Just One Song More

1. Billy Jones: “Yes! We Have No Bananas”

One of the four or five irreducible particles of the silliness of the Roaring Twenties, the folly of the années folles, the glitter of the Goldene Zwanziger, the keynote and image of all that was evanescent and soon to vanish, like champagne bubbles, in the era to come. A vaudeville routine sold as a Tin Pan Alley ditty, with a stop-start melody and nonsense refrain that captured a bluff, jaunty mood and lent itself to repetition, sawing relentlessly away with or without the lyrics kidding the incomplete Americanisms of the Lower East Side. But that kidding remains, a none too subtle reminder that the white majority would never consent to seeing immigrants as fully human. Nonsense in the United States is always political; perhaps that too is not unique to us.

2. Clay Custer: “The Rocks”

The consensus among jazz scholars is that Clay Custer is most likely a pseudonym for the tune’s composer, but there are a few other Chicago-area pianists it could be, including his brother Hersal. Regardless, it’s the first disc on record to feature a walking bassline (so early in its development that it’s almost a stumbling one); this, combined with the previous year’s publication of “The Fives” from the same pen, is the birth of boogie-woogie piano. By decade’s end, the genre will have been fully formalized by pianists who all point to the work of Arkansas-born, New Orleans-trained, Chicago-adopted “Gut Bucket” George Washington Thomas as fundamental. Even apart from the all-important bassline, the chromatic opening trills and development of its themes—the rocks could be wave-dashed, or more euphemistic—give delight.

3. King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band: “Dipper Mouth Blues”

Seven years is a long time in pop, which hot jazz still is. The gap between the Original Dixieland Jass Band’s first recordings and the first sides made by Joe “King” Oliver’s band—who would undoubtedly have been one of the ODJB’s primary inspirations back when New Orleans was the quarantined heart of jazz, before it spread like a virus to infect the entire nation—would have been noticeable in any era, but a comparison between the two reveals that while the white boys got the energy and the raucousness right, they missed the funk and the communal interplay. Oliver’s muted trumpet solo isn’t just virtuosity: it responds to and is responded to by the rest of the band, including the young second cornettist, recently arrived to Chicago from New Orleans.

4. Bennie Moten’s Kansas City Orchestra: “Elephant’s Wobble”

And just as the first true New Orleans jazz is waxed, so too is the first true Kansas City jazz: less molasses funky, more brightly riffed, with a hard-stomping rhythm that presages much industrialized pop to come, from Motown to techno. Bennie Moten, a nearly thirty year old pianist, composer and now bandleader who had knocked about the Missouri ragtime scene since his youth, scored his first recording date in St. Louis, with a band of Kansas City luminaries who individually hearken back to older forms, from Sousa’s drilled marches to Joplin’s ragtime of theme and recapitulation to Ossman’s savagely strummed minstrel banjo: but together, powered by the newly hot-running engine of jazz, they produce a gleeful, entirely modern sound that piledrives, lean and hungry for rhythm, into the future.

5. Sylvester Weaver: “Guitar Blues”

Most discographies will note this as the first country blues record; but Sylvester Weaver was born and reared in Louisville, Kentucky, which if it wasn’t a New York-scale metropolis was still no dirt-road waystation; nor is it the Deep South. Like most of his Black peers making their way before recording horns in the years before the electric-recording boom, Weaver was an urban entertainer—his first recordings were as an accompanist to blues singer Sara Martin. His instrument was called a “guitjo,” a banjo body strung like a guitar, and his slide technique sounds particularly otherworldly on its resonant body. The technique has appeared before, as played by Hawaiʻian musicians and white southerners; but here the sound connects (on record) to the blues, and the echoes from it will be lasting.

6. Os Oito Batutas: “Urubu”

We have heard the most prominent soloist in this supergroup before: choro composer and flautist Pixinguinha had already left his mark on Brazilian popular music in the 1910s. But when he joined seven other Black and mulatto choristas to form an eight-man group in 1919 so that a theater empresario would have an attraction in between showings of silent films, the result was a music that swung harder than traditional choro and even outpaced early samba: “Urubu” (the Guaraní word for vulture, and you can hear a wheeling, wing-fluttering flight in Pixinguinha’s flute) is just as modern, as dynamic, and as future-facing as any New Orleans jazz. In fact, musicians like Os Oito Batutas (the eight legends), demonstrate that the spirit of jazz was never exclusively a North American phenomenon.

7. Rosita Quiroga: “Sollozos”

Two legends in the field of Argentinean tango make their debut with this recording: Rosita Quiroga, the music’s first great woman singer, born in the lower-class milieu to which a cosmopolitan like Gardel only pretended; and Osvaldo Fresedo, the song’s composer, who when he begins to record in his own right will become perhaps the most emblematic tango bandleader of the decade, with a long career to follow. “Sollozos” (Sobs), with a lyric by the composer’s brother Emilio, is one of the great tango songs, uncovering the everyday pathos within the music’s slinky passion. Quiroga’s direct, unadorned vocal style refuses self-pity even as her words ask us to pity her, and the harmonium which opens the recording casts the plucked guitars which accompany her throughout in the light of eternity.

8. Carlos Gardel: “Alma porteña”

But as tango branched out into newly classed and gendered forms, Gardel the eternal cosmopolite continued to go from strength to strength. “Alma porteña” (Soul of Buenos Aires) is another of the deathless tango songs, in which the music itself is apostrophized as the cause, and cure, of all man’s ills. The mellifluous self-assurance in his baritone voice, the intricate backing of his accompanists Barbieri and Ricardo, and the swooping, tantalizing melody from Vicente Greco, who had been writing and performing tangos since the early 1910s, make a dazzling, almost overwhelming display of what I think of as Baroque tango, tango at its most self-important, self-mythologizing, and capital-r Romantic. If tango is une force qui va and Gardel is its prophet, why should we ever ask for anything more quotidian?

9. Bessie Smith: “Baby Won’t You Please Come Home Blues”

Three long years after the record companies learned that there was a market for “race” (for which see blues) records, the most famous and well compensated blues singer on the Black vaudeville circuit finally signed a contract with Columbia to cut her first records, accompanied on piano by early jazz pianist and empresario Clarence Williams, who had published (and supposedly co-wrote) this song. Its co-composer, Charles Warfield, later complained that he was cheated, which was probably true enough: music labels had much to learn from sheet-music publishers on how to screw over their talent. But the song itself is just a trifle: what makes it stick is Bessie Smith’s full-lunged performance, too self-possessed to be melodramatic about missing her lover, but too serious about her heartbreak to treat it flippantly either.

10. Ma Rainey with Lovie Austin and Her Blues Serenaders: “Barrel House Blues”

The blues singer who taught Bessie Smith to perform in public, and whose popular performances since the early 1900s in medicine shows, minstrel shows, and vaudeville had no doubt influenced white singers from Sophie Tucker to Marion Harris, also cut her first records for Paramount in 1923, at the age of forty-one. Accompanied by Chicago-based pianist and composer Lovie Austin and her hot jazz band, Rainey sings three verses that mock at Prohibition while reinforcing her own status as the elder stateswoman of the blues: the “Papa” of the song is presumably is Will Rainey, her husband, manager, and one-time partner, while “Mama” is herself, a creature of voracious appetite whose addiction to port, sport, gin, and “outside men” is a thorough rejection of a respectability that couldn’t touch her.

11. Esther Bigeou with Piron’s New Orleans Orchestra: “West Indies Blues”

Anglo-Caribbean music has not appeared in these pages since 1915, but it didn’t go unheard, nor was its influence insignificant. “West Indies Blues” was written by the great Black jazz songwriter Spencer Williams, with funning lyrics by Edgar Dowell, in the wake of Jamaican-born Pan-African Black separatist Marcus Garvey’s conviction on trumped-up charges of mail fraud: the broad dialect Esther Bigeou, a New Orleans native, uses to caricature West Indian speech is, at this remove, indistinguishable from the Coon dialects white songwriters had been putting in the mouths of US-born Blacks for generations. Even so, the sheet music was subtitled “a calipso,” and though it’s not proper Trinidadian calypso, it’s played by people who have heard it: Armand Piron’s orchestra was one of the foremost Creole bands of New Orleans.

12. Marion Harris: “Who’s Sorry Now?”

As the genuine articles began to take their rightful place before the recording horn, the white women whose imitations of blues shouters had made the racist recording market safe for the blues began to move into more genteel forms of music-making, where Black women presumably couldn’t follow. (We’ll see about that.) Marion Harris, a constant presence here since 1916, has never sounded more polished and inexpressive—which is to say, whiter—than when warbling this ditty by dilettante composer Ted Snyder (who we won’t see again) and Tin Pan Alley lifers, lyricists Bert Kalmar and Harry Ruby (who we will). A song of vindictive triumph paced like a parlor ballad, it retained enough kick thirty-five years later to jumpstart the career of a teenager who sang like a grown woman.

13. Sophie Tucker: “You’ve Gotta See Mamma Ev’ry Night (Or You Can’t See Mamma At All)”

Of course, La Tucker never followed the trends for white women singers. Now in her mid-thirties, she had built too firmly on a foundation of Coon shouting to move blithely into sweet girlish Tin Pan Alley fluff: but raucous faux-blues Tin Pan Alley fluff would do just as well. “You’ve Got to see Mamma” was written by popular hack Con Conrad (empresario Billy Rose is credited on lyrics), and in general outline it’s a good imitation of contemporary Black women’s songs, slightly saucy, humorously aggressive towards a wayward lover, and firmly self-respecting. But there’s no actual blues structure or emotion to it, which makes it all the better as a cloak for the indeterminately-raced Tucker to wrap herself in: big and brassy, but ultimately respectful of show-biz and social convention.

14. Wendell Hall: “It Ain’t Gonna Rain No Mo’”

The ways in which the desiccated remains of minstrelsy were shaped and pounded into country music are a major part of the recording history of the 1920s. “Ain’t Gonna Rain” is considered a folk song (four years later, Carl Sandburg would suggest that it dates to the 1870s), but Hall, a Midwestern vaudevillian who performed under the legend “The Red-Headed Music Maker,” punches out the verses, with nonstandard vocabulary and Southern rural hokum straight out of Uncle Remus, in a minstrel-inflected screech and yowl, a sound which would migrate into the “high lonesome” style which will characterize honky-tonk. But he’s also very much of his time: his instrument was not the banjo but the ukulele, the portable if not particularly versatile instrument which gave a fizzy, irrepressible soundtrack to the 1920s.

15. Fiddlin’ John Carson: “The Old Hen Cackled and the Rooster’s Gonna Crow”

Après Eck, le deluge: country fiddlers were still major entertainers in the rural communities where they set and called the dances, and as the South urbanized, they grew into bigger stars thanks to old-time fiddling conventions. The fifty-something Carson, of Atlanta, was hot enough stuff that he was a local fixture on the new medium of radio and appeared in newsreels. A sharp-eyed Atlanta distributor cajoled Okeh’s talent scout Ralph Peer into recording him in a rare acoustic-era location recording, a makeshift studio set up in an empty Atlanta storefront. Peer wasn’t happy with the results (he’d do better later), but the record, “Old Hen” b/w “Little Old Log Cabin in the Lane” (see 1907), sold out at the next convention. No hero, as we’ll see, Carson nevertheless lasted.

16. Asako Tanabe: “Sendo kouta”

As country music slowly pushes its way onto record, so too does the music frequently compared to it: Japanese enka, which (like country) originated in a specific milieu but has since broadened to mean any vaguely folkloric or traditional popular music. I’ve been unable to learn anything about the singer attributed here: 田辺朝子 is a common enough name that basic online searches are useless. But 船頭小唄 (often translated as “Ferryman’s Song”) was a major musical touchstone of the era, a street song which borrowed the melody of a Shinpei Nakayama composition. It became infamous in the wake of the Great Kanto Earthquake, said to have been predicted in the haunting, death-obsessed lyrics. A sentimental 1923 film of the same title inspired multiple recordings; this is the one posted to YouTube.

17. Mounira al-Madiyyah: “Asmar malak ruhi”

1923 was the first full year of nominal Egyptian independence from the British “protectorate” which had begun in 1882 and was formalized during the War to break Ottoman power. Although the British occupation would not be entirely ended until 1953, the promulgation of the first constitution and the convention of the first parliament in Cairo is worth commemorating here, with the voice of the first Muslim woman in the modern era to come to prominence as an entertainer in Egypt: before her (as throughout North Africa and the Middle East), the profession was limited to Jewish and Christian women. أسمر ملك روحي was one of her signature songs, one that has had long echoes in Egyptian light-entertainment history: “Dark King of My Soul” is one way to translate the title.

18. Mohammad el-Wahab: “Ma niish bahebbek”

Egyptian popular music was still only just being born: the September 1923 death at the age of 31 of café singer and musical-theater composer Sayed Darwish, whose melodies (some of which we will hear in future) borrowed Western structures and sometimes instrumentation in a break with classical Arabic formulas, is a useful demarcation point. Mohammad el-Wahab was a friend and close collaborator with Darwish in his last years, and would become perhaps the most important Egyptian popular musician of the twentieth century, but one. This early song, a light taqtuqa from the kind of genial musical romantic comedy which would come to form the backbone of the West and South Asian film industry, is an anti-love song performed in character as a rascal protesting (too much) that he only loves himself.

19. Marika Papagika: “Opou dis dio kyparissia”

The Anatolian Greek singer Marika Papagika was by now more or less the undisputed queen of the ex-Ottoman diaspora in New York City, despite continued challenges from Kiria Koula. Within the next year or so she would even open the first café-aman (and behind authority’s back, a speakeasy) in the Western hemisphere; but here, with her husband on cimbalom and other immigrant musicians on violin, cello, and percussion, she sings a song which takes its title from the Greek folk air “When You See Two Cypresses,” but hares off in other directions in the singing. It’s called a Zeïmpekiko (Anatolian Greek folk dance) on the label, but scholars, noting the modern fusions which New World residence has imparted to Papagika’s musical ecosystem, have called it an early example of rebetiko.

20. Naftule Brandwein’s Orchestra: “Doina and Nachspiel”

As we move further into the 1920s, the number of great recordings by the Eastern European Jewish artists who brought what we now call klezmer to the tenements of New York City will slowly decrease. Partly this is because of rapid assimilation and the inroads made by Jewish artists into mainstream US culture: the next generation of talented Jewish musicians were more likely to aspire to be Gershwin or Brice than Brandwein or Picon. But also, beginning in 1924, the country’s open (to Europeans) immigration policy was for the first time given a permanent numerical limit, heavily restricting (as it meant to) the number of new Jewish immigrants to the United States. There will be more klezmer records in future, but let this be a valediction for the first generation.

21. Isa Kremer: “Dwie Guitarre”

But there was a whole constellation of global Jewish culture which the policies set by a know-nothing Congress could not touch. Isa Kremer, the great Russian Jewish soprano, was born to bourgeois parents in what is now Moldova, but was publishing revolutionary poetry in Odessa as a teenager. She debuted as an opera singer in Italy; within a few years, she included Yiddish folk songs in her concert repertoire, supposedly the first woman to do so. The Russian Revolution left her without a home (her family had backed the moderates), and her peripatetic concert schedule brought her to the United States in 1922, where she was acclaimed by Jewish and non-Jewish audiences alike. This selection of Russian romans or “gypsy” music is illustrative of her clear voice and lively style.

22. Pau Casals: “Kol Nidrei”

Another example of Jewish music having entered the concert canon: the German (Protestant) composer Max Bruch had composed this piece for cello and orchestra in 1880, the melody of the first section based on the Hebrew prayer recited during the evening service on Yom Kippur and that of the second on one of Isaac Nathan’s 1815 settings for Byron’s Hebrew Melodies. (Gentiles appropriating Jewish art and being reappropriated by Jews in turn has a long history.) The great Catalan cellist Pau Casals rendered it sensitively, accompanied only by Edouard Gendron on piano, for Columbia in 1923. In those years Casals was the preeminent cellist in Europe, recording in France and conducting an orchestra in Barcelona. An ardent Republican, he went into self-imposed exile when Franco came to power, and never returned.

23. Marian Anderson: “Deep River”

1. A. C. (Eck) Robertson: “Sallie Gooden”

The story goes that the two Texans entered New York City in full fancy dress, 35-year-old Eck Robertson in a spangled cowboy outfit, and his 75-year-old partner Henry C. Gilliland in old Confederate Army togs, his own. They went straight to the Victor offices and insisted on cutting a record; whether because the talent manager thought he could sell it, or just to get the hicks out of the office, “Sallie Gooden” b/w “Arkansas Traveler” was the result. “Traveler” was the duet, “Gooden” a solo piece by Eck: and if it’s not exactly the first country record (studio professionals had been cutting Ozark reels and string-band minstrelsy for years), it’s the first made by genuine rural Southerners. Thirteen variations in three minutes: Robertson rarely recorded again, but he laid a pattern for all old-time to follow.

2. Ory’s Sunshine Orchestra: “Society Blues”

Meanwhile, the first genuine Black New Orleans jazz records were recorded in the sleepy backwater then still becoming the cinematic boomtown of Los Angeles, California, to be sold out of a store also owned by the proprietor of the recording studio. Edward “Kid” Ory was a successful Creole jazz trombonist whose band had included King Oliver and a young cornetist named Armstrong back in the Crescent City; he had decamped to the West Coast after Storyville’s closure in 1917, and the band he put together in the Golden State was, if not the toast of Rampart Street, respectable. Ory would wend to Chicago within the next few years, where he would fall in with old Orleanian friends, but that’s a story for another time. “Society Blues,” halfway between classy and kidding, is mellow as a porch conversation.

3. Alberta Hunter: “Down Hearted Blues”

Another legendary figure of twentieth-century music bows onto the stage. Alberta Hunter, who was born and bred in Memphis but made her name in Chicago, is of the generation of performers who, like her fellow Southern-born, Northern-famed peers Ethel Waters and Florence Mills, fell halfway between the stools of cabaret and the blues, and was nearly forgotten by a history that prized the blues over cabaret and (which would come to mean the same thing) men over women. She had already toured Europe to great acclaim by the time she settled down to a Harlem club gig and cut this immortal blues, co-written with pianist (and possibly sometime lover) Lovie Austin. The following year, the century’s most famous blues shouter would notch it as her first smash record, but Hunter’s sly, sashaying take emphasizes its essential theatricality.

4. Marion Harris: “I’m Just Wild about Harry”

The biggest hit from Shuffle Along, the all-Black musical which took New York by storm in 1921 and kickstarted a decade of Black excellence, “I’m Just Wild about Harry” took a year to get onto record. Partly the delay served to deracinate the tune, to transform it from an unembarrassed declaration of Black love (it was originally written as a waltz, in an even more overt challenge to racial norms) to a raggy burst of pep that anyone, in these dance-band days, could turkey-trot or whistle: F. Scott Fitzgerald coined “the Jazz Age” in 1922, the perfect descriptor of such cavalier white adoption of Black forms. Marion Harris had always sung Black, sometimes exaggeratedly so, but only the broad syncopation and extra pep of the last few choruses gestures in that direction here; she simply sounds American.

5. Ed Gallagher and Al Shean: “Oh! Mister Gallagher and Mister Shean”

The background hum to popular culture in the 1920s—as it had been since the 1880s—was vaudeville, the stage circuit mechanism by which the entire country absorbed roughly the same songs, dances, slapstick, patter, and acrobatics as the big cities, though delayed. Ephemeral by design, but calcified enough that the right act could get forty years out of the same routine, the ethos of vaudeville was desperation; you never knew what would work, so you played as broad as possible. Gallagher and Shean, an Irishman and a German Jew respectively, reportedly loathed each other, but their shared song, as tightly structured as a sonnet, was bigger than either of them: they could and did swap out verses every time, which makes this double-sided record’s domestic-abuse and skin-color jokes revealing as an indication of what sold.

6. Jack Buchanan: “And Her Mother Came Too”

While the Broadway theatrical songwriting machine was entering its second decade of eminence, its West End equivalent was rather more sedate. The young British songwriter who posed the greatest challenge to the imported Berlins, Kerns, and Gershwins was Welshman Ivor Novello. “Keep the Home Fires Burning” had been a wartime favorite, but it was in the 1920s that his songwriting really bloomed. This entry, on the surface a mere one-note mother-in-law joke in age-old music-hall tradition, has a more nuanced harmonic structure than strictly necessary, and especially given eternal Drones Club habitué Jack Buchanan’s urbane, ever so slightly camp delivery, the joke destabilizes, becoming less about a too-enthusiastic chaperone and more like a Wodehousian parody of Vincent O’Sullivan’s classic 1912 Decadent novella The Good Girl, about a simpleton increasingly entangled by a family of moral vampires.

7. Sara Martin: “Tain’t Nobody's Bus’ness if I Do”

On the right hand side of the label is printed the legend “Contralto Solo / Piano Accomp. by T. Waller.” And so another of the giants of early jazz piano bobs to the surface here, accompanying Miss Sara Martin, one of the half-dozen or so essential blues-not-blues singers of the decade, on a song that will become an urban blues standard, evolving in many directions over the course of the century. But here, in its original ragtime-blues form, written by African-American songwriter Porter Grainger and Mamie Smith sideman Everett Robbins, “Nobody’s Business” is a perfect marriage of defiant, antisocial (because society is dangerous) blues tradition and Tin Pan Alley hokum, setting the template for the theatrical blues tradition of the 1930s and 40s which songwriters like Harold Arlen or Hoagy Carmichael would turn into vernacular American pop.

8. Lucille Hegamin and her Blue Flame Syncopaters: “Aggravatin’ Papa (Don’t You Try to Two-Time Me)”

In fact, some white songwriters were there already. Composer J. Russel Robinson, a Hoosier, was a ragtime pianist who had supplied W. C. Handy’s publishing company, and lyricist Roy Turk was a New York native whose slangy, sentimental songs helped to define the Jazz Age. Three years earlier, “Aggravatin’ Papa” might have been a Coon song—the Southern setting, the stereotypically trifling man, the understated threats of violence could all have been delivered by a blackface singer for laughs—but instead Black singers and players adopted it and turned  it into a blues standard, starting with Lucille Hegamin. Her delivery, using the blues trick of repeating the end of a line where a solo would otherwise go, is cheerful, almost delighted to tear into the juicy threats she’s making, while her Syncopaters swoon woozily around her.

9. Trixie Smith and the Jazz Masters: “My Man Rocks Me (With One Steady Roll)”

The confluence of the words “rock” and “roll” in such a way that makes it obvious they were already conjoined in a familiar phrase decades before they got pinned to a backbeat is perhaps the least noteworthy thing about this record. Trixie Smith was a genuine Southern Black singer, born and raised in Georgia, but not a gutbucket blues singer: her upbringing had been genteel, and her singing, as here, tended toward the light and winsome. Nevertheless, “My Man Rocks Me” is among the first great single-entendre blues records, so hot (though entirely by implication) that a parental warning logo would have had to be slapped on it in the CD era. Written by Chicago-based songwriter and publisher J. Berni Barbour, it’s performed here at such a languorous drag, with a deep-stroking trombone, that it’s practically tantric.

10. Eva Tanguay: “I Don’t Care”

In 1922 she was forty-four and long past her wasp-waisted prime; but back when she was the chaotic, hair-flowing, man-eating, lung-bursting Quebecois-born sensation of the Naughty Oughts, she hadn’t bothered to step before a recording horn, and so this is all we have of her: her signature song, some fifteen years late. But if this is a shadow of her former self, what must she have been like in her strength? Her voice is blown out, her tempos all scattered as the studio musicians attempt to keep up with her lurches from faux-maudlin verses to the roaring, flippant chorus, still as strong a fuck-you to the propriety, daintiness, and demureness of the ideal woman as it ever was. If the fuck-you sounds rather more ghostly today, it isn’t because women are expected to care any less.

11. Georgel: “La garçonne”

But the “I-Don’t-Care Girl” had been a model for a whole generation of women now reaching adulthood who disdained the voluminous skirts and hairstyles of their mothers. The flapper, as she was known in English, had her equivalent in every nation: but when Victor Margueritte’s sensationalistic lesbian 1922 French novel La garçonne was bowdlerized into English the same year, it was called The Bachelor Girl. The topical song of the same name by Vincent Scotto (lyrics by a pair of hacks) sneers at women who bob their hair, dress in mannish attire, and choose not to flirt with men, predicting a lonely, cruel dotage for any woman who doesn’t embrace motherhood. Georgel’s rendition was a hit, but the last verse was often omitted, and the androgynous garçonne’s sleek, stylish, and damn-the-conventions poise became a decade’s aspiration.

12. Paul Whiteman and His Orchestra: “I’ll Build a Stairway to Paradise”

Having come into a minor fortune on the unexpected success of “Swanee,” the young, prolific, and ambitious composer George Gershwin soon found himself writing music for George White’s Scandals, meant as stiff competition for Ziegfeld’s Follies. The first (and perhaps only) immortal song from that series of revues, “Stairway to Paradise” was the young man’s first compositional triumph, a winding musical ascent to match the twin curved staircases in the stage show, with blues harmonics to accentuate its modernity and jazz it away from typical revue politesse. The orchestra pit for the number was directed by celebrity conductor Paul Whiteman, and his later recording with his Orchestra, leaving out the less-impressive lyrics, is one of the great dance-band records of the era, sweetly winging Gershwin’s hypermelodic expression of that rarest of emotions in pop music—joy.

13. Conchita Piquer: “El florero”

Among the many sensations which took place seemingly nightly on New York stages in the early 1920s, the debut of a sixteen-year-old Valencian soubrette in drag as a flower-selling boy in El gato montés (The Wild Cat), a successful Spanish operetta undergoing a respectable Broadway run, has largely been forgotten in English-language circles. But the tale goes that a representative from Columbia rushed backstage during the intermission to sign her to a two-year recording contract, only to discover that not only didn’t she speak English, she had only a vague grasp of Castilian. Thirty years later Concha Piquer would be the grand dame of Spanish copla, a long-reigning movie star and one of the most recognizable Spanish-language singers in the world; Broadway’s ability to generate stars without even noticing was at its peak in the 1920s.

14. Baiano: “Eu só quero é beliscá”

In February of 1922, the Teatro Municipal of São Paulo hosted a week of art exhibitions, lectures, concerts, and poetry readings called the Semana de Arte Moderna: it was ground zero for Brazilian modernism, an explosive, controversial, and thoroughly regional rejection of European norms in favor of miscegenated, tropical Brasilidade. But the middle-class intellectuals and artists promoted by the Semana were conflicted about the street-level sambas and batuques with which the urban masses—not to mention hustling commercial songwriters—expressed themselves, just as Anglo modernists were ambivalent or worse towards jazz. This cateretê (tr. “I Just Want a Pinch”) by Eduardo Souto, with its dense paulista slang, faux-tribal rhythms, and anti-authoritarian stance (the song’s satirical object is cops shaking down street vendors) was just as modernist as Oswald de Andrade’s poems or Tarsila do Amaral’s paintings.

15. Alcides Briceño y Jorge Añez: “La soldadera”

Belisario de Jesús García was a soldier in the Mexican Revolution who fought on the side of the Carrancista revolutionaries who murdered Emiliano Zapata; the same year, he published his first song, “La soldadera.” The word literally means “the woman who receives payment for taking care of a soldier,” and could refer to a wife or domestic or (more likely) camp follower, but in the Mexican Revolution it was applied to the hundreds and thousands of women who took up arms in the cause, whether perforce or otherwise. This version of García’s imitation corrido was recorded in New York by a Panamanian-Colombian duo who would sing anything in Spanish regardless of nationality, with studio hacks on instrumentation; despite which, it’s been wisely adopted by Mexico as one of the great early records of Mexican vernacular pop.

16. Carlos Gardel: “El tango de la muerte”

Not the “Tango de la muerte” written by the little-known Horacio Mackintosh in 1917, which is an instrumental; this tango was written (music and lyrics) by Alberto Navión, a French-born, Uruguay-raised composer for the Argentine theater whose work was often uneven; the sainete which introduced this song has been dismissed as mediocre, but Gardel getting his pipes on any song elevates it. And in fact, a song of typically Latin despair which may have been risible or banal in the theater is transformed into a throbbing report from the depths of depression on record. Bounded by the strict strums of guitarists Guillermo Barbieri and José Ricardo, Gardel’s voice moors in self-pitying baritone melancholy, and flutters up to keening tenor remorse. He wants to die, and only the milonga (criollo dancehall, birthplace of tango) keeps him alive.

17. La Niña de los Peines: “Tango de la tontona”

It is a great piece of foolishness that she has not appeared here before: her first record was cut in 1905, when she was fifteen. But in 1922, the distinguished Spanish composer Manuel de Falla and a young, scarcely-known poet named García Lorca organized the first Concurso de Cante Jondo, or Deep Song Contest, in Granada, the Andalusian city which could reasonably claim to be among the birthplaces of flamenco. Pastora Pavón, already at thirty-two the greatest cantaora of all time, was the only woman on the judging panel. This song (set to the relatively new “tango” palo) addressing a foolish, heartbreaking girl was an early favorite of her repertoire, and one of a series of records she cut in 1922, accompanied by guitarist Luis Molina. It only hints at the astonishing depths of her voice.

18. El Tenazas de Morón: “Yo he andaito la Francia (Seguiriyas de Silverio)”

But the great revelation of the Granada Concurso was Diego Bermúdez of the Sevillian town Morón de la Frontera, a septuagenarian who had retired from flamenco singing in the nineteenth century after having been stabbed: flamenco was once a disreputable, dangerous field. His archaic style was received rapturously by the musicologists and mystic nationalists in the audience, who considered it a direct link to the authentic Roma origins of flamenco song as represented by the legendary prototypical cantaor Silverio Franconetti, and as opposed to modern syncretic theatricalized flamenco, sullied by commercialism and mass media. On being (re)discovered, Bermúdez (nicknamed Tenazas, or Tongs) recorded several platters of quavering, ancient flamenco, a set which Falla would carry with him into exile. But his moment in the sun was short-lived; the following year, El Tenazas was laid to rest.

19. Naftule Brandwein: “Kallarash”

We have heard him before on records credited to other bandleaders, particularly Abe Schwartz, but this is the moment where the foremost klezmer clarinetist of the era before anyone called the music klezmer struck out on his own. Born into a family of Hasidic musicians in what was then called Polish Galicia (present-day Ukraine) and having emigrated to the US in 1908 at nineteen, Brandwein was a showman, even a showboat, who would sometimes perform with a self-promoting neon sign around his neck, or play with his back to the audience so as not to give away his proprietary fingering techniques. “Kallarash,” subtitled “A Bridal Dedication,” is a slow-then-fast dance memorializing a town in Romanian Bessarabia. It’s a perfect showcase for his overtly emotional, flashily sentimental style, a virtuosic display for a Hendrix of the clarinet.

20. A. Z. Idelsohn und Männerchor: “Hava Nagila”

Abraham Zvi Idelsohn, born in present-day Latvia, worked as a cantor in Europe and South Africa before emigrating to Palestine in the years of the Second Aliyah, when European Jews fled pogroms in the Russian Empire in the hope of establishing a Zionist state in Palestine. Idelsohn’s musical training led him to take an interest in the Jewish music of Palestine, and his ethnomusicological work is some of the most comprehensive in the field. In setting his own words to an old melody traced to the diaspora in the Ukraine, he is considered the author of “Hava Nagila,” and when the German label Polydor, then making one of the first music-industry attempts to comprehensively document folkloric music, invited him to record some of his collection, he conducted a choir in one of the era’s folk-art hybrids.

21. Fisk University Jubilee Singers: “I Ain’t Goin’ to Study War No More”

The ancient Jewish poetic image, given in the prophet Isaiah, of reshaping implements of warfare into implements of agriculture is one of the most powerful in all religion: and one of its most beautiful expressions was the work of anonymous (to us, if not to Heaven) men and women enslaved in the southern United States, probably less than two hundred years ago. As with most art made by Black Americans, there are double and treble meanings to “Down by the Riverside”— the Ohio was perhaps more salient than the Jordan, whether the one in Israel or the one in Bunyan, and ending the study of war doesn’t necessarily mean forgoing violent struggle anymore than the end of school is the end of work. Even the pious, unhurried reading given by four Fisk men here contains multitudes.

22. Feodor Chaliapin: “Ey, ukhnem!”

1. Noble Sissle and Eubie Blake: “Love Will Find a Way”

1920 saw Black American performers finally allowed to speak in their own voice on record, not an assumed one or through a minstrel mediary; and 1921 was the year that the same thing happened, in an even more unlikely fashion, on (actually off-off-) Broadway. Just like “Crazy Blues,” Shuffle Along saw the respectable tenth cringe at its low-down humor and sexy swing, and later generations would reject the blacked-up comedians who enacted the ribbon-thin plot, but attendance records were hardly broken over some slapstick: as with all good shows, catchy melodies sold tickets. Sissle had sung with Jim Europe, and Blake had ragged up and down the coast, and their score, jaunty or rowdy or plaintive as necessary, made Shuffle Along the first jazz musical. But this, the lovers’ duet, is more besides: the first true Black American love song, unblemished by minstrelsy.

2. Bert Williams: “Brother Low Down”

As a new generation, the jazz generation represented here by Sissle and Blake, dawns, the previous generation, powered by ragtime, vaudeville patter, and Coon song, sets. Bert Williams, here from the beginning, bows off with this mordant character sketch of an itinerant street preacher begging for booze money and defensive about his preaching permit. It’s Coonery, in the generic sense of presenting a caricature of blackness for the amusement of whites, but it’s also part of a long Black (and Jewish) tradition satirizing religious hypocrisy and celebrating idiosyncratic locutions. Williams collapsed on stage in February 1922, his final public act being to raise a laugh from an unfeeling audience believing it was part of the show. Which as a metaphor for his career, and the entire century, is hard to better: Black suffering as just another disposable consumer product, entertainment to the end.

3. Ethel Waters: “There’ll Be Some Changes Made”

With a song pitched at the exact midpoint between Sissle and Blake’s middle-class reverie and Williams’ working-class satire, we meet one of the century’s legendary figures, one of the peerless voices of the jazz-song revolution already underway. Written by overlooked Black composer Benton Overstreet and underappreciated Black comedian Billy Higgins (both retrospectively pointed out by Langston Hughes as masters in their field), “There’ll Be Some Changes Made” lifts a line from “Crazy Blues” to produce a more overtly comic song about putting oneself back together after being walked out on by a no-good man. Waters’ sweet-and-sour voice neither overplays the comedy nor makes a blues tragedy of the material: one of the first great recordings of the Harlem Renaissance, its clear-eyedness and good humor about sexual relations between consenting adults makes yet another subject on which Black America reluctantly instructed its white counterpart.

4. Fanny Brice: “Second Hand Rose”

The B side of Victor 45263 would in time prove to be one of the most influential recordings in US musical history, arguably inventing the torch song as a genre, but we met “Mon homme” last year on the continent where it was even more influential. Anyway the A side, “Second Hand Rose,” is far truer to Fanny Brice’s stage persona: a nice but impoverished Jewish goil whose ignorance, forthrightness, and pretensions are played for laughs — but crucially, the laughs came not only from the presumed upper-crust WASP theater audience, but from her fellow immigrants. The rubber-faced, nervily dynamic performer born Fania Borach had headlined the Follies in 1910, when she was just nineteen; ten years later she was back with Ziegfeld and bigger than ever. Jolson and Cantor got better publicity, but of that generation of Jewish-American stars, she was the genius.

5. Marion Harris: “Look for the Silver Lining”

Three years on from the Great War, only one of the Powers was experiencing an economic boom. Americans have traditionally been optimists anyway, but the psychological moment was even more ripe for popular songs expounding on the tenets of the New Thought, a philosophical charlatanry whose descendants include the Power of Positive Thinking and the Secret. Even Al Jolson making a bid as the Apostle of Pep with “April Showers” wasn’t as complete a victory for the sunny-side-up brigade as the smash hit from Sally, the Jerome Kern musical which inaugurated the Flapper decade almost as neatly as Shuffle Along inaugurated the Harlem same. The lyric for “Look for the Silver Lining” functions beautifully in the show as the plucky title character’s never-say-die philosophy, but it’s that swoony Kern melody which has made it immortal, long after every silver lining has rusted over.

6. Van & Schenck: “Ain’t We Got Fun?”

A more cynical philosophy, if one just as indelibly associated with the new decade, is expressed here, in our first encounter with Tin Pan Alley composer Richard A. Whiting, whose career will cross our paths many times more. His skip-a-doodle melody ensured the song a long life in newsboy’s whistles, but it’s Gus Kahn’s witty, slangy lyric, highlighting the contrast between the jet-setting lifestyle promised in magazine advertisements and the actual poverty experienced by millions in a time of ever-sharper inequality, that made the tune so characteristic of its era that it’s been quoted everywhere from Gatsby to Zelig. The vaudeville harmonists Gus Van (baritone) and Joe Schenck (countertenor), Americans of German stock who happily embraced Irish, Italian, or Jewish stereotypes depending on the routine, had the hit record, and their beefy, down-the-middle rendition sells both the title’s cheerfulness and the verses’ shrug.

7. Sam Moore: “Laughing Rag”

As jazz became, seemingly overnight, the newest sensation in popular music, its forefather ragtime, freed from the burden of being the most advanced thing going, continued to mutate. This record, essential to any history of jazz or even country music, takes the Hawai'ian slack-key technique (though on the Octo-Chord, a custom-built eight-string guitar) and applies it to ragtime proper, approaching jazz at one end and predicting Nashville steel pedal workouts for generations to come at the other. His protegé Roy Smeck’s 1928 cover of “Laughing Rag” is canonical in Grand Ole Opry lore, but it is Virginia-born vaudevillian, eccentric, and (briefly) Follies star Sam Moore who sits at the crossroads of Hawai'ian and country music, and his ragtime will, as we will see, spread kudzu-like through the broad highways and quiet backwaters which make up all the musical permutations of the American South.

8. James P. Johnson: “Keep Off the Grass”

Another, and perhaps more consequential, mutation of ragtime was the strain developed by piano hustlers at Harlem rent parties, hired hands to make the joint bounce so the hosts could make rent, a strain which only made its way onto record in 1921. New Jersey native James P. Johnson was the acknowledged master of the new “stride” piano style, so named because of the distance the hands traveled in order to maintain the rock-solid rhythm and harmonic filigree. Comparison to the popular piano novelty of the day, “Kitten on the Keys,” is instructive: Johnson’s composition has a real low end, a greater chromatic range, and an ass-shaking drive. Where “Kitten” simpers, “Grass” slams, which is why stride looks forward to boogie-woogie and thence to rock & roll, and thus gains a measure of eternity. Novelty lives for a day; Black American jazz is forever.

9. Johnnie Dunn’s Original Jazz Hounds acc. Edith Wilson: “Nervous Blues”

The “Crazy Blues” blues craze continues apace; this overview, attempting to look in dozens of directions at once, can only skim the surface. Edith Wilson was an another all-around singer rather than a blues singer strictly speaking, and had only been professional for two years when she found herself swept up in Columbia’s dragnet. With Wilson singing a Perry Bradford composition for Johnnie Dunn, who had led Mamie Smith’s band, “Nervous Blues” is as straight a sequel to “Crazy Blues” as anything, including Mamie’s own voluminous output. The subject was in the zeitgeist anyway — popularizations of Freud claimed nerves as the trouble of the age, and nervous disorders were, along with urbanization and Jewishness, diagnosed as one of the three scourges of traditional values by reactionaries everywhere, including Hitler; in which climate, there’s something heroic about a Black woman owning her mental health.

10. Gertrude Saunders: “I’m Craving for That Kind of Love”

Edith Wilson’s primary claim to fame in the later 1920s would be her showcases in revues built around Florence Mills, the startling comet of Black excellence in music, dance and comedy who flashed so briefly across the Harlem Renaissance that she never recorded; but she will haunt these pages. Florence was catapulted to fame as a replacement for the soubrette role in Shuffle Along; the woman she replaced was Gertrude Saunders, whose most legendary achievement in later years was getting cold-cocked by Bessie Smith over a man; but here, singing the song that Florence would make her own within a year, she whoops and hollers, turning Sissle and Blake’s original tune almost unrecognizable in her performance of salacious, wild-child desire. It’s the sort of gleefully unhinged performance that would come to be associated with punk rock, and it’s all we have of her.

11. Eubie Blake: “Sounds of Africa”

As epochal as Shuffle Along was, it was not the only, or perhaps even the greatest, achievement of its composer in the year of his glory. “Sounds of Africa,” its title usually changed to “Charleston Rag” in later publication form, is one of the deathless piano solos of a decade in which the piano solo recording became an art form to itself. Blake’s heterogenous musical apprenticeship had included years playing for the high rollers in Atlantic City, one of the liminal spaces where white people consumed Black bodies, services, and art without making much distinction between them; generally unaware that those Black bodies were doing just as much consuming. “Sounds of Africa” features both a funky walking bassline and Debussy-like chromaticism, and it is ragtime pushing not just into furious, hard-rocking modernism, but into regions of pure sound. That you can dance to.

12. Carlos Gardel: “La copa del olvido”

Tango and jazz were experiencing simultaneous early golden ages in 1921, but the dynamics of the musics’ dissemination were quite different. Shuffle Along was a landmark theatrical event, the first jazz musical; meanwhile, Cuando un pobre se divierte, the play from which “La copa del olvido” became working-class dramatist and lyricist Alberto Vaccarezza’s first hit song, was only another of the hundreds of sainetes criollos, in which tango songs were de rigeur, being produced in Buenos Aires in those years. Gardel, the by now irreplaceable voice of tango, recording the song — and Enrique Delfino, who has appeared here frequently as a composer, providing the music — was a greater imprimatur than the show. Although neither Gardel’s tremulous performance nor Delfino’s sketchy melody make the song immortal: that’s the lyric, in which the singer calls for another round while he contemplates murdering his faithless lover.

13. Grupo do Moringa: “No rancho”

The vast majority of our visits to Brazil have been to Rio de Janeiro, where the port-town outbreaks of miscegenation, musical and otherwise, allowed such epochal musical traditions as the samba to flourish. But Brazil has always been much larger and more diverse than that; as one hint of which, over to composer Eduardo Souto, born in Rio but who consciously worked in all of the established Brazilian (and some foreign) musical fields. “No rancho” (in the countryside) is designated as a cateretê, by legend an ancient folkloric Amerindian dance, revived by São Paulo cosmopolites like vanguardist poet and novelist Mário de Andrade, who considered it one of the few authentic Brazilian traditions. Souto’s melodic and rhythmic sense, though, is anything but ancient, and such representations of countrified subaltern traditions given national mythological meaning by sophisticated urban tastemakers was hardly limited to Brazil.

14. Georgel: “La vipère”

Vincent Scotto, the great twentieth-century composer of French chanson réaliste, is by now a regular in these pages, but the interpreter is new to us, though in 1921 he was well-known to Parisian audiences. His pompadour and mincing stage manner was borrowed (with blessings) from Félix Mayol, and his choice of repertoire owed something to music-hall legend Harry Fragson, but between the wars Georgel far outstripped his old masters as one of the key voices of les années folles. “La vipère” is about one of Scotto’s (and popular culture’s) standbys, the female  viper, who tempts the young man away from work, home, and family, to keep him in misery while she sells her body. He gets his revenge in the final verse in classic Grand Guignol fashion, but the gruesome narrative isn’t really the point: Georgel’s half-sobbing, half-humorous delivery exemplifies the (French) decade.

15. Orchester mit Refraingesang: “Das Lila Lied”

A landmark in queer media, “Das Lila Lied” (the lilac song) was very likely the first gay anthem in Western popular music. Deviance, sexual and otherwise, had long been a subject of chanson, but lyricist Kurt Schwabach and composer Mischa Spoliansky — two Jews working in Berlin’s legendary queer-friendly kabarett scene — dedicated their lied to Magnus Hirschfeld, the researcher whose Institute for Sexual Science was the first organization in the Western world to advocate for the rights of homosexual and transgender citizens. The chorus, which begins and ends “We are different from the others,” is as much protest song as sentimental education, the way pop usually works; but although the Weimar Republic officially protected homosexuality, it was still so taboo that Spoliansky used a pen name, and as far as I can ascertain, the players and singer of this, the first recording, remain uncredited.

16. Kandel’s Orchestra: “A Zoi Feift Min Un a Schweiger”

By 1921, the most modern and up-to-date form of popular music was the dance band, playing uptempo, lightly syncopated but not actually jazzy music with orchestral instruments. Paul Whiteman was the clear leader, but there were similar outfits in every city in the nation, and much of the rest of the world. Which was nothing new to the Eastern Europe-born klezmorim of New York, who had been working in similarly-sized outfits, and often at much faster tempos, for decades without being embraced by uptown goyim hotel dancefloors. Clarinetist Harry Kandel, born in the Ukraine, was one of the great klezmer bandleaders of the era, and on this recording, “Putting it Over on Mother in Law,” he pushes his orchestra to such whirling, piercing heights, with the drummer knocking regular off-beats, that together they predict not only swing, but even elements of free jazz.

17. Achilleas Poulos: “Kamomatou”

Relatively little is known about proto-rebetiko singer Achilleas Poulos, save that he was born in the northwestern Balıkesir province of Turkey (then the Ottoman Empire), and emigrated to the United States in 1913. His powerful voice and wide repertoire made him a briefly popular recording artist in the Ottoman-Greek diasporic community, recording for just ten years before falling silent until his death in 1970. In this early recording, issued by an independent Armenian label in New York, the stark instrumentation (Poulos himself played the oud) creates a surprisingly modern backdrop for his arresting, emotional voice as he sings a lament of unrequited love, full of ancient, stark imagery like flames, clouds, and darkness. “Kamomatou” (lit. mischief-maker) can be translated as coquette or temptress, a woman who makes hay of men, and it’s been used frequently as a title in twentieth-century Greek songs.

18. Miss Indubala: “Ore Majhi Tori Hetha”

It’s virtually impossible to fit most Asian recording activity into the models I’ve been building of emergent Western popular musics; this recording by a young woman who would, a decade later, become one of the early stars of Bollywood, both on screen and in playback recording, was not so much a remarkable record in its moment as it is a historical marker, a signpost on the road to emergent modernism. The droning backdrop of the harmonium, introduced to the subcontinent by Victorian colonizers and still despised by classical purists in the early 20th century, is one element of modernity: another is the parenthetical (Jangla) on the label, indicating that the performance is a combination of two or more traditional ragas. The third is Indubala Devi herself, trained in the vanishing courtesan-singer tradition of Kolkata, granting herself immortality by saying her name on record.

19. Jacob Gegna: “A Tfileh Fun Mendel Beilis”

In 1911, the body of a young boy was found mutilated on the outskirts of Kiev. Authorities arrested a local factory superintendent on suspicion of his having murdered the child in a secret Jewish blood ritual. After Mendel Beilis insisted on clearing his name, refusing a general clemency for convicted felons, his trial was one of the sensations of the late Tsarist era. The most infamous blood libel of the twentieth century swept up honest investigators and reporters who were threatened with dismissal or worse for defending the innocent man; Beilis was finally acquitted after two years of a horrific media circus, followed particularly closely by the millions of Jewish immigrants in the United States. Jacob Gegna, a violinist who had himself immigrated from the Ukraine the following year, cut a single record in 1921, including this moving tribute to the innocent Beilis.

20. Michael Coleman: “The Shaskeen”

Traditional Irish music has rarely taken up much space in these pages, and will continue to do so; my emphasis on novelty, hybridity, and pop ethics over tradition, purity, and folk ethics means that there’s rarely much space for purely local traditions, no matter how sentimentally widespread. Still, I have two ears and a heart. Probably the most influential traditional Irish musician of the twentieth century, Michael Coleman was a remarkable exponent of the Sligo fiddle tradition, playing fast-paced, polyphonic reels that allow him and his piano accompanist to sound like a full band. “The Shaskeen” was one of his first records, a corruption of the Irish seisgeann or marshland, and its sheer velocity makes plain the hypothesis that American vernacular music gets its funk from its African heritage and its recklessness from its Irish. And in December 1921, Ireland was free.

21. Antonio and Luigi Russolo: “Corale”

1. Mamie Smith and Her Jazz Hounds: “Crazy Blues”

Everything to this moment has been prologue: minstrelsy, marches, ragtime, dance crazes from South America or the Pacific, all has merely made straight the paths. Today the prophecy is fulfilled in your hearing. The record that shook the foundations of the earth, the record that won the first battle in a war most people didn’t yet know was happening, the record in the shadow of which all that has happened since still dwells. “Ain’t had nothing but bad news,” but the joy and energy and racket that propels her is a grand fuck-you to all false merchants of that news.

2. Al Jolson: “Swanee”

Another record important for different, and lesser, reasons. Where “Crazy Blues” is African-American musicians finally presenting their vernacular music unmediated by white caricature, “Swanee” is white (well, Jewish) Americans claiming a new and modern identity directly through the caricature of blacks. It’s  a multigenerational caricature, as the 22-year-old composer (meet George Gershwin) quotes the original minstrel songwriter, and the performer, at his reckless height, has abandoned any pretense of imitation: his caricature, though performed in blackface, yowling cretinously for Mammy, is more self-parody than any other. The song’s melodic verve creates the future even as its lyrics plunder the past.

3. Baiano & Izaltina: “Cangerê”

As the Jazz Age begins, so too does the golden age of samba, with this slangy underground duet, the only known composition by Chico de Baiana, or the Bahia woman’s boy. “Cangerê,” said to be derived from an African language, is a specific ritual in the Afro-Brazilian Feitiço religion; the man and woman, arguing as usual in pop duets, threaten each other with the supernatural, while the samba rhythm works its own ineluctable magic on the listener. Two instrumental versions of the song were also cut in 1920, and the rhythmic power of the Banda da Casa Edison’s remains galvanizing.

4. Carlos Gardel: “Milonguita”

We have met many classic tango songs already, and will meet many more; but tango too is kicking into a new gear at the start of a new decade. “Milonguita,” by Argentine composer Enrique Delfino and Uruguayan lyricist Samuel Linnig, is one of the crown jewels of the Golden Age of Tango, never more exquisitely rendered than by Gardel’s burnished pipes. Full of the lunfardo slang that characterized the Buenos Aires underworld, it’s a portrait of a young woman driven to perdition by wine, men, and tango; her very name, “little-milonga,” refers to the dancehalls where the tango corrupted souls.

5. Mistinguett: “Mon homme”

Of the four canonical twentieth-century renditions of this song, the original is the least well-known; but Fanny Brice, Billie Holiday, and Édith Piaf sang other songs. The shining star of the Folies-Bergère between 1900 and 1930, Mistinguett sang many others too, but she may as well not have; this song, whether called “Mon homme” or “My Man,” has far superseded her own limited fame, and dragged her along rather cruelly in its wake. But pay attention to her studied lightness and flippancy, far from Brice’s and Piaf’s tragic posturing or Holiday’s bitter resignation: self-pity would be unfitting of her stardom.

6. Maurice Chevalier: “Oh! Maurice”

Mistinguett had been the toast of Paris since the Belle Époque; meanwhile, her nearest male equivalent, thirteen years her junior, was just rising to fame in 1920. (As though to exemplify the Parisian spirit, they had been lovers since 1911.) His first recorded hit, “Oh! Maurice” is an orgy of ribald egotism, a rhapsody on his masculine charms and the flutters into which he sends the female of the species. It’s tongue-in-cheek, of course, as all music-hall songs (of which it is a cousin) are; but it also owes its insouciant verve to the brio drifting from across the Atlantic.

7. Salvatore Papaccio: “Scettico Blues”

As does this. To be sure, it’s only called a blues because anything with even a slightly downbeat view of life was called a blues in 1920 (the copyright registration books were full to bursting of “blues”), but although structurally it’s what it sounds, a canzone napoletana, it’s also a witty, cynical plaint about the unfairness and falsity of life; and the see-sawing melody, though it doesn’t sound much like the blues strictly defined, owes more to ragtime-inflected American stage music than to traditional Italian bel canto. When pop singer Mina covered it in 1976, nostalgia couldn’t entirely obscure existentialism.

8. Lucille Hegamin & Harris’ Blues and Jazz Seven: “The Jazz Me Blues”

“Crazy Blues” had an immediate, electrifying effect on the recording industry; then as now, the most overwhelming flattery of success was imitation. It would take longer for authentic blues sensations, as measured by live performance in venues whites knew nothing of, to get on record, but refined generalist Black performers like Lucille Hegamin were pressed into immediate service to fill the obvious gap in the market. “Jazz Me Blues” was written by the young Black songwriter Tom Delaney, and its slangy but chaste evocation of the pleasures of the new groove under the sun is spun juicily in her mouth.

9. Bert Williams: “Unlucky Blues”

He was there at the beginning of the century, making outlandish grunts and twisting a love song into travesty; and he remains here at the century’s maturation, in some ways only catching up to where he was then. His voice is weathered with age and experience, the humorous glint in his eye undimmed but his face still poker-straight. Although the blues has now exploded into commercial popularity as feminine tragedy, his throaty plaintiveness looks forward to the masculine rural blues which will overshadow them. The song is Broadway pop, not blues, but his soul has always known the flatted fifth.

10. Nora Bayes: “The Broadway Blues”

It’s not often that I’ll privilege a recording by a white vaudevillian over a more famous one by an epochal Black act, but in this case the Sissle and Blake record is a bit too jaunty and careless, which only makes sense, as they didn’t write it. Bayes, a veteran Jewish coon singer, takes it at a drag, and is no longer burlesquing Blackness with weird hiccoughs, just singing, with the authority of age, a song about the pallor of the limelight. And with hindsight it’s hard to believe the aforementioned Gershwin kid didn’t have an ear on the orchestration.

11. Edith Day: “Alice Blue Gown”

The upheaval among the downmarket forms of musical entertainment, as authentic Black music begins to challenge the galumphing jeers of minstrelsy, did not necessarily have any immediate effect on the upmarket musical theater, which remained prissy, stodgy, and sentimental: but perhaps not quite unrecoverably foreign to us as it may sound today. “Alice Blue Gown” is meant to be wistful: in the show Irene, it is a song by a young woman nostalgic for her childhood dress of the shade named for President Roosevelt’s daughter. Chelsea Clinton would occupy the same cultural space today; and similar nostalgias are at work.

12. Paul Whiteman & His Ambassador Orchestra: “Whispering”

It is perhaps no accident that the “King of Jazz” cut his first record the same year that the real first jazz record was cut, and anyone curious about understanding the currents and cultures at work in the early 1920s would do well to study the sonic, rhythmic, tonal, and (yes) verbal discrepancies between “Crazy Blues” and “Whispering.” The Ambassador Orchestra is crisp, slick, not a hair out of place, not a glimpse of human feeling. Not only easy listening but Kraftwerk is predicted by their well-drilled rhythms; it is perhaps no accident either that Čapek’s robots emerged this year.

13. Ted Lewis Jazz Band: “When My Baby Smiles at Me”

While we’ve met Ted Lewis before, this more conventional dance-band number, with parts portioned out fairly among the band’s instrumentalists and his shabby-genteel crooning avant la lettre, was his first big hit, both on record and (helped by his star appearance at the Greenwich Village Follies of 1920) on sheet music. Compared to “O,” his klezmer-derived clarinet is more integrated into the tune’s jazz gestalt, and the way forward to Benny Goodman is clearly pointed; but there are still elements of ODJB-like novelty, as in the “I cry… I cry” refrain towards the end, squawked in parody by the band.

14. Ben Hokea Players: “Honolulu March”

A star instrumentalist, bandleader, and educator whose first records were also made in 1919, Ben Hokea was a Hawaiʻian-born guitarist who, on coming to the mainland, made his home base in Toronto, and his slack-key technique, more peppy and jazzy than dreamy and wistful, was instrumental in making hula music one of the everyday sounds of the 1920s, not just an exotica fad of the decade prior. The traditional song his band cuts here is taken at such a raggy, stuttering clip that the pedal steel swing of the Nashville-oriented decades to come is conjured by its streamlined, modern drive.

15. María Teresa Vera & Manuel Corona: “El yambú guaguancó”

Although we’ve heard from María Teresa Vera before, it was as a generalist singer covering a popular theater song; with this recording, she and her trova mentor, Manuel Corona, finally introduce the rumba proper (as distinct from the sones marketed as rhumbas in the 1930s) to recorded history. Yambú and guaguancó are both varieties of rumba, and the wordless chorus is characteristic of yambú. Vera’s verses are from the ancient storehouse of Cuban verse and symbol which, like blues verses, were mixed and matched to make up a song; but the insinuating rhythm, with its bell-clear clave, is what moves.

16. Zaki Murad: “Zuruni Kulli Sana Marra”

Because my focus has been (and will remain) primarily on Western music, I have paid scant attention to the deep wonders of Egyptian music, on record since before the century turned. Zaki Murad, of Jewish descent like many early Arabic-language recording stars, had been a successful recording artist since 1910, touring the Arabic-speaking world, and it is unjust that only this magnificent taqtuqa, “Visit Me Every Day,” by the legendary secular composer Sayyid Darwish (often considered the father of Egyptian popular music) represents him here. Do remember Murad’s last name, however; his daughter will join us later in the century.

17. Mishka Ziganoff: “Odessa Bulgar”

The Jewish diaspora, filtered through the sieve of immigration and collected in the tenements of New York, was always many peoples instead of one. Mishka Ziganoff was born in Odessa under the Russian Empire and emigrated to the US around the age of ten; his family settled in Brooklyn, and he became a virtuoso accordionist. His heritage was a jumble: he spoke Yiddish, but considered himself a Gypsy and communed as a Christian. In the ancient tradition of the musician as outsider, he managed to combine multiple interpretations of identity and home into a comforting tapestry, calling everyone to dance.

18. Abe Schwartz & Sylvia Schwartz: “National Hora Pt. 1”

Meanwhile, the most popular Jewish bandleader of the period, while cutting many lively freilach tunes that remain deathless today, paused to record something more quiet and perhaps personal: accompanied only by his daughter on piano, he fiddles a longing, keening improvisation in the “tzigane” (Roma) tradition, and wraps it up in what to Western European ears is an Irish jig. Klezmer scholars have declared this side a one-off, not a rendition of any familiar tune (Pt. 2 is better known as “Der Gasn Nigun”), and it’s impossible for me not to hear it as a thrilling expression of American pluralism.

19. Enrico Caruso: “I’ m’arricordo ’e Napule”

In a year, the Voice will be no more. This isn’t his last recording (that’s a selection from a Mass by Rossini), but it’s his last great canzone napoletana, a brand-new song of nostalgia and reverie about his hometown of Naples. More than anyone, he was the greatest star of the first age of recording, and as he dims, a new generation of stars is beginning to glow. Soon their brightness will eclipse his own; but few of them will retain anything like his name recognition over the years. A century later, and Caruso is still synonymous with beautiful singing.

20. Anita Patti Brown: “Villanelle”

1. Lieut. Jim Europe’s 369th U.S. Infantry “Hell Fighters” Band: “That Moaning Trombone”

On February 17, the all-colored (Black and Puerto Rican) 369th Regiment paraded up Fifth Avenue, home to Harlem. Nicknamed the “Hell Fighters” because they never lost a man, a captive, or an inch of ground, they were twenty times as good as their white counterparts, and got something less than a tenth the respect. Their band was led by James Reese Europe, famous before the war as the Castles’ bandleader, now pushing Black vernacular music into new territory with military discipline. His opulent arrangements and quick-cut rhythms were cut short two months after this recording by the penknife of a drummer lashing out at perceived disrespect.

2. Ted Lewis Band: “O”

Two years after the First Jazz Record, and jazz is already widely (mis)understood not as urban Black southern music characterized by improvisation and rhythm but as white novelty music characterized by instruments making unusual sounds and, okay, rhythm, or at least tempo. Bandleader and clarinetist Ted Lewis was Jewish, but his roots were in small-town Ohio rather than immigrant New York, so his approximation of klezmer on the instrumental break is as much a put-on (and as utterly sincere) as his adoption of Black musical forms. In a sense this is the first record of the 1920s, an airy dance-band tune that shimmies towards frivolous transcendence.

3. Eddie Cantor: “You’d Be Surprised”

Two years ago, Cantor introduced himself here as a geeky young dope awestruck by a self-sufficient woman; and now he has become the mouthpiece for Irving Berlin’s portrait of a geeky young dope who is, Revenge of the Nerds-style, an unexpectedly (and perhaps not very ethically) efficacious lover. It’s a gender-reversed take on Al Jolson’s sly contemporary hit “I’ll Say She Does,” which breezily quoted the flamboyantly ribald Eva Tanguay. Though Jolson was the more senior and bigger star, Cantor was coming up fast, and his quicker wit and ability to kid himself as well as his material gave him a head start on the future.

4. Sophie Tucker: “Ev'rybody Shimmies Now”

After a recording drought of seven years, Sophie Tucker returned to the horn in 1918, and on the precipice of the Jazz Age, aged 32, she has fully adopted the big, brassy, middle-aged persona she would carry into the age of swing, and rock beyond. The shoulder-shaking shimmy was still a novelty, an orientalism probably borrowed from Black dancers, and recently popularized to scandalous effect by Polish-born Ziegfeld girl Gilda Gray. Tucker’s reportage of its popularity is oddly breathless for her, as if she’s shimmying while recording; but the wheeling, crashing string section is a reminder that Black-imitating music was not yet entirely identified with horns.

5. Marion Harris: “A Good Man Is Hard to Find”

It was round about this time that blonde flapper Marion Harris began to be billed as the “Queen of Blues Singers,” a piece of publicity she did little to discourage, but which would provoke a certain yet-unrecorded singer to bill herself as their Empress instead. This song, written by Black vaudevillian Eddie Green and published by W. C. Handy, would receive its most well-known reading in the Empress’s voice. Here, though, the usually-melodramatic Harris takes it as a comic song, and twists her voice up into vaudevillian Coonerisms while a marimba plunks cheerfully away in the back half. Six years later, Flannery O’Connor will be born.

6. Bert Williams: “When the Moon Shines on the Moonshine”

The single most misguided piece of legislation in US history became law on October 28, to take effect January 1st, 1920. As a symbol for the decade of excess, folly, and high spirits that it inaugurated, Prohibition was almost novelistically apt; but riding high on the inflated prosperity of armament profits, the US mostly treated it as an occasion for jokes. Bert Williams even allowed as he’d sing for the occasion, forgoing his usual exquisitely-timed oratory for notes warbled and wheezed, with a crackerjack vaudeville band making comic hay of every pause. In his hands, minstrelsy becomes a private joke, and then a public one.

7. The Kalaluki Hawaiian Orchestra: “Hawaiian Nights”

The deracination of Hawaiian music, four years ago an exciting novelty, now just one flavor among the modern many, continues apace, with this waltz-time piece composed by itinerant hack pianist Lee Roberts and performed by a group so conspicuously free of recorded membership history that it was probably Columbia’s house band for Hawaiian records; Lawrence Kalaluki’s name survives otherwise only as a reputable instructor of Hawaiian music in contemporary advertising. The Moloch-machine of the recording industry fed on Hawaiian music just like it was doing on blues, jazz, minstrelsy, or tango, and spat out a streamlined product purpose-built for exotic, but not too exotic, reverie.

8. Choro Pixinguinha: “Sofres Porque Queres”

Although samba has most recently come to our attention, Brazilian music was far from being all samba all the time (and indeed never would be), and music like this aching choro melody over tango rhythms was still a plurality of Brazilian compositional activity. Pixinguinha, an Afro-Brazilian flautist born Alfredo de Rocha Viana, wrote it as a lament—the title translates to either “you suffer because you desire” or “you suffer because you want to”—but plays it rather jauntily, letting the minor-key chord changes of seven-string guitarist Tute (Arthur de Souza Nascimento) evoke the title’s heartbreak while his flute flutters on in divine unconcern.

9. Orquesta Típica Canaro: “El Africano”

We have met bandoneonist Juan “Pacho” Maglio, pianist Roberto Firpo, and singer Carlos Gardel, and now, with the introduction of the orchestra típica led by Urugayan violinist Francisco Canaro, the major players of Argentine tango going into the music’s 1920s Golden Age are gathered. Firpo’s airy, melodic, sentimental tango is a marked contrast with Canaro’s earthier, more sensuous style: as in this instrumental milonga, emphasizing the rhythmic Afro-Argentine foundations of tango music. Unlike Firpo, who was more at home in the world of decorous Spanish theatrical entertainment, Canaro also played hot jazz á là norteamericano with a small combo, and his tango reflects that modernity.

10. Floro y Miguel: “Se Acabó la Choricera”

Afro-Cuban rhythms are eternal: where even the Black jazz of 1919 was relatively restrictive in is rhythmic inventory, the clave pulse on this trova song is draggingly offset by the guitar part, leaving generous spaces in the rhythm that a later generation would understand as funk, the holes into which bodily motion fits. Floro Zorrilla was a trovador who had been recording stentorian ballads for a decade before he got a new partner in Miguel Zaballa; this song, supposedly written by a nineteen-year-old Santiago drummer nicknamed Chori (he would win greater fame a decade later), is one of the deathless Cuban sones of its generation.

11. Trío González: “Cielito Lindo”

The scarcity of Mexican music in these pages should not be considered a judgment on the poverty of Mexican musical culture over the last decade; but the instability of a drawn-out revolution, which in some regions almost amounted to civil war, meant that relatively little recording took place. In 1919, utopian peasant freedom fighter Emiliano Zapata was assassinated by ambush, as the revolutionary Carranza government consolidated its control; and this nineteenth-century folk song which, with its instantly-recognizable “ay, ay, ay, ay” refrain, has long been considered one of several unofficial Mexican national anthems, was first recorded—in New York City, pit stop for travelling corrideros.

12. Raquel Meller: “Acuérdate de Mí”

The Spanish theatrical genre cuplé could be bawdy or satiric; less often, it was sentimental, as in this aging diva’s demand to be remembered by the man who has thrown her over for another. The glorious irony is that it was Aragón-born, Barcelona-bred diva Raquel Meller’s breakout song, at the tender age of thirty. She had been on stage since her early teens, after running away from a convent, but was never much of a soubrette—proper divadom takes time. Everything came together at once, however: she semi-scandalously married Guatemalan modernist poet Enrique Gómez Carrillo and starred in her first silent film the same year.

13. John Steel: “A Pretty Girl Is Like a Melody”

With 1919, we mark the ten-year anniversary of Isadore Baline’s appearance as a songwriter in these pages. On top of the showbiz world, he did that which everyone did who found themselves in such rarified air, and joined the Ziegfeld machine. The Follies of 1919 trumpeted “songs by Irving Berlin” as the major coup it was, and this song, written as spackle to fill gaps between girls promenading semi-nude to the classical canon, became the Follies theme ever since. John Steel, a tenor of much force if no personality, sang it in the show, and recorded it; but even from his adenoids, it’s maddeningly unforgettable.

14. Art Hickman & His Orchestra: “Rose Room”

Where Ted Lewis was taking the comic squawks and energy of the ODJB into more joyful territory, other white dance-band musicians were merging it with the Castles’ high-class fox-trot of the early ’10s, beefing up their orchestras and emphasizing sweetness of melody, heterogenous instrumentation, and unrelenting pep. Dimly aware of the smutty connotations of the word “jazz,” they tried to call their music something else: one sober nomination, Synco-Pep, epitomizes the totally unbluesy, but uptempo and syncopated modern dance music promulgated by thousands of nightlife orchestra’s like Hickman’s, who played the Rose Room in San Francisco’s St. Francis Hotel. A charming period piece, skilfully done.

15. Sergei Rachmaninoff: “Prelyudiya”

In 1919, Rachmaninoff was a middle-aged refugee of the Bolshevik Revolution, playing his hits for audiences for whom Russian Romanticism was an an exotic occasion for sentiment. The Prelude in C-Sharp Minor, composed when he was a nineteen-year-old conservatory graduate, is charged with the gloomy emotionalism of adolescence while still being relatively easy to play, which has kept it popular with listeners over the last century; by the time he made this first recording of it, he loathed it as only an ambitious and serious-minded artist saddled with an early one-hit wonder can. Still, it kept him clothed and fed, so he kept playing it.

16. Heinrich Schlusnus with Richard Strauss: “Ruhe, meine Seele!”

Richard Strauss was ten years older than Rachmaninoff when he entered the studio with the great lyric baritone Heinrich Schulsnus to play piano on one of his greatest lieder. He had composed the setting of socialist poet Karl Henckell’s early self-epitaph as a gift for his bride in 1894; and while his output in the oughts and teens of the twentieth century had been among the most advanced operatic and symphonic work in the world, the limitations of recording technology meant that a song like this emotionally conflicted summation of life in the world, alternately raging and accepting, got onto disc before the world changed.

17. M. N. Ghosh: “Baul”

This being only our second visit to the Indian subcontinent in nineteen years is inexcusable, given the volume of recording taking place, but understandable, given its relative lack of documentation in the West. M. N. Ghosh, who also recorded as Monta Babu, depending on the religious affiliation of the music he was singing, was a popular Bengali recording artist through the early 1930s. “Baul” seems to be a reference to the “madman” mystic religious tradition of the same name centered in the Bengal region (what is now eastern India and Bangladesh), and the shaking, rattling percussion that accompanies Ghosh is both ancient and strikingly modern.

18. Marika Papagika: “Hrissaido”

Perhaps the greatest exponent of Greek and Anatolian music in the United States between World War I and the Depression, Marika Papagika was born on the Greek island Kos off the Turkish coast, found some success in the dying Ottoman Empire as a café-amam singer, and emigrated to the US at twenty-five with her husband Gus Papagika, who nearly always accompanied her on cimbalom. This slow and evocative tsamiko (a slow-motion Greek folk dance), with the Papagikas joined by cello and violin, is superb evidence for the power, emotion, and authority of her voice, one of the great voices in vernacular music of the era.

19. Henry T. Burleigh: “Go Down Moses”

1. Al Jolson: “Rock-a-Bye Your Baby with a Dixie Melody”

The old never simply gives way to the new; generally it tries to jump on the bandwagon. So this, a Coon song if ever there was one—Jolson performed it in blackface, rolling his eyes grotesquely as he yammered about Mammy—is infected with the new jazz spirit. Which was understood as just another way to perform blackness, a new arrow in the quiver of mockery. But there’s a freedom, an insouciance, a refusal to be denigrated, in jazz that was missing from the Coon repertoire. It’s a song about missing the South, but it’s not about missing the plantation; it’s such a modern jive that Aretha Franklin recorded it in 1961.

2. Bert Williams: “O Death, Where Is Thy Sting?”

If the first twenty years of the century have been dominated in these pages by anyone, it has been by Bert Williams, whose exaggeratedly patient drawl denoted mere slow wit to his mass (white) audience but connoted evasion, veiled self-definition, and a Bartlebian form of refusal to those with ears to hear. The text of this theoretically comic monologue is straight Coonery, the narrator a blasphemous, illiterate creature of appetite, but Williams’ delivery, with its pauses and ironic inflections, turns it into something like a philosophy, an acknowledgement of the riggedness of religion’s respectability racket, and a pattern-card for the next century of popular music, with all its sympathy for the devil.

3. Marion Harris: “After You’ve Gone”

By 1918, the blues, both as a sheet-music faux-folklorism and as a genuinely Black tent-show holler, had been a part of the popular imagination long enough that they were beginning to transform the climate of popular song more broadly. Plenty of white imitators were producing blues (or blueish) songs, as we have seen and will continue to, but the largely-forgotten Black team of Turner Layton and Henry Creamer were among the first to take up the unabashedly adult themes of blues—infidelity, heartbreak, revenge—and put them into a song without overt Black signifiers. Marion Harris’s voice evokes still-unrecorded blues shouters, but the distinction between Black and white singing is collapsing.

4. Dúo Gardel-Razzano, Orquesta Roberto Firpo: “El Moro”

The speed with which the once-unacceptable Gardel had become adopted by the tango establishment can be seen by the fact that not a year after “Mi Noche Triste,” he was, with his harmonizing partner José Razzano, recording with the most popular and esteemed bandleader in South America, Roberto Firpo. “El Moro,” adapted by Gardel from a well-known poem by nineteenth-century statesman and belletrist Juan María Gutiérrez, is less a song of urban tango than a song of the pampas gaucho, roughly equivalent in Argentine national mythology to the US cowboy or frontiersman; the moro of the title refers to the singer’s beloved Arabian (i.e. Moorish) horse, apparently lost to an Indian.

5. Bahiano: “O Malhador”

The second “samba carnavalesca” in as many years recorded by Baiano, singing a song composed by Black sambista Donga and written in carioca slang by journalist and playwright Mauro de Almeida. Although the true Afr0-Brazilian samba bateria (drum line) of carnaval marches would not appear on record for another generation, the inclusion of ragged, funky percussion during the refrain here is in its own way as revolutionary as any record recorded during this revolutionary decade. And the spare instrumentation, with its prominent moaning clarinet, is a reminder that the entire Atlantic coast of the Americas is a continuum of musical borrowing, innovation, and expression: it could be jazz, calypso, or klezmer.

6. Jewish Orchestra: “Der Shtiler Bulgar”

The reigning king of freilach (now klezmer) clarinet was Naftule Brandwein, a thirty-four year old clarinettist born in the Russian Empire (now Ukraine); having emigrated to New York in 1908, he was by 1918 regarded as one of the major Jewish musical stars of the era. There is no way to be positive that his is the clarinet on this record—recordings aimed at immigrant populations were rarely carefully documented in these years—but it sounds likely; he was playing with Abe Schwartz (whose outfit the Jewish Orchestra was) around then, and his lively, expressive, and free style fits with the irrepressible sounds that belie the title “the quiet Bulgarian [dance].”

7. Nora Bayes: “Regretful Blues”

If Harris’s recording of “After You’ve Gone” represents a sophisticated mainstreaming of still-germinal blues song, this, by aging Jewish vaudeville queen Nora Bayes, represents the crass, unsophisticated adoption of blues by unembarrassable showbiz lifers. As sung by her in George M. Cohan’s second patriotic revue in as many years, it’s a hokey, crude imitation of blues sentiment smashed shamelessly together with brainless rah-rah wartime jingoism. Bayes’ delivery veers wildly between full-on Coon, with hiccuping vocal breaks and unseemly squawks (which is one origin of country music’s high lonesome yodels) and the straight big-voiced belting of vaudeville; compared to Harris she’s hopelessly out-of-date, but it remains, unaccountably, a hell of a record.

8. Wilbur C. Sweatman’s Original Jazz Band: “Everybody’s Crazy ’bout the Doggone Blues, But I’m Happy”

After having a hit with “After You’re Gone,” Layton and Creamer could publish anything; among their sheet-music successes was this little-remembered rag, an early instance of Black irony about white adoption of Black musical forms. When Black St. Louis bandleader and executor of the late Scott Joplin’s estate Wilbur Sweatman took it up, though, it was no longer a mere rag. Sweatman was famous on the vaudeville circuit for playing as many as three clarinets at once, and this raucous, giddy recording is as much jazz as ragtime; the instruments swerve and slide all over the beat, and where the ODJB’s jass was tinged with mockery, here there’s nothing but joy.

9. Eddie Nelson: “Tishomingo Blues”

Spencer Williams, like Turner Layton, Shelton Brooks, and the up-and-coming Eubie Blake, was an early Black jazz composer whose compositions ended up outliving his name, but who deserves to be remembered not just as an antecedent to the likes of Ellington, but as a peer to white contemporaries like Kern or Berlin. This was one of his early hits, a going-back-to-the-South song singing of nostalgia for Black community and solidarity rather than for the Mammy of minstrel caricature; this minstrelly recording, prominently featuring a slide whistle (because Blackness is goofy, you see), is perhaps not the song’s best foot forward, but it’s a document of one way African-American music was received.

10. Billy Murray: “K-K-K-Katy”

The European War (later upgraded to World War ostensibly due to proxy battles in colonial territory, but really because Europe was considered the world) ended, after five years of promised glory churning into mechanized slaughter, with more than a whiff of farce. The latecoming United States mostly memorialized it in jokey songs like this one, where a boy must take leave of a girl and such is the blushing virginal yokeldom on both sides that a stammer gets turned into a hook. Murray, whose sharp, nasal voice recorded well and so who has appeared indiscriminately in these pages, was perhaps best suited to ditties like this, where no one gets hurt.

11. Arthur Fields: “Oh! How I Hate to Get Up in the Morning”

The second military draft in United States history caught up the most famous and valuable songwriter in New York, who had only become a naturalized citizen earlier that year. But the Army, knowing well what a prize Irving Berlin was, did not send him to Europe, but had him stage a musical, Yip Yip Yaphank, to raise funds and recruit the boys. This song, an eternal classic in sentiment if not in historical context, was the big hit; Berlin himself performed it in uniform (and would do so again a quarter-century later). The recording by ex-vaudevillian Fields benefits from the witty orchestration Victor could afford to lavish, and so pop looms.

12. Claire Waldoff: “Ach Jott, Was Sind die Männer Dumm”

German music, so dominant in the nineteenth-century symphonic and operatic traditions, was slow to adapt to the nimbler forms of twentieth century pop. Our first encounter with German popular song is this kabarett piece by an unconventional performer, roughly translated “Oh Gawd, How Stupid Men Are.” Waldoff (born Clara Wortmann) was a prominent member of Berlin’s gay milieu, wearing masculine attire and living openly with her lesbian partner. Like much of her most popular material, this was written for her by prolific theatrical composer Walter Kollo: dense with Berlinerisch slang, it’s a sneering indictment of masculine privilege and misogyny, while Waldoff’s trademark growl points forward to Lotte Lenya and Nina Hagen.

13. Félix Mayol: “Ell’ Prend l’Boul’vard Magenta”

French popular music, meanwhile, was only going from strength to strength in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The only country in the world where Decadence was a populist movement (with all the attendant ills of colonialism), French music-hall, chanson réaliste, and cabaret could be stultifyingly sexualized by repressed US or UK standards. This Vincent Scotto song, for instance, recounts a man’s deathly passion for a streetwalker; that it was performed on stage and on record by the mincingly effeminate Félix Mayol, the kind of career homosexual who was all but out, is the kind of perverse jouissance that made contemporary French literature synonymous with pornography in the English-speaking world.

14. Giorgos Chelmis: “Den Se Thelo Pia”

Greek theatrical music and popular song (which as in every nation are not the same thing, but feed each other continually) was undergoing a renaissance in the late 10s, as the Turkish expulsion of ethnic Greeks (and genocide of Armenians) fed Athens and the other Hellenic metropolises with a new population of culturally varied and restless laborers, artists, and customers. I can’t find anything to confirm that this Giorgos Chelmis is the one who was married to the great Greek stage actress Marika Kotopouli, but whether or no, this café-amam song about the sensual misery of failed love is a lovely recording, and one more clue on the trail of rebetika.

15. Maâlma Titine: “Wahad el Ghozal Rit el Youm”

The tradition of Judeo-Algerian music is very old, older perhaps than the Umayyad Caliphate which stretched from northern Spain to Kashmir in the eighth century. The highly developed interfaith musical traditions of Muslim Andalusia took root in North Africa following the Reconquista, and after centuries of colonialism, it was the French who first made recorded documents of Algerian music. Maâlma (an Arabic honorific) Titine (a French diminutive) was a young Jewish performer, primarily a pianist but also a singer, in Algiers; the song seems to be Algerian folk poetry that has been recorded in many different ways. It is not chaabi, but it is a starting point for its urban modernity.

16. Enrico Caruso: “Sei Morta Nella Vita Mia”

The Voice will be with us for only three years more; as his repertoire mostly consisted of music much older than these pages’ focus, we’ve heard from him less often than his importance and broad popularity during the first two decades of the century would indicate. But with this canzone, written by the prolific Mario Pasquale Costa circa 1895, he demands to be heard as one of the most original, provocative, and enduring voices of the century. One of the original from-the-vault rescues, it was recorded in 1918 but not issued for another thirty years, possibly because the piano accompaniment was too simple for 1918’s tastes; today it sounds merely reverent.

17. Guido Deiro: “Temperamental Rag”

Caruso, the son of a Neapolitan mechanic, was the greatest exponent of the world’s highest-status music; Count Guido Deiro was born to a noble family in northern Italy, and became an exponent of what would often be understood as some of the tackiest music of the twentieth century. Travelling the world in concert and vaudeville, he popularized the piano accordion, that staple of polka, tejano, zydeco, turbo-folk, and Lawrence Welk. But he was no mere charlatan with a product to sell; he was a genuine virtuoso, with a compositional knack that produced songs like this one, as joyous and nimble as any rag written to be played on any other instrument.

18. Flonzaley Quartet: “Molly on the Shore”

1. The Original Dixieland Jass Band, “Dixie Jass Band One Step”

There’s something about years of the twentieth century ending in 7. Maybe it’s just the point in the decade when enough trends have become noticeable that it’s easy for them to coalesce around a flashpoint. In any case, this record is, in a very real sense, the beginning of modern music. It’s not proper jazz (whatever that turns out to be), it’s a bunch of white kids making an unholy noise in garage-punk imitation of what they think Black music sounds like. It’s Elvis and Jerry Lee, the Beatles and the Stones, the Dolls and the Clash, the Beasties and Marshall Mathers, Ke$ha and Miley. It’s a racket, in more than one sense, and everything flows from it.

2. Baiano e Coro, “Pelo Telefone”

From the dance halls of New Orleans to the Carnaval streets of Rio de Janeiro, there’s a whole lotta coalescin’ goin’ on. This is not, technically, the first samba on record, any more than the ODJB was the first jass, but it’s the first record that called itself a samba, and it’s got a brisker, funkier sway than any Brazilian music we’ve heard to date. Composed by the Black sambista Donga and performed by the white generalist performer Baiano (of Bahia, a majority-Black state), “Pelo Telefone” (by telephone, cf. “Hello Ma Baby”) is exactly the same kind of blind dance forward into the future that the ODJB represents, with all the racial, class, and technological confusion which inheres.

3. Carlos Gardel, “Mi Noche Triste”

While tango has been heard on record for a decade, and has been a fashionable step in the dance halls of the global aristocracy for four years, upper-class condescension means that what is a genteel dance music for Europeans in ball gowns is underclass pimps-and-pickpockets trash in song form. Lyrics in lunfardo slang evoke the seamy underbelly of Buenos Aires nightlife, and the violent, sexual atmosphere of the milonga horrifies the bourgeois keepers of taste. Into this atmosphere, “Mi Noche Triste” is launched, hits, and what tango was, had been, could be, is utterly transformed. No longer just a semi-reputable dance music, tango has become a theatrical, literary music, and one of the world’s great storehouses of song.

4. María Teresa Vera & Rafael Zequeira “Óyelo Bien, Rubén (El Servicio Obligatorio)”

Meanwhile, Cuban music has been a shadowy undercurrent in these pages, more concerned with the nineteenth-century danzones of Havana gentility than the Afro-descended rumbas, guaguancós, and above all sones simmering up from Oriente province. The first modern Cuban voice to be heard with great success on record is a woman’s: María Teresa Vera, who with her duet partner Zequeira was foundational in establishing Cuba’s trova (troubadour) tradition. Here, on her first recording trip to New York City, she turns her tutor Manuel Corona’s satirical guaracha (Cuban theater song) about ladykillers hastily marrying to avoid the wartime draft into an incantatory meditation on human frailty. Called “rumba” on the label, it could be considered Vera’s first great santería record.

5. Abe Schwartz’s Orchestra, “Tanzt, Tanzt, Yiddelech”

The fifth cornerstone of the 1917 firsts (that aren’t really firsts) is this, the first klezmer record, except Jewish musicians have been recording freilach (joyful) dance music for a decade. But here, in the dance band of Bucharest-born bandleader Abe Schwartz, the classic elements of what would later be identified as klezmer are gathered together and propelled forward by the urgency, hunger, and population pressure of immigrant New York. (Probably) Naftule Brandwein’s clarinet chirps and squalls above the horns, strings, and percussion, as the demand of the title — “dance, dance, Jewish people” — reaches out to listening Gentiles of all races, and not just jazzing New Yorkers, but immigrants and underclasses all around the world will hear its call.

6. Anna Wheaton & James Harrod, “Till the Clouds Roll By”

With foundational records in the history of jazz, samba, tango, son, and klezmer, five of the great syncretic urban musics of the early twentieth century can trace their lineage to 1917; by comparison, a mere tectonic shift in the theatrical music of the ruling classes is dog bites man. Still. Music by Jerome Kern, lyrics by P. G. Wodehouse, with intricate polysyllabic and internal rhymes: this is something new on the New York stage, and the intimacy and unpretentiousness of Oh, Boy!, the show where the song debuted, heralds a new era in Anglophone musical comedy: light and flippant, telling a single story rather than the patchwork of revue, with accessible, up-to-date songs that you can live by.

7. Nine Pinson, “Le Cri du Poilu”

But while the Western hemisphere is undergoing a seismic shift in the nature and future of popular music, Europe remains embroiled in a dirty, pointless war that not all the chipper kit-bag trouble-packing warbles in the world can mask. Here, a French music-hall veteran adopts a song by Vincent Scotto, a young, fresh-faced composer who will help to transform chanson in the coming decades: a jaundiced, unpatriotic acknowledgement that the average unshaven soldier would vastly prefer getting laid to laying down his life—or taking any German’s—in the mud and disease of the trenches. The rousing refrain “Une femme, une femme” is far more open and direct than the winking, blushing Armentières mademoiselles of their British counterparts.

8. Eddie Cantor, “That’s the Kind of Baby for Me”

What the French do not bother to encode, Jewish performers in the US very much do. On the one hand, this recording can be heard as a white suburban expression of the Jazz Age arriving three years ahead of schedule, as Eddie Cantor’s everyschmuck is exactly the kind of enthusiastic virgin that F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Held Jr., and Harold Lloyd loved to parody. On the other, it’s a very specific expression of Lower East Side tenement life, a compact, energetic, and perforce cosmopolitan kind of life which, when Cantor became America’s mass-media uncle, would read all-American. But here, as a Ziegfeld Follies star—where he played Bert Williams’ son in blackface—he became America’s gawky kid brother.

9. Handy’s Orchestra of Memphis, “A Bunch of Blues”

And finally, two decades after the first written report of a music that could be understood as the blues, seven years since the first published blues song, three years since the first recorded blues song, here is the first recorded example of the blues in what you might—must—call its true form, to wit, being performed by African-American musicians of the South. It is still dicty and middle-class, it is still marching-band in overarching form, it is still a composed blues rather than a folk blues, because W. C. Handy knows where the money in the music business is, and you need copyrights and no funny business you might get sued over. But it’s another real beginning.

10. Eubie Blake Trio, “Hungarian Rag”

And here’s another. Blake (like Handy) has a better claim to being called the first jazz recording artist than the Original Dixieland Jass Band, and not just because of the color of his skin. Nominally a rag, this trio piece (two pianos and trap drums) is taken at such a velocity, with such sleek verve and inherent funk, that it breaks loose of the confines of the ragtime form and romps joyously among the as-yet-unnamed musics of the coming decade. If it is ragtime, it is the freest, boldest ragtime yet heard; if it is jazz, it is of a particularly rattling, industrial, Atlantic-coast sort, rather than the steamy Delta funk of New Orleans: Blake is from Baltimore.

11. Henry C. Browne, “Push Dem Clouds Away”

But as black American musicians begin, however slowly and painfully, to carve out a space for themselves, the nearly century-long dehumanization of black Americans called minstrelsy grinds along, carving out a track that 1917 did not have a name for, but would be known to history as “old-time.” This song, both a grossly offensive Coon song and a prototype of the power-of-positive-thinking genre of song that will only grow more prominent in the coming decade, was written for the forgotten 1891 musical A Trip to Chinatown; Browne was a new generation of minstrel performer who made a specialty of digging up old stuff and singing it as crassly as possible; it’s one origin of country music among many.

12. The Six Brown Brothers, “At the Darktown Strutters’ Ball”

The explosion that was the Original Dixieland Jass Band’s first records loosed off a tremendous amount of energy around the country, as the first genuine recorded popular-music craze gained traction. All kinds of things got recorded in their wake, whether it made any sense to market them as jazz or not. This, for example, is a white vaudeville act doing a stiff reading of a song written by black vaudevillian Shelton Brooks (we last saw him behind “Some of These Days”), which would become an early jazz standard. It’s less jazz than the ODJB were, but because of the novelty configuration that was the Brown Brothers’ act—six saxophones, from bass to alto—it has jazz texture.

13. Orquesta Típica Maglio, “El Tío Soltero”

Even as Carlos Gardel brings tango as a sung form into the light, tango consolidates as an instrumental dance music. The title of this bewitching, sprightly dance comes from the same underworld lunfardo roots as Gardel’s song—“El tío soltero” is a raffish way to refer to a single guy out on the prowl—but the music depicts a decorous flâneur, with its twinkly orchestration and fin-de-siècle melodic accents. Only the insistent pulse of the tango rhythm marks it as more than a sedate ballroom whirl. We last saw “Pacho” Maglio five years ago, and the distance between his hungry, dazzling tango of 1912 and his pretty, complacent tango of 1917 is why Gardel had to happen.

14. Ford Hawaiians, “Wiliwili Wai”

While the hula craze in the United States is several years old now, the continued recording and distribution of Hawai’an music has only really gotten started. This group, featuring the virtuoso Henry Kailimai on ukulele, was assembled by automaker Henry Ford as artists in residence at his Detroit headquarters; as Ford was friendly with Edison, they recorded frequently. This meditation on a lawn sprinkler—composed by the dethroned Queen Lili‘uokalani—is perhaps not the sort of perky hula music Ford had in mind, as the funereal pace and basso vocal turn it into a powerful lament, an island spiritual, and a memorial for the last Queen of Hawai’i, who would be dead by the end of 1917.

15. Alma Gluck & Efrem Zimbalist, “Chanson Hebraïque”

But as popular song explodes in all four corners of the globe, the classical concert tradition that has constituted the bulk of recording to date is still very much alive. This extremely proper classical recording, though, is full of unusual resonances. Gluck was a Jewish-American soprano born in Romania, popular in concert and on record, where her rendition of the minstrel “Carry Me Back to Ole Virginny” was huge; her husband Zimbalist was a Russian Jewish violinist whose sentimental recordings of the classical canon were prolific; the song is the Jewish folk song “Meyerke, mein zun,” as arranged by French impressionist composer Maurice Ravel in 1910. It’s a remarkable high point of folk song as art song.

16. Fritz Kreisler, “Poor Butterfly”

Far and away the most popular violinist of the era was the Austrian-born Kreisler, whose wide range and sweet tone exactly hit the comforting, not to say comfortable, note that the broad bourgeois audience for concert music wanted from it. This, a pop-crossover recording of a show tune based on Puccini’s Madame Butterfly, was one of his biggest recorded hits, and if the context has faded over the century—pop-crossover songs do not originate in circus-venue spectacles borrowing from orientalist operas anymore, Cirque du Soleil notwithstanding—the sturdy melodic underpinnings and Kreisler’s expressive, populist but unsentimental mitteleuropean technique (especially as compared to the austerity of a peer like Jascha Heifetz) still has the power to resonate today.

17. Nora Bayes, “Over There”

1. Orquesta Típica Roberto Firpo, “La Cumparsita”

As the European War rages — two years now, and no end in sight — popular culture spins at what contemporary observers declare is a terrifying rate. A song is half-written by a young Uruguayan, whose friends make him take it to the visiting greatest bandleader of Buenos Aires. This gentleman glues on pieces from two of his own half-forgotten songs, and premiers it in Montevideo. It’s received well enough that when he returns to Buenos Aires he records it. “La Cumparsita,” or “the little Carnival march,” is a hit for a season or two; but when words are added some eight years later it becomes one of the deathless tangos of the century. Still, here, with a small bandoneon-piano-violins-flute combo, its sweet, languorous melodicism is undeniable.

2. Enrico Caruso, “’O Sole Mio”

We last heard him fourteen years ago, unsettling his earliest gramophone listeners with a mirthless Pagliacci laugh. In the years since, he has become The Voice, the unrivaled exemplar of Italian bel canto on stage and more importantly on record. He generally sings airs from the operatic canon, his rich, rolling overtones more suited to the solid verities of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries than to the emerging dissonances of the twentieth. But here, he sings not an aria, but a canzone napoletana, a song of his birthplace, Naples, as new as 1898, with more modest, even populist traditions of melodicism and emotion. The orchestration, with its habanera rhythm and castanets, evokes a pan-Latinism that’s becoming highly fashionable in this decade of tangos and maxixes.

3. Elsie Baker and Billy Murray, “Play a Simple Melody”

Midway through the decade, in the narrow block of high-rise apartment buildings nicknamed Tin Pan Alley by New York’s flippant press corps, there is only one name which inspires awe among all the verse-scribblers and piano-bashers competing to sell the most sheet music to the public. He’s not thirty, and he’s had his second smash revue of all-original material. The boy born Israel Baline in Belarus (or Siberia), son of a synagogue cantor, is the hottest thing in show business. Simple melodies are one reason: something anyone can pick out on the piano or whistle in the street. The other reason is demonstrated in the contrasting section of this song: ragtime, deracinated and purged of its Black underworld origins, is now a universal American bounce.

4. Ciro’s Club Coon Orchestra, “On the Shore at Le-Lei-Wei”

As ragtime blends into universality, Black America moves forward restlessly. Pianist Dan Kildare was born in Jamaica, but he trained in the US under James Reese Europe playing for the Castles, and in 1915 he took his own percussive string-heavy orchestra to England as the musical entertainment for Ciro’s, the legendary nightclub that presaged the Jazz Age in Great War-era London. “On the Shore at Le-Lei-Wei” was a novelty song from Very Good, Eddie, a Jerome Kern show at the Princess Theater, co-credited to Hawai’ian ukulele master Henry Kailimai. Kildare’s band attacks it at a ferocious pace, banjos raving, while the vocal (singing “Waikiki” rather than “Le-Lei-Wei”) is rather lost in the hubbub. If it’s not quite yet jazz, it’s certainly no longer just ragtime.

5. Frank Ferera and Helen Louise, “Hapa Haole Hula Girl”

Meanwhile, hula music from the Hawai’ian islands, not the New York stage, continues to evolve. “Hapa Haole Hula Girl” was written by the Hawai’ian music impresario Sonny Cunha in 1909, as a sort of thesis statement for the hapa haole (half white) music which he pioneered, writing lyrics in English and bringing in non-Hawai’an (and non-missionary) influences from popular music. The song’s first great recording, by the entirely haole husband and wife team Frank Ferera (slack-key guitar) and Helen Louise (rhythm guitar), is an instrumental. Which is fine, since Cunha’s infantilizing, exoticizing lyrics are best left to their era, but the swooning lilt of the melody and Ferera’s sharp, incisive soloing help make hula, hapa haole or otherwise, as modern as tango, ragtime, or jazz.

6. Felix Arndt, “Nola”

So we turn to another record that isn’t quite jazz, but would come to inform it, particularly in the highly-embroidered keyboard work of Art Tatum. It’s the composition, and recording, for which Felix Arndt is best remembered: a musical portrait of Nola Locke, for whom he wrote it as a present on their engagement in 1915. Arndt’s flashy, fluid playing is the kind of instrumental prowess that later generations would only recognize in guitar gods, once rock had displaced all other music. Virtuosos have a long history in concert music, of course, but the snappiness of the rhythm and the airiness of the melody mark “Nola” as something newer, more modern. The word pop was not yet in use, but no other word will do.

7. The Versatile Four, “Circus Day in Dixie”

In one sense, this recording is the newest, most modern music we have yet heard: terrifically fast, with funky drum breaks and a bandleader shouting out encouragement and instruction like James Brown. In another sense, it’s one of the last glimpses we’ve ever gotten of the oldest American pop form, minstrelsy: not the decrepit show-biz memory of minstrelsy, flattened out into marches and racist jokes, but the galvanic, specifically Black-imitating music that electrified New York audiences in the 1840s when performed by young Irish immigrants in, yes, blackface. The Versatile Four did not black up, and “Circus Day in Dixie” the song is a product of the 1910s, a frank imitation of “Alexander’s Ragtime Band,” but the record stomps and swings like an exhumed ghost.

8. George O’Connor, “Nigger Blues”

LeRoy “Lasses” White, a blackface performer in Dallas, copyrighted this song as “Negro Blues” in 1912, but when the sheet music was published a year later, what had been an unexceptionable descriptor had become a slur. White was white; but the song is the first published twelve-bar blues, the standard form, with its repeating lines, that would come to define Black twentieth-century music. The lyrics are probably no more original to White than the blues form, but they are our first encounter with many of the signature images of the storehouse of demotic song, from the blues being nothing but a good person feeling bad to laying one’s head down on some railroad line. Columbia hack O’Connor tries to sing minstrel, and just sings American.

9. Marion Harris, “I Ain’t Got Nobody Much”

The song’s origins are disputed — four different copyrights in five years — but the best claims include Black performers, and if it’s not a blues song by a strict accounting of the form, it’s the next best thing, a torch song. Marion Harris was a twenty-year-old Midwesterner who had only been in show business for two years, but her belting was exactly what record companies and stage producers wanted in the years when the blues were gathering cultural steam: a white woman who sang Black. She’s not doing a minstrel affectation, but she’s not a sub rosa representative of The Culture, either: after twenty years of cakewalks, ragtime, coon songs, and Bert Williams, Black singing is American singing. It will only grow more so from here.

10. Fay Compton, “Take Off a Little Bit”

Irving Berlin started in music as a song plugger, someone who would sing new songs in public to sell those in earshot on the sheet music. He graduated to writing his own songs, and was now a wealthy man, able to sell Broadway shows on the strength of his name alone. Stop! Look! Listen! was his second hit in as many years, and the slightly-naughty proto-flapper song “Take Off a Little Bit” was a showstopper as sung by the slightly-naughty French comic actress Gaby Deslys. (Eighteen-year-old ingénue Fay Compton sang it when the show went to London the following year.) There were songs in the show that would have longer lives, but it’s worth remembering when future Establishment institution Irving Berlin wrote a stripper anthem.

11. Paquita Escribano, “Fea”

The Spanish musical-theater genre cuplé, which was to Madrid and Barcelona in the late nineteenth century what music-hall was to London and cabaret to Paris, has been unjustly neglected here, but our first encounter is an exceptional piece. “Fea” (ugly) could be considered as belonging to two separate but particularly Spanish literary and theatrical traditions, the comic-erotic sicalipsis and the psychological-grotesque esperpento. The singer declares herself so ugly that all sorts of hideous consequences befall the viewer, while the audience, either live in the theater or at a remove on record, rejoices in the irony of her pretty face. Paquita Escribano was one of the great cupletistas of the era, and though in her thirties at this recording, was not yet halfway through her career.

12. Jorge Bastos, Carlos Santos, Ilda Stichini and Guilhermina Anjos, “Fado do Afonso Costa”

And so to Lisbon, where fados have been sung for centuries and recorded for several years. But despite its title, this is not a fado: it’s another theatrical piece, a comic song from the topical and satirical revue Coração à Larga, sung by four stalwarts of the early Portuguese recording industry. The subject of the song, Afonso Costa, was the Prime Minister of Portugal seven times between 1913 and 1917 (politics moved at dizzying speeds in the First Republic), and was primarily responsible for erecting initial barriers between Church and State. The topical lyrics are of minor interest today; what is remarkable is the rhythm of the thing, a patter song delivered with such snapping force that a 21st-century listener is inevitably reminded of hip-hop.

13. Kiria Koula, “Tsifte-Telli”

The masses of immigrants flooding into New York through the latter half of the nineteenth century and the first part of the twentieth are beginning to make themselves heard. Koula Antonopoulou emigrated from the western province of Missolonghi in 1912, and by some reckonings was the first Greek woman to record. Here she is barely a presence, just some murmured syllables and moans, while Andreas Pongis’ keening violin and Athanasios Makedonas’ insistent bouzouki recreate the Ottoman world of café-aman dances. The title itself is merely a genre of Greek-Anatolian dance, tsifteteli, and its physicality is remarkable today. In three years, Koula would make history again, founding an independent record label for recording and distributing Greek music, which was probably the first female-owned label in history.

14. Joseph Moskowitz, “Doina”

When the Romanian-born Jewish musician Joseph Moskowitz came to New York in 1908, he advertised his solo cimbalom concerts in Yiddish, Italian, Hungarian, and Romanian. A consummate performer and enviable virtuoso, he had been classically trained — the cimbalom is a concert version of the folk dulcimer — but he also knew the importance of a mass audience. His repertoire was a potent blend of traditional Jewish, Roma, and Romanian music, and after settling in New York, he had absorbed ragtime and the light classical canon; as preserved on disc, his music still has the power to transport today. Doina is a Romanian folk music, possibly with Ottoman sources, and Moskowitz’ dreamy run through a Turkish maqam before breaking out into the dance was influential in klezmer.

15. Abraham Rosenstein, “Die Milchume”

Concerts of Jewish music were special events in New York; more everyday was the Yiddish theater, and its hit songs whether sung, printed or recorded. There are thousands of these songs from the early twentieth century, some of which are in the first rank of American songwriting. “Die Milchume” is a deeply affecting lament about war. The broader American theatergoing public were unconcerned about the European war, but as nearly every Jewish New Yorker knew someone in the German, Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman, or Russian Empires then embroiled, it was not just a subject in the newspapers, but in everyday correspondence, gossip, and fears. Cantor Abraham Rosenstein was a popular recording artist of Yiddish song, specializing in comedy: here he pours on the schmaltz, and earns it.

16. Zabelle Panosian, “Groung”

1. Harry MacDonough & Olive Kline: "They Didn't Believe Me"

The little earthquakes which change the landscape of popular music if not permanently then at least irrevocably are rarely like geological earthquakes in that a specific epicenter can be pinpointed; it’s more usually something in the air. Nevertheless, the fifty-year era of professionalized popular song bound and sold as the Great American Songbook began here, with a plaintive, unfussy melody and conversational lyrics which made romance an everyday thing rather than a grandiose Herbertian hornswoggle. It made a household name of composer Jerome Kern, and added to his ambition to do even greater things. By the time this recording (one of several made in 1915) was on the market, he was already preparing to transform the rest of American musical theater with the collaboration of a couple of Anglo-American humorists. To be continued....

2. Murray's Ragtime Banjo Quartet with the Bohemian Band: "Hors D'Oeuvre"

British imitation of American vernacular music has a long history, some of which we’ve already glimpsed; but this is one of the earliest British imitations of specifically black American vernacular music. Murray’s Ragtime Banjo Quartet was named for their performance venue, the popular and innovative nightclub in Beak Street named Murray’s (founded, incidentally, by a Chicagoan), which opened in 1913 and lasted in various forms until 1970. The act’s (inaudible) pianist composed the number — with liberal inspiration, as a moment’s listening suggests, from Irving Berlin and Stephen Foster — and the decidedly unfunky horn charts are credited to the Bohemian Band, another American-imitating ragtime act active in the W1 postal code. The overall impression left by the record is nostalgia — like many British imitators to come they got the atmosphere, but lost the urgency.

3. Jack Charman: "Mademoiselle from Armentières"

The second most famous World War I song today (at the time it was synonymous with the war, especially in the UK), remembered mostly for the verses — not recorded here — which suggested that being a soldier who participated in the liberation of a village earned you the sexual gratitude of its women. Jack Charman was a prolific if not extremely beloved music-hall star, better known for cashing in on the supposedly humorous songs of the moment than for his stage characters or individual performance style. His delivery of “Mademoiselle” is a perfunctory bawl, but it nails the generalized British attitude towards the French (and, really, every non-British peoples) of the era, which could be summed up as disgust at cultural difference mingled with a prurient interest in the sexual availability of difference.

4. George Grossmith, Jr.: "Murders"

Heir to the comic dynasty of Penzance’s Major General, the Mikado’s Ko-Ko, and the proto-Wodehousian Diary of a Nobody, George Grossmith, Jr. (actually III, but his grandfather was a journalist, not a showman, so his D’Oyley Cartesian father is called the first) was the great star of the Edwardian musical theater, playing — and writing, and producing, and singing — such essentially British types that he could be considered the English George M. Cohan. His stage manner in youth formed the kernel of Bertie Wooster and the rest of the Drones; his productions popularized the cakewalk, ragtime, and the tango among British audiences; and his comic dance routines foreshadowed the Ministry of Silly Walks. “Murders” is a blackly comic monologue set to music aimed directly at the universal British appetite for cosy mayhem.

5. Bert Williams: "I'm Neutral"

In the mid-teens, the reigning US king of comic monologues set to music remained Bert Williams; “I’m Neutral” was merely another in his impressive arsenal. The subtlety of his humor is almost invisible here, as he plays on contemporary stereotypes of black men as cringing cowards to parody American isolationism during World War I. The final verse, in which he still gravely affirms his neutrality over an incident of horrific domestic violence, makes his entirely serious satirical point: refusal to intervene is tantamount to murder, and isolationism calls into question the honor, courage, virtue, and decency of the American public. As a black man, of course, he knew all about that honor, courage, virtue and decency; which is why the satire can only be inferential. Any more explicit, and he’d be dead.

6. The Right Quintette: "The Rain Song"

The Right Quintette, led by Canadian basso James Lightfoot, were a popular and energetic New York-based cabaret act, part of the general movement of black entertainment away from the lavish productions of the Nineties and Oughts into more intimate venues. “The Rain Song” originally appeared in the Williams & Walker revue Bandanna Land in 1908 (composed by Will Marion Cook), but had become part of the repertoire for every shucking-and-jiving troupe in the land by the time the Quintette recorded the handful of platters (three Cooks and one Stephen Foster) which left their slender mark on history. Acoustically superior to the Afro-American Folk Song Singers’ rendition of the tune, thanks to the measly five voices, it strikes a now-familiar balance between racist caricature — get money — and aesthetic achievement — forward the race.

7. The Fisk Jubilee SIngers: "In the Great Gettin'-Up Mawnin'"

Which isn’t all that different, as it happens, from the objectives of the several Jubilee Singer companies roving the Republic performing concerts of spirituals to raise money for the educational institutions that will be called HBCUs. The money, of course, is meant for greater good, and the forwarding of the race is meant to have a spiritual dimension in addition to an aesthetic one, but the elision of the spiritual and the aesthetic is hardly unique to the African-American tradition(s). This recording differs from the standard version of the spiritual known today (thanks largely to Mahalia Jackson’s midcentury rewrite), and is more concerned with present-day social justice than apocalyptic promises — the distinction between “in this world” and “fare thee well” is a history of the civil rights struggle in miniature.

8. Lionel Belasco: "Buddy Abraham"

Meanwhile, Trinidadian music on record was evolving in many directions at once. Bandleader and composer Lionel Belasco’s preferred instrument of choice — the piano — guaranteed that his solo recordings would become merely historical curiosities rather than setting a new standard for calypso, which, tied as it was to carnival celebrations and outdoor parades, preferred more portable instrumentation. But his melodic sense and classical training made many of his compositions standards, and his work and fame would grow larger than carnival celebrations in the coming years, as he introduced island rhythms to North America and Europe by touring and performing with a crack ensemble. Here, his one-man performance of his own “Buddy Abraham” is inflected by ragtime and Expressionism, but the rhythm steady as a rock and light as a breeze, remains purely Trinidadian.

9. Grupo Chiquinha Gonzaga: "Sonhando"

The godmother of Brazilian popular music, a multi-racial anti-slavery activist, daughter of military privilege, and widely-celebrated composer, Chiquinha Gonzaga was almost seventy by the time of this recording, but still writing new music. “Sonhando” was written in 1914, a pretty, fluttering choro that cycles through a half-dozen permutations of the same flowing melody, and in this recording by some of the most well-known musicians in Brazil, earns its title (“dreaming” in Portuguese). Though it’s become a piano standard in the years since, the recording conventions of Brazil in the teens — and the conventions of choro more generally — gave preeminence to the flute, which could pierce through the fog of surface noise. Gonzaga would live another twenty years, long enough to see samba replace the choro she partly invented.

10. Grupo O Passos No Choro: "Apanhei-te Cavaquinho"

The flautist on “Sonhando” was probably Antônio Maria Passos, whose Grupo o Passos no Choro was one of the most celebrated choro outfits in Brazil, where he was lauded as the greatest vernacular flautist. Ironically, he doesn’t appear on this recording, which is a piano solo (there’s just a possibility that the pianist is in fact Chiquinha Gonzaga, which would be a lovely symmetry), a polka-informed rendition of one of composer Ernesto Nazareth’s signature tunes. “Apanhei-te cavaquinho” means “I have you, cavaquinho” (the cavaquinho is a small guitar of Portuguese origin not unlike a ukelele in size and timbre), and it’s a danceable little tune suggestive of the traditional (and universal) myth of the carefree musician who owns almost nothing in the world but his guitar, and likes it that way.

11. Dúo Valdivieso-Safadi: "Flores negras"

The authorship of the Latin American standard “Flores negras” is frequently disputed — in YouTube comments Colombian, Ecuadorean, Argentine, Cuban, and Peruvian partisans make their cases — but the earliest and most convincing attributions give it to Colombian poet Julio Flores. And because it’s in waltz time it’s called a bolero north of the Panama Canal (completed 1914) and a pasillo to the south; the pasillo being one of the national dances of Colombia (and Ecuador), its place of origin makes it a pasillo in my book. In any case, this is the first known recording; the duo Alberto Valdivieso Alvarado (vocal) and Nicasio Safadi (guitar and vocal) were based in Ecuador, where Valdivieso was born and where Safadi’s Lebanese parents had immigrated. They recorded little before going their separate ways; we may meet them again.

12. Pale K. Lua & David Kaili: "Cunha Medley"

If 1915 was remembered for any one musical event in the United States in the years after, it was as the year of the “Hawaiian fad,” immortalized in country-music histories as popularizing the distinctive whine of slack-key guitar throughout the country; it just as quickly blew out most places, but stuck in the Appalachians and flourished. (Hawai’ian music had been popular for decades, a standard side-effect of imperial adventurism; but like twerking in 2013, it only became a fad when white people noticed.) This record, a medley of Lua’s own compositions (he’s the slide virtuoso; Kaili keeps time), seems to look forward to later pedal-steel tunes, having absorbed the jaunty quick-change of their typical circuit in vaudeville — which came from minstrelsy, and which would greatly inform country music.

13. Elliniki Estoudiantina: "Eli-Eli"

The “estudiantine” or mandolin orchestra was an extremely popular European folk-classical configuration around the turn of the century, and broadly an amateur movement as opposed to the more professional marching band. The “Estoudiantina Elleniki” translates as the Mandolin Orchestra of Greece, a popular Ottoman-Empire act based in Smyrna (a culturally Greek city located in modern Turkey) by an Athenian and a Greek Byzantine who played everything; folk tunes, operetta, traditional Athenian serenades, and even approached the modern, churning underground urban Greek music which would later be known as rebetiko. “Eli Eli” was composed by Giorgos Vidalis, a Smyrna native who would later flee to the US as a refugee from the Turkish occupation. It’s a lament for a woman whose love for a soldier is unreciprocated, a resonant theme in wartime.

14. Abe Elenkrig's Yidishe Orchestra: "Dem Reben's Nigen"

The Yiddish title of the song translates as “The Rabbi’s Tune,” and Abe Elenkrig’s orchestra is already pushing and whirling their freilach further and wilder in the two years since the last time we encountered them, closer and closer to what the Jewish-inflected jazz of the swing era would become. The clarinet laughs mockingly, perhaps irreligiously (it’s difficult to imagine this tune being understood as a particularly reverent depiction of a rabbi, cultural difference notwithstanding), and the tempo swirls increasingly agitatedly: a decade removed from their Bessarabian roots, and New York is already working its restless, galvanic magic on the performers. What had been pockets of disparate immigrant communities for decades was consolidating into an uneasily unified Jewish-American identity; Yiddish theater of the period was almost as popular as gentile Broadway.

15. Aleksandr Vertinsky: "Ya Segodnya Smeyus' Nad Soboy"

1. Victor Military Band: "Memphis Blues"

W. C. Handy recollected that he first heard an old man playing the blues in a Mississippi train station in 1903. He wrote a tune for a Memphis mayoral candidate in 1909, reworking and publishing it in 1912 it under the title “The Memphis Blues.” It was a significant hit, credited with inspiring Vernon and Irene Castle’s fox-trot, and became part of the fabric of “ethnic” dance numbers that were increasingly defining the high life of the 1910s. It was recorded three times in 1914: vaudevillian Morton Harvey added coon-song lyrics about Handy himself and moaned in a burlesque of blackness, popular white bandleader Charles Prince threw in “comic” effects like a neighing trombone and farm-animal noises (cf. early Mickey Mouse shorts); and the stiff-jointed Victor Military Band played it so straight that you can barely hear the blues.

2. Felix Arndt: "Desecration Rag"

The line between Scott Joplin and George Gershwin in the history of American art-vernacular music isn’t a straight one; Felix Arndt was one of the lesser-known intermediaries. An extremely popular if temperamental performer in his day, he was from an aristocratic New York family and classically trained but was fascinated by ragtime both for its technical complexity and the interpretive lens it gave to music. He wrote “Desecration Rag” to demonstrate that ragging classical music didn’t only have a comic purpose; it could be technically challenging and harmonically complex as well. This recording, one of his first, shows not only the fluidity of skill at the keyboard — though we’re still in the infancy of ragtime piano’s recording history, so all we can compare him to yet is other white men — but his interpretive sensitivity. Jauntiness transforms into hauntingness with surprising effectiveness.

3. Europe's Society Orchestra: "Castle House Rag"

The premier black band in the country steps back from the overwhelming drive of “Down Home Rag,” proving why they were the house band for the extremely elegant if liberated Castles. Though the drumming is still funky, the middle section of the tune drops out the drums altogether in favor of twinkly celeste notes (Irene Castle’s solo dance, perhaps?), and the band’s string-heavy arrangement makes the shift between classy and raggy sound entirely natural. It wouldn’t be for another several years and the ascendance of a particularly New Orleans strain of rag that horn bands became entirely identified with blackness: string bands were still considered as authentic as it came, and Europe played the authenticity game hard, insisting that his musicians know their parts by heart so as to not dispel the myth of innate African musicality by sight-reading in public.

4. Nora Bayes: "Harmony Baby"

It would be factually incorrect to call this the first record with improvised musical nonsense syllables (i.e. scatting) — much non-Western music is built around the concept, and the gramophone had reached more or less everywhere by 1914. But it is one of the earliest recorded instances of a proto-scat in a song identified with black American identity, even if the markers indicating that identity is not clear at the remove of nearly a century. In the slang of the teens, “harmony” was not just a noun indicating a particular technical musical idea, but a metonym for uptempo, vernacular (which coded black) music: this is coon song edging into rag song edging into jazz song, and the Jewish vaudevillian Bayes swerves her voice around enough that it’s not entirely unlike what proper jazz singers would be doing in a decade or more.

5. Bert Williams: "You Can't Get Away from It"

Bert Williams was better known as a monologist than a singer, and even his greatest recordings are more spoken than sung. But when given a proper song, his conversational style in front of the recording horn would prove to be influential in the age of the microphone. “You Can’t Get Away from It” was written by Tin Pan Alley hack Jean Schwartz, whose most notable composition to date had been a sentimental exotica called “Chinatown, My Chinatown,” but it’s one of the great statements of ragtime’s imperial phase. Even the very different pulse of tango is lumped in with the dance mania that most social observers, whether indulgently for it or primly against it, agreed was sweeping the nation. The chuckle in Williams’ voice gives it away: Schwartz may have meant his song for satire, but Williams knows whose rhythm they’re dancing to.

6: Orquesta Típica Criolla Firpo: "Champagne tango"

With the name Roberto Firpo we begin to leave behind tango’s first (or rather second, as the earliest tangueros went unrecorded) generation, and step into the bright lights of the Golden Age of Tango. He was one of the first to record romantic, as opposed to merely danceable, tangos, and his early promise is evident here, where despite the grind of surface noise his lightness of touch and the sensitivity of his arrangements for violin and piano are audible. “Champagne tango” was written by the prolific and eccentric Manuel Aróztegui, but the performance, and even the recording, bear all the hallmarks of Firpo’s romantic style, from the strings’ pizzicatti to the clarinet’s grace notes. But most important is his own piano: it was Firpo who established the piano as a major contributor to the tango’s sound, very nearly as necessary as the bandoneón.

7: Grupo Terror do Facões: "O maxixe"

If 1913 was the year of the tango, at least in the Castle-led dance-crazy USA, then 1914 was the year of the maxixe, which is often described as the Brazilian tango. Especially in the bassline, it’s hard to tell much difference, though Brazilian music is as always characterized by a certain lightness. The popularity of the maxixe has generally been limited to the ballroom in the twentieth century, as the choro and later the samba became enthroned as Brazil’s national music. This group, whose name translates to “terror of the machetes” — machetes being slang of the period for bad musicians — recorded a dozen or so sides in Porto Alegre, the southern port city closest to Uruguay and Argentina, home of the tango. Most of their songs were composed by their leader-guitarist Octávio Dutra, including this one, titled simply “the maxixe.” 

8: Julian Whiterose: "Iron Duke in the Land"

It is mostly an accident of history that makes this the most modern-sounding thing we’ve yet heard, because a man singing solo with a hard-strummed string instrument and being backed up by other men on the chorus is hardly an invention of the rock era. But later history tends to swallow up earlier history, so that this, true Trinidadian calypso in a radically simplified form, is freighted with all that would come after it, from Leadbelly to Jason Mraz and beyond. We know almost nothing about Julian Whiterose, except that he was one of the first calypsonians to sing in English rather than French, and that this recording, about the arrival of the locomotive to the island nations, was perhaps the inspiration for the name of one of the more famous calypsonians of that music’s Golden Age beginning in the 1930s.

9. Pepi Littmann: "Oljom Habu"

A survival from the days of the Brodersänger (Yiddish singers and entertainers from the Galician — now western Ukraine — city of Brody), Frau Pepi Littmann was among the first Jewish performers to move out of the limited religious or ceremonial sphere of performance in the nineteenth century and perform in public spaces like inns, wine gardens, and other intimate venues; theaters dedicated to Jewish performance were still unimaginable in those years. Expert in both comedy and sentimental verse, she was successful enough to traverse Europe and even sail to New York, where she was popular with the immigrant population’s burgeoning theatrical scene, and recorded this showcase for her technique pitched halfway between cantor and klezmer. The title translates to “The World to Come,” and she sounds alternately cautionary and celebratory as the woodwinds pipe urgently behind her and she belts in increasingly tight circles.

10. Matsui Sumako: "Kachūsha no Uta"

While Japanese literary, theatrical, and musical traditions are of course thousands of years old, our first encounter with them is in the person of a woman heavily identified with interpreting Western texts. Matsui was a student of Tsubouchi Shōyō, who popularized Shakespeare, and first came to fame in Ibsen’s A Doll’s House. In 1913 she performed as Katyusha Maslova in Tolstoy’s Resurrection, and the prolific composer Nakayama Shimpei wrote this song at the request of her director Shimamura Hogetsu: titled “Katyusha’s Song,” it’s profoundly affecting in both the universal simplicity of the melody and in Matsui’s small but controlled voice. On release, it was immensely popular with the Japanese public, and has been credited with founding the genre of ryūkōka, or popular song, roughly equivalent to jazz song in the US. Four years later, Shimamura died of influenza; she killed herself in response.

11. Billy Murray and Kathleen Kingston: "You're Here and I'm Here"

The habit of interpolating a catchy new song into an old play was hardly exclusively Japanese; perhaps the reigning American champion at the activity was Jerome Kern, a young, ambitious, and mostly unsuccessful composer hard at work on both Broadway and the West End. The Laughing Husband was originally an Austrian operetta, and it wasn’t even the first time Kern had plugged a gap with “You’re Here and I’m Here” — it was just the show that gave him one of his first small hits. He hadn’t entirely come into his own as a composer yet, but you can already hear the way the melody develops in a light, memorable manner rather than just see-sawing back and forth as in most of the song hits of the age. And note the interior rhymes by lyricist Harry B. Smith — we’ll hear more of those.

12. Afro-American Folk Song Singers: "Swing Along"

At the turn of the century African-American composer Will Marion Cook, frustrated in his attempts to be the American Dvořak, turned instead to composing for all-black shows. “Swing Along” was written for the 1903 Williams and Walker fantasia In Dahomey, but he revised it in 1914 when presenting a concert of “Afro-American Folk Songs” with the assistance (which he rather resented) of the hot new thing in black music, James Reese Europe. The recording of that choral revision is muddy and indistinct — masses of voices did not record well, and Cook characteristically refused to trim down the many parts — but it’s not the individual voices that matter so much as the massive, weighty changes he has them running through. Nobody was writing on this scale in 1914; the first time we’ll get anything close to it is Porgy and Bess.

13. Tuskegee Institute Singers: "Good News"

By contrast, the mere eight voices of the Tuskegee singers record with almost insolent clarity. (Cook would have spit fire.) Although again the compositional and arranging brilliance of hardworking and unacknowledged black musicians is impossible to ignore. This rendition of “Good News (Chariot’s Comin’)” is only typical of the intricate and polished effects that the most prestigious black universities, Booker T. Washington-founded Tuskegee above all, strove for in their renditions of old spirituals. It’s one of the least-documented of the spiritual texts, with no attributed authorship that I can find, but — at least in this recording — the quick snap of the vowells and the ease with which it lends itself to being played with in meter and tempo seems to predict not only the gospel vocal quartets to come, but the vocalese and doo-wop and rock and roll beyond.

14. John McCormack: "It's a Long, Long Way to Tipperary"

1. Europe's Society Orchestra: "Down Home Rag"

The importance of this record to American musical history cannot be overstated: an all-black musical outfit playing black vernacular music written by a black man. Composer Wilbur Sweatman was a friend and competitor to Scott Joplin; bandleader James Reese Europe led the greatest dance orchestra in the country, black or white. At least according to his employers, who were Vernon and Irene Castle, the most famous couple on the contintent; they made staid Victorian America a dancing nation through a brilliant combination of discipline, celebrity, and capitalism. But once in the studio, Europe didn’t record any fox-trot: this whirling, breakneck take on Sweatman’s rag is almost too fast to dance to, and if the counterpoint of his huge orchestra is a little buried in the surface noise, the precision and force of the rhythm cannot be denied. The guffawing vocal is an echo of minstrelsy, but at last the laughter sounds earned.

2. Hedges Brothers & Jacobson: "San Francisco Bay"

Still, after more than a quarter-century, ragtime — even progressive, slip-rhythmed ragtime — was no longer exclusively the province of black Southern composers like Sweatman, but a national music, liberating to everyone. The Hedges and Jacobson, a relatively small-time vaudeville trio from California and Philadephia respectively, were nothing special in the showbiz annals — certainly nothing in the written record suggests that anyone heard them as being ten years ahead of schedule. But on the pair of minstrel-rag songs they cut in 1913 (“Land of Cotton” was the flipside), they hit the off beat so hard, and harmonize so raggedly, that they anticipate not just the jazz to come but the rock ’n’ roll that will supplant it. There were hundreds, if not thousands, of similarly small-time outfits criss-crossing the nation, almost none of whom were recorded, and almost never so loosely; the incompleteness of our historical record can be heartbreaking.

3. Bert Williams: "Borrow from Me"

In 1913, Bert Williams had been a headlining star of the Ziegfeld Follies for three years; America’s greatest showman had declared his faith in the money-making potential of his star by daring the rest of the cast to walk when they protested against sharing the stage with a black man: “I can replace every one of you but him.” In his earning power, the slow casualness of his comedy, and his palatability to White America, Williams anticipated Bill Cosby by half a century; but he was not above issuing a shrewd “fuck you” on record to those who confused his gullible, slow-witted stage persona with himself. This song eventually becomes a standard — and race-free — piece of comic hyperbole about lending and collateral, but the opening verse, in which Williams rejects a degrading offer to participate in Uncle Tom’s Cabin with cool, ironic contempt, is a masterpiece of dignity passing as comedy.

4. Toots Paka's Hawaiians: "Aloha 'Oe"

The unofficial anthem of Hawai’i and probably the most famous song in the Hawai’ian language, “Aloha ‘Oe” is not necessarily the greatest or most deeply moving of the hundreds of songs written by Queen Lili’uokalani, the last monarch of Hawai’i, but it had the most profound effect on the music of the mainland United States. The gentle rhythm employed by Toots Paka’s combo here recalls the back and forth of the surf; the song’s structure is indebted to parlor song, but more vernacular than the longeurs of the white bourgeoisie; and of course the dreamy, ineffably sad whine of the steel guitar points forward to many, many different directions in which American music woud turn. It’s almost impossible not to hear predictions of commercial 1940s country ballads in this recording; but of course its power is not dependent on what comes after it, but is contained within the solitary beauty of the recording itself.

5. Don Antonio Chacón: "Solamente con mirarte (Soleares)"

The many related Andalusian musical traditions grouped under the name flamenco are very old — the first written record of a music similar to what we know as flamenco dates from the 18th century — but like any musical tradition worth its salt, it’s grown and adapted to meet new historical circumstances. Antonio Chacón had been recognized as the premier flamenco singer in Spain for almost two decades before he made his first recordings in 1913 with the legendary guitarist Ramón Montoya. Like the blues, flamenco has a rigorous structure which is open to the improvisation of a skilled performer; “Solamente con mirarte” is in soleá form (thus the traditional parenthetical in the title), one of the oldest and most basic flamenco palos. Which doesn’t mean easy: Chacón’s astonishing facility with melisma and the microtones which point to flamenco’s influcence from Roma, Arabic, and North African musics is breathtaking even under the recorded hiss of age.

6. A. Elenkrig's Yidishe Orchestra: "Patsch Tanz"

The Yiddish title “Patsch Tanz” translates as “Clapping Dance,” and one listen to the record demonstrates why it’s called that. Intensely rhythmic, the orchestra of Abraham Elenkrieg (not pictured) is one of the first that can be called klezmer in the modern sense; that is, which united the melodic and harmonic sense of the Eastern European Jewish freilach orchestra to the urban drive and forward motion of the immigrant U.S. Elenkrieg was a horn player, but his cornet is buried in the mix behind the massive drums, humming violins, and the mockingly whimpering clarinet that makes common cause with what New Orleans jazz musicians were concurrently (though unheard on record) making clarinets do, as we will hear in due time. The song was recorded in New York in 1913, and was apparently part of the standard Yiddische repertoire, played by at least two other New York-based orchestras within the half-decade to come.

7. Al Jolson: "You Made Me Love You (I Didn't Want to Do It)"

Meanwhile, in the Winter Garden Theatre on Broadway, the most famous Jewish performer in New York was scoring a massive hit with his revue The Honeymoon Express, in which he sang anything that wasn’t nailed down — but the greatest sensation was a sentimental ditty called “You Made Me Love You,” written by a pair of Tin Pan Alley hacks and unbearably twee in the throat of anyone but Jolson, whose foghorn voice and incessant air of kidding the song as he sang it transformed it from a song of devotion to autobiography. Not that anyone was fooled that Jolson was in love with anyone but himself: it was the audience, humming it on the way out of the theater, who were the song’s true “I.” And the “you” was the mugging, sappy, hugely energetic Jolson, who won audiences over not through innate likeability (they didn’t want to do it) but through sheer dynamic brio.

8. George Formby: "John Willie's Ragtime Band"

If there were a British equivalent to Al Jolson, it might be George Formby pére; though the differences between the two are not entirely down to national temperament. Where Jolson was energetic, boisterous, try-anything, and above all loud, Formby’s stage persona was low-key and diffident, a laconic Northerner hugely impressed by the glamour of London music-hall (where he nevertheless headlined for decades). His primary character was John Willie, a not-terribly-bright Lancashire lad who sang in a halting brogue; here he rewrites “Alexander’s Ragtime Band” to fit his stereotypical lower-class Northern milieu (as imaginary, and as derogatory, as minstrel tropes in American ragtime), and in so doing anticipates the British Invasion by half a century. Not that Formby was known, or even known of, in the States: but the method of taking vernacular American forms and making them over into vehicles for British identity, politics, and satire, is prescient.

9. Fragson: "Je connais une blonde"

It is absurd that this is our first encounter with French popular song; I can plead only a lack of space. Harry Fragson was the son of a French father and a Belgian mother, but he was born in Soho, and bilingualism aided his career considerably, since he was just as popular in Paris as London, and his parodies of the music-hall stars of each nation were warmly received across the Channel in the other. His biggest Anglophone hit was “Hello, Hello, Who’s Your Lady Friend,” a winking mockery of philandering husbands, but in France he’s best remembered for this rewrite of Irving Berlin’s “A Girl in Havana.” He would be dead before 1913 was out, shot by his paranoid, suicidal father, and the following year the troops of France would march to the front lines singing “Je connais une blonde” with the assurance of men who knew it would be over soon.

10. Marcelly & Léo Daniderff: "Sur la Riviera"

The French Riviera had been the playground of the idle rich, the aristocracy, and — naturally — the ambitious and self-promoting entertainer since the middle of the 19th century; with its “health spas” that also happened to host high-stakes casinos, its resort towns full of intrigue, and its local Carnival customs as florid as any Latin nation’s, it was a favorite setting for fiction both popular (the pulp romances of E. Phillips Oppenheim) and highbrow (Henry James’ The Ambassadors), but it did not receive a populist theme song until 1913, when composer Léo Daniderff had the first of his many hits with “Sur la Riviera.” This recording teams him with music-hall and café singer Marcelly, and the music may be familiar to cinema buffs; but the lyrics, which put the Board-of-Tourism-approved singalong chorus in the mouth of a fancy-dress Pierrot, predict one of the favorite themes of the 1920s.

11. Nellie Melba: "L'âme évaporée"

This history’s prejudice towards the new — towards the snap and crackle of popular music, of premieres and firsts and flings forth into the future — has meant that we have ignored the voice that was, more than any other, called the greatest in the first decade of the twentieth century (and in the last decade of the nineteenth). Australian soprano Nellie Melba was a superstar, a primma donna whose pure, agile voice was better suited to the seductiveness of Italian and French opera than to the oppressive weight of German; but her records, especially as recording improved and her voice aged, were nearly always of the classical canon rather than of new material. She was fifty-two when this record — of a Debussy composition as recent as 1891 — was made, but fragments of her old tonal purity come down to us, and the melody’s gentle progressions point towards popular song some decades in the future.

12. John McCormack: "Foggy Dew"

One of Melba’s favorite duet partners in the later years of her life — because he never upstaged her — was John McCormack, an Irish tenor who recorded prolifically and without much concern for the quality of the song. His voice was superbly matched to the limitations of the recording process, and he sang the classical canon, popular ditties, sentimental Irish weepies, and flag-waving humbug with the same booming regularity. The song had to be something special to get him to vary his approach, and “Foggy Dew,” an old Irish folk air (with new lyrics by the mysterious L. F. Milligan) was special: Spenser Clay’s tumbling piano meets McCormack’s solemn but sensitive rendition of the song, and the result is one of the first superb recordings of British folk song. The immensely popular McCormack was no folk singer — and folk purists to come would decry his academy-trained vocal — but he was unimpeachably Irish.

13. Chauncey Olcott: "When Irish Eyes Are Smiling"

1. Lovey's Trinidad String Band: "Mango Vert"

The bright spotlight of the recording horn has reached the Caribbean, where (Cuba excepted) the national musics have hitherto gone undetected by the relentless drive of multinational capitalism to sell a people’s music back to them. Lovey’s String Band was one of the most popular in Trinidad, led by George R. L. Baille, who went by the nickname “Lovey.” He’s credited as composer here, though as “Green Mango” or “Mangoes” it would become a popular folk-calypso song. And this is calypso, the earliest on record. The enormous energy pulsing here is still something of a shock, especially compared to the staid white American or European orchestras churning out stiff rags. The band name is something of a red herring; the band’s real secret weapon isn’t strings but its rhythm section, which pounds and patters in such dense clusters that they get lost in the hissing grooves of the record. Not just progenitor of island music, it prefigures all Africanized funk, from Tito to Fela to Diplo.

2. Orquesta Típica Pacho: "Armenonville"

Meanwhile, wheeling down the South American coast, another African-European-American mezcla is approaching its (first) zenith as a recorded music. If tango is Argentina’s jazz, Juan “Pacho” Maglio’s arrival is comparable to that of Louis Armstrong, the first great player of the form’s signature instrument the bandoneón, and the first bandleader popular with the public and on record. “Armenonville” was named for a fashionable dancehall opened by a couple of Maglio’s friends in Buenos Aires, and the elegant cosmopolitanism of the composition stands in relief to the strict tango tempo kept by the guitar. Cornet-violin (an amplified violin that recorded better than the ordinary kind) and flute make up the “orchestral” backing; with just four instruments, Maglio suggests an entire orchestra, and before long tango will be an international orchestral music, turning from a small-combo dance music played by guys nicknamed Pacho to an ornate big-band music. Ironically, Maglio never played the Armenonville; it was too high-class for his populist dance airs.

3. Roy Spangler: "Red Onion Rag"

Ragtime as an organizing force in the popular culture of the age was almost twenty years old, yet it wasn’t recorded in what many ragtimers believe (and some believed then, notably Scott Joplin) to be its truest form — as a solo piano exercise — until 1912. As always in American music of the pre-jazz era, it was white men who shouldered forward to the recording horn first. Mike Bernard cut the first piano ragtime record, a version of “Everybody Two-Step” that dazzles with rinkydink flash but contains virtually none of the rhythmic slippage inherent in black American music — no funk, in modern terms. Roy Spangler was less well-known — we know almost nothing about him today — but paid better attention to the black piano professors; his rendition of Abe Olman’s “Red Onion Rag” is loose and jazzy, and when it speeds up in the second half approaches the honky-tonk virtuosity of stride. You can shake your ass to it, in other words, and please do.

4. Bob Roberts: "Ragtime Cowboy Joe"

The omnipresence of ragtime as an overriding cultural theme means it was only a matter of time until it was applied to another of the cultural figures that was gaining the upper hand in the American imagination, the cowboy. And indeed every musical movement since has adopted the cowboy as a sort of totemic image, from swing to blues to reggae to rock to b-boy. “Ragtime Cowboy Joe” is pure Tin Pan Alley fluff, written by a passel of New Yorkers who thought it was cute when a nephew dressed up in a cowboy costume, but the comedy canter in the rhythm and the plucked banjo deep in the mix point forward to western music to come — for the West, and especially the music of the West, have always been as much a pop-culture construction as anything authentic to the soil. But it’s the rag, not the cowboy, that makes the song — and Roberts handles the surprisingly tricky rhythmic shifts of the chorus with aplomb.

5. Al Jolson: "Snap Your Fingers (And Away You Go)"

The rap about Jolson is that he started out playing a blackface character, but was too original and eccentric to convincingly render a particular ethnic characterization for long; after a certain point he kept blacking up but neither he nor his audience were under any illusions that he was supposed to be performing blackness; it was just his look, like Weber & Fields’ comedy mustaches or Charlie Chaplin’s baggy trousers. That’s the story, anyway; if we’re less convinced that there’s such a thing as good-faith blackface today, it’s with reason. Certainly “Snap Your Fingers” (sometimes spelled “Snap Yo’ Fingers”) is broadly minstrel, with Jolson playing the role of the Carefree Coon. But already his foghorn voice and distinctive mannerisms are taking over — the bleat that Mel Blanc used to represent Jolson can be heard in the first note he sings — and the song has plausible deniability embedded into it: after all, he could just be encouraging all freedom-swaggering Americans to walk in a modern jazzy step.

6. Elsie Janis: "Fo' de Lawd's Sake Play a Waltz"

Elsie Janis was one of the major starlets of the era, a singer-actress on Broadway and the West End who starred in shows called things like The Hoyden (1906) and The Slim Princess (1911), farces with more melody than wit. Reissues of this song claim it’s from The Slim Princess, but it’s not present in the original score; stars like Elsie Janis (or Al Jolson) who had shows built around them would often introduce a new song part way through the run — sometimes with a bit of extra dialogue to explain its presence in the plot, sometimes not. The interpolation of “Fo’ de Lawd’s Sake” would have been essentially random: a topical satire on new music, with references to popular songs like “Oh You Beautiful Doll” and “Ragtime Violin” — even a quotation of “Alexander’s Ragtime Band” — and dance crazes like the Turkey Trot and Grizzly Bear, in minstrel dialect that today just sounds like singing — it’s the overly-enunciated “correct” voices that sound oddly comic today.

7. Ada Jones: "I've Got the Finest Man"

Elsie Janis would have been a latecomer to singing minstrel dialect songs; Ada Jones had been doing it since the 1890s, and wouldn’t stop until the more heterogenous 1920s forced a sea change in acceptable recorded entertainment. “I’ve Got the Finest Man” wasn’t marketed as a minstrel song — instead of a hideous caricature of African-Americans, the sheet music was sold with a pretty Art Nouveau pattern on the cover — but it was written by two black men, lyricist Harry Creamer (who would go on to write blues and jazz with Turner Layton and James P. Johnson) and bandleader and composer James Reese Europe, who worked for dance-vogue popularizers Vernon and Irene Castle, and whose name we will see much more of in the coming years. There’s nothing specifically black about the lyrics — even the second verse, in which the man turns out to be a rascally thief, is race-neutral — and it’s an early example of black song as sincerely anodyne as any white music.

8. The Heidelberg Quartet: "Waiting for the Robert E. Lee"

The Robert E. Lee, named of course for the Confederate General, was a famous steamship in the Reconstruction South which won a much-hyped race down the Mississippi in 1870. That it’s the name for the boat in this song may have meant nothing more than the rhythmic quality of the name (it’s a rare choriamb), but the associations of course are those of classical minstrelsy: carefree black people jumping for joy at the approach of a ship that forms an essential part of their economic servitude, named after the most famous fighter in the cause of slavery in the English-speaking world. But if the song’s purpose is base, the purposes to which it can be put are more complicated, and the Heidelberg Quintette (with a lead vocal by Billy Murray, not Will Oakland, as reported elsewhere) take the opportunity to sound as actually black as possible, pushing the rhythm forward into ragtime and inserting arrhythmic vocal breaks that come closer to doo-wop than barbershop.

9. Fred Van Eps: "Maurice Tango"

I’ve already mentioned Vernon and Irene Castle once; prepare to hear their names many times more. Though they were not musicians, they had an enormous impact on American music of the 1910s through their exhibition dancing and (more subtly) by their policy of color-blind musician hiring. They are largely credited for introducing the tango to American society, though the first dancer to have his name on an American tango was Maurice Mouvet, a glamorous gigolo type who worked with many different partners over the course of his career. Madeline d’Harville was his partner when Silvio Hein, an American composer, dedicated his tango to them, and Fred Van Eps, the great second banana of American banjo music (after Vess L. Ossman), recorded it. Van Eps was rather a dab hand at musical exotica, and if his “Maurice Tango” isn’t actually in tango rhythm, his use of “exotic” scales and his interplay with the backing orchestra makes it a more mysterious and evocative-sounding rag than usual.

10. Carlos Gardel: "Sos Mi Tirador Plateado"

It’s appropriate, perhaps, that the man who will become the most famous voice and most fêted personality of the Tango Age creeps in here, in a side entrance to the milonga, and murmurs to himself. Carlos Gardel is only twenty-one years old in 1912, and this was his first record, made almost surreptitiously on the small Odeón label. It did not make him famous, and he won’t try for another five years. But when he did at last become famous, he sang this song again and again. It’s embedded with the slang of low-life Buenos Aires, and rife with metaphors, puns and wordplay, but it is essentially an ode to a woman that has the attributes of a weapon (or vice vera), couched in vividly erotic language (one unmistakable line is “sos vaina de mi puñual,” or “you are the sheath to my dagger”) and sung in a low croon, barely audible above the soft plucking of the guitar, moving too slow to tango.

11. Harry Lauder: "Roamin' in the Gloamin'"

It’s the rare British music hall veteran who gets a second look-in in these pages — the heavy American bias should be pretty obvious by now. But Harry Lauder played the left side of the Atlantic so frequently, and so lucratively, that it was like a second home to him. Americans can fall hard for a properly broad Scotsman — just ask Mel Gibson or Mike Myers — and their sentimental streak was blamed on Celtic origins long before Hollywood profited from it. “Roamin’ in the Gloamin’” is theoretically a comic Scotsface ballad, but Americans took it as the real thing, humming and playing and plinking it out as a love ditty with or without the broad brogue; for the peculiar enchantment of light and air in the gloaming — a.k.a. twilight — is roughly similar on the Scots highlands and in the Middle West, as another sentimental Celto-American, F. Scott Fitzgerald, would say. Lauder would continue to play British stereotypes through WWII, but he always sang this song.

12. Apollo Male Quartette: "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot"

1. Sophie Tucker: "Some of These Days"

The American song form with which we opened the century — the Coon song — has shifted from a derogatory, sneering Othering to a lightly mocking inclusiveness. If it would be too much to claim that We Are All Coons Now, at least some people aren’t unwilling to embrace the idea. Sophie Tucker was a Jewish “shouter” — that is, she sang big and brassy, because she was big and brassy — and she was one of the first to publicly join the dots between the African-American and Jewish experiences. “Some of These Days” takes the form of a Coon song — the “lament for a no-good man” genre — but both melody and the specific instrumentation used here are reminiscent of the Jewish music of Eastern Europe (where Tucker, as Sonya Kalish, was born), all minor keys and keening violins. It was written, however, by a black man: Shelton Brooks, Canadian-born but vaudevilled everywhere. Tucker consciously modeled her act on blues shouters like Ma Rainey, and called herself “The Last of the Red Hot Mamas.” On record, though, she was one of the first.

2: Arthur Collins & Byron G. Harlan: "Alexander's Ragtime Band"

The inextricable relationship between Jewishness and American song was only beginning. Sophie Tucker was a star, but a young songwriter born Israel Baline would eclipse her before long. He’s had hits before — hits for a season, for a year — but now he’s written an all-time perennial, one of those songs that comes to stand in for an entire generation, steamrolling whatever it may have originally meant. And originally, “Alexander’s Ragtime Band” was yet another Coon song. Alexander, with its classical pretensions, was one of the traditional Funny Names for black men, who were all supposed to be George or Sam. Collins and Harlan know this, and they sing in exaggerated Negro dialect, Harlan as the more insulting “Negress” voice making sure every yas counts. It’s not ragtime, though Hollywood revisionism would later call it the first ragtime song, off by some twenty years. It’s a march: though it can, and has, been ragged, as well as jazzed, swung, boogie-woogied, and all else. Beyond the insult, it’s a song about the importance of music, and there are never enough of those.

3. George M. Cohan: "I Want To Hear A Yankee Doodle Tune"

As American song shifts its weight forward into the new decade, it begins to leave behind the old. This isn’t quite the last we’ll hear of Cohan as a songwriter, but it’s the first and the last we hear in his own voice. He never fully trusted the recording horn or, later, the microphone; he was, after all, a song-and-dance man. But in 1911, a half-decade after the peak of his career, he recorded a handful of songs, perhaps hoping to goose sheet-music sales; they were mostly leftovers from old shows, and remain largely forgotten today. This was the best of them: a summation of his attitude towards music — pro-popular song, anti-longhair pretension, a dash of ragtime for flavor, and patriotic as hell — that works musically to showcase Cohan at his best: the opening patter verse reveals a not-embarrassing flow. It’s revealing that Sousa is the musical idol invoked: already he’s waxing nostalgic for a vanishing era; Sousa was still active, but marching bands were fading as vaudeville and dance bands came into their own.

4. Montgomery & Stone: "Travel, Travel Little Star"

Two of the best-paid clowns in vaudeville were Dave Montgomery and Fred Stone, who, by 1911, rarely appeared in vaudeville as their own revues kept them quite busy enough. They had catapulted to fame as the Scarecrow and the Tin Man in the original 1903 production of The Wizard of Oz — but before long L. Frank Baum was dedicating books to them, as their popularity kept Oz bankable and him rich. Montgomery was the short, practical one, Stone the gangly, rueful one, and they did every act imaginable, including blackface, orientalface, and povertyface. They even made records, such as this number from the show The Old Town (also starring a young Will Rogers), where they played show-business vagabonds, on the run from sheriffs who had “attached” (put a lien of confiscation on) their stage properties to make up for local towns’ losses accrued by their failed shows. They interrupt their close-harmony singing with back-and-forth patter in the vein that Abbott and Costello would later practice, and swing back into song without batting an eyelash, consummate professionals.

5. Harry Champion: "I'm Henery the Eighth, I Am"

Vaudeville in America and music-hall in England were both approaching something of a zenith in the years before World War I, with music-hall growing in popularity as the working classes who loved it became ever more financially independent. Probably the best-known music-hall song of the modern era, thanks to the Herman’s Hermits’ 1965 cover, is Harry Champion’s signature “I’m Henery the Eighth.” Champion was one of the most remarkable performers of the music-hall stage, a Cockney dynamo of energy with a wide repertoire and the ability to sell it with apparent effortlesslessness; in fact it’s something of a shame that this will be our only encounter with him. Ironically, it was vaudeville — or variety, as it was known in the UK — that would put him out of work. Accustomed to holding a stage for the evening, he never got used to the quicker, one-act-after-another pace of vaudeville, and when the transatlantic form began to replace the older music-hall tradition after the War, he went into the taxi business, doing quite well for himself.

6. Al Jolson: "Asleep in the Deep"

Many years from now, Jerry Lee Lewis will hold forth the contention that there have ever only been four great stylists of American song: Jimmie Rodgers, Hank Williams, Al Jolson, and himself. Rogers’ yodeling, Williams’ high lonesome voice, and (granted) Lewis’s frenzied wailing, sure, we can understand — but wherefore the foghorned, showbizzy Jolson? But one listen to this, and damned if the sonofabitch isn’t right. “Asleep in the Deep” was a parlor song of 1897, a dolorous tribute to the brave sailors lost at sea; but in the hands of the young Jolson, a dynamic, barely-known Lithuanian immigrant and itinerant performer who had just booked his first regular New York gig, it becomes a — well, a what? A travesty, sure; a comedy song, possibly, though he doesn’t entirely give up on the sentiment. Instead he bellows, moans, stretches notes over bars and wraps them around once or twice; he gibbers, he goes basso profundo, he makes sounds that would be called scatting in another generation — in short, he invents American song. You can’t take your ears off him. And everything follows.

7. George P. Watson: "Sleep, Baby, Sleep"

By comparison, George Watson is only following the notes on the page. “Sleep, Baby, Sleep” was another parlor song, published by one John J. Handley in 1885 and as it was supposed to be set in the German Alps, a yodel was written into the chorus. This in itself was hardly unusual: Alpine yodeling was a standard feature of German- or Austrian-descended popular song (think of “The Lonely Goatherd” in The Sound of Music), and if yodeling doesn’t seem like quite the most soothing sound for a lullaby, well, cultures vary and all that. George P. Watson, however, was a professional German impersonator and yodeling specialist; and in the second half of the song he stops paying any attention to what Handley wrote and inserts his own Cherman-accented verses with their own yodeling accompaniment, less Alpine all the time. If it’s not quite the high lonesome yodel that would come to define country music, it’s also not quite entirely not; and as we’ll come to hear, country (like all American) music, draws as much from commercialized novelty as from tradition.

8. Toots Paka's Hawaiians: "Kamawae"

Speaking of which. The Hawai’ian steel guitar sound, spectral and keening, will of course come to define country music even more than the yodel. This is’nt quite the first American recording of Hawai’ian music (the islands were annexed by the United States, as a sort of afterthought to the Spanish-American War in the Philippines, in 1898, and recordings were made as early as 1905), but it’s still much earlier than the hula craze of 1915-1916 that would popularize the steel guitar throughout the country, but especially and eventually in the uplands of the South. And Toots Paka’s troupe, in addition to several others, were laying the groundwork for that craze with concerts and recordings. The alternate title given for one release of “Kamawae” (or “Kamawe”) is “Shake Your Feet,” and the number is appropriately uptempo, the steel guitar sharing space with flute for melody while ukeleles set a fast rhythm and the chorus sings in Hawai’ian. The islands have a rich musical tradition, some of which we’ll come to explore much more in depth, but this is a fine start.

9. Flora Rodríguez de Gobbi & Orquesta: "Minguito"

Often ignored in the standard histories of the tango, Alfredo Gobbi and his wife Flora were among the first recording stars of the Argentinean music world. They hardly confined themselves to the tango — then new enough to seem like a passing fad — but wrote and performed zarzuelas (the Spanish tradition of comic opera with political and topical satire), mazurkas, polkas, and other European dances in addition to the tango rioplatense. Which translates as “tango of the Río de la Plata,” a river which originates in Uruguay and pours into the sea near Buenos Aires; in a musical sense, it’s very much the South American Mississippi. “Minguito” was performed solo by Flora as a comic tango in character as a newspaper boy on the streets of Buenos Aires trying to manage his time between his girls, his papers, dancing the tango, and smoking cigarettes. Full of lively street slang, the song is irrepressibly melodic even if you don’t understand the words, and while the tango rhythm is still not as pronounced as it will come to be, it’s still more song than dance.

10. Yángos Psamátyalis: "Zmirneïkomanes"

The urban Greek music which would come to be called rebetiko in the years between the wars was a music of varied ancestry; like all of the great urban ethnic musics of the early twentieth century (tango, jazz, fado, klezmer, flamenco, samba, blues), it developed out of migration, assimilation, and hybridization. The center of gravity in the Eastern Mediterranean was still Constantinople, hub of the failing Ottoman Empire, and Turkish musical modes (or makam) were much more influential than Western European ones. To the untrained ear (mine, for example), this Greek song by a Greek singer sounds Turkish, or even Arabic; but it is sung in Greek, accompanied by accordion (as close to a universal instrument as exists this side of the piano), and instead of taking a theme from classical Persian or Turkish literature, the title has been (roughly) translated as “Bordello Blues.” I don’t know anything about Yángos Psamátyalis (nor does anyone else on the Internet, apparently), but his longuers of emotion over the keening accordion and rock-solid timekeeping plucked strings rushes into the future at breakneck speed.

11. Victor Light Opera Company: "Gems from Naughty Marietta"

1. Nora Bayes: "Has Anybody Here Seen Kelly?"

The full tale of how the Irish became American is far beyond the purview of this website; but though it began deep in America’s past, before there was an America to exclude anyone from, it had not, as of 1910, been fully accomplished. Nora Bayes was Jewish (she was born Eleanor Goldberg), but she worked hard at assuming the brogues of a half-dozen different stereotypes, less in mockery than in melting-pot solidarity, though there was mockery too — immigrants love to laugh at nothing so much as themselves — and so became the preeminent queen of vaudeville for twenty years.

2. Blanche Ring: "Come, Josephine, in My Flying Machine"

A bare seven years after the Wright Brothers’ first successful flight at Kitty Hawk, the American — and global — imagination had been captured by the idea of unaided flight, and fantasias of the Highway of the Future unrolled in proto-sci-fi magazines, cartoon etchings, and of course popular song. It’s not surprising that a song based on the craze would filter it through the June-moon-spoon of romantic woo, but it’s maybe more surprising that the hit was made by a plummy contralto whose designs on Josephine may be entirely pure... but that’s not how we hear it today.

3. Arthur Pryor's Band: "Temptation Rag"

The sheer velocity of Pryor’s arrangement here is surprising even today; few ragtime revivalists would care to play a single piano arrangement at 120 bpm, let alone an entire brass band. Compare it to the New York Military Band’s rendition of the same year, and it’s the difference between Billy Ocean and Derrick May. But “Temptation Rag” also marks ragtime’s Elvis moment, when it switched from being a lowlife music played by black people and their disreputable admirers to the unexceptionable pop of the era; its composer, Thomas Henry Lodge, was white, and as stolidly middle-class as they come.

4. Bert Williams: "Play that Barbershop Chord"

Ragtime music had been known in the US since 1893, when Scott Joplin had introduced it at the Chicago World’s Fair. But like any disreputable mixed-race music of the period — Argentinean tango, Brazilian samba, and Martinican biguine come to mind — it was not considered proper music for song; it was dance music only. 1910 saw the those already-loose restrictions relax considerably; and Bert Williams, already at the top of his game, jumped on the chance to insert a little funk into his comic patter. Typically, he misdirects: the "barbershop chord" isn’t used here, because it requires multiple voices.

5. Billy Murray & Chorus: "Casey Jones, The Brave Engineer"

Casey Jones was a real railroad engineer who was killed trying to prevent the collision of two trains; the song that bears his name was (apparently) first sung by a black engine cleaner who had known him, and gained circulation for nearly a decade before two vaudeville chancers saw the chance to pick up some easy royalties and published it, copyright them. Along the way it had picked up some free-floating verses about an unfaithful wife — Jones’s widow was very upset about it all — and entered into American folklore; Carl Sandburg called it “the greatest [American] ballad ever written.”

6. Candido Pereira da Silva & Grupo Carioca: "Saudações"

If you don’t know Portuguese, don’t assume you know what the title means just because you've heard of saudade — "saudações" actually means "greetings." (This is, of course, the mistake I initially made.) Candido da Silva was one of the leading twentieth-century composers of choro, the national music of nineteenth-century Brazil, and one of the leading trombonists of the music; here his soft, elegant trombone style, juxtaposed against the rhythmic backing of the Grupo Carioca (group from Rio de Janeiro), points towards samba and even bossa nova. He taught and composed into the 1940s, but recorded rarely after this.

7. Victor Light Opera Company: "Favorite Airs from The Arcadians"

The Arcadians was one of the major musicals of Edwardian London, a gently comic fantasia that found the sweet spot between the earlier operettas of Gilbert & Sullivan and the later musical comedies of Noel Coward. Its plot was cheerful social satire: the unspoiled inhabitants of a hitherto-undiscovered Arcadia attempt — and, spoiler alert, fail — to convert wicked Londoners to their moral simplicity. This isn’t a cast recording, but experienced phonograph singers (you might recognize Billy Murray) singing "Arcadians are we," "The Girl with a Brogue," "Arcady is ever young," "Charming Weather," "Bring Me a Rose," and "Truth is so beautiful."

8. Feodor Chaliapin: "Luchinushka"

One of the greatest operatic bassos of all time, Feodor Chaliapin was also one of the most dynamic performers of his generation, a magnetic and powerful singer who rose from peasant origins in tsarist Russia to become one of the most beloved ambassadors of Russian music around the world. His signature role was Boris Godunov in Mussorgsky’s opera of the same name, but he sang arias and songs of the people with equal relish and intensity. “Luchinushka” is a Russian folk song; the “luchina” of the title refers to a burning wooden splinter used by peasants to light their homes.

9. Antonina Nezhdanova: "Otvet mne, zorkoe svetilo"

As clear and pure as Chaliapin was deep and stormy, Nezhdanova’s soprano was one of the most captivating and gorgeous voices recorded in the first half of the twentieth century, and though she rarely sang outside Russia, she sang a handful of enduring roles, including the Queen of Shemakha in Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s 1909 The Golden Cockerel. This aria is usually called “Hymn to the Sun” in English (I believe the title translates to “Tell me, watchful light”), and it’s a moment of solitary beauty in an opera that covertly satirizes the military overreach and failure of the tsarist regime.

10. Raymond Hitchcock: "So What's the Use"