banjo has a higher pitched 'plink and plunk' that made it the most useful percussion instrument of the day.

In the late 1890's and early 1900's the industry of recording was in its infancy. There were many attempts to commercialize the process, to make a living with the new technologies. The first recorders were hand operated. The customer could only listen to the playback by placing a sound tube in the ear.

Volume was faint, but since recording and playing back sounds had never been done before, this technology was considered a miracle by many. In the late 1870's and early 1880's some industrious entrepreneurs including Thomas Edison, made circuits within the country and internationally displaying and playing the new machine - for a fee, of course.

The ability to record and replay music opened up the entire nation (and soon the entire world) to new sounds. Refined sounds of the city were available to rural folks and vice versa. New tastes in music were developing. A mere 30 years after the discovery of this new technology, by the early 1900's, recorded music was very available. Many marketing schemes involved a free give-away of a gramophone machine so the consumer would purchase the records. Several different size records and gramophones were designed so that consumers were locked into one recording company, a ploy that frustrated most consumers and fairly quickly failed in the marketplace. By the mid 19teens, most record sizes were standardized so that records could be played on many machines. This was also at the height of the American industrial revolution where patents were issued as a way to protect ideas long enough for entrepreneurs to recover costs and build a business. The patent wars were a divisive time in American industrial history. Many new phonograph companies were started and quickly died over patent disputes. In the early 1900's, a new sound was beginning to be heard. The African sounds brought to America by the plantation slaves had been mixing with European Christian sacred music for generations creating a soulful sound of desperation and defiance. The blues is uniquely American and as it was growing in plantation based songs, it was also growing in rural mountain songs so that hillbilly blues was born. It was the same genre of southern musicians who took instrumental music into a new direction where rigid structure was abandoned and each individual's contribution to the music was free expression creating jazz.

Early jazz and blues recordings are rare today. The commercialization of recorded sound in the early part of the 20th century is a legacy of new company start-ups, patent lawsuits, management failures, and ultimately company failures. Some record companies such as Black Patti, were in business for less than one year. Many recordings were lost in process. It was also not uncommon for an individual to entice a record company to produce a small batch of a the artist's record where it then fell upon the artist to distribute and sell those records. There are many recordings known to have been created, but no copies survive today.

These early recordings - vaudeville, minstrel, ethnic, classical, narrative, urban, rural, hillbilly, jazz, and blues - are all a vocal part of American history. They are just a small part of our heritage - who we are and how we got here.