Posted on 07/01/2024 1:22:39 PM PDT by CharlesOConnell
I muse upon changes in music life across the expanse of the rise of talkies and radio. You would think that radio & talkies made music more accessible, therefore, the average person's appreciation of and participation in music got better after culture started to be put in an electronic form. Here's a suggestion that the opposite is true.
Some things we know, to suggest that nearly everyone sang, are that in the decade before World War I, there were 300 piano brands in the U.S. (Most customers were middle-class, but some poor children could get a piano.) There were ten, 1-million sellers per year, of--not records--sheet music. Victrola was an expensive novelty; the average family didn't have one; they were more common in music stores, to prompt sales of sheet music that had gone stale. The average person knew the lyrics to 200 songs; they didn't have to be good singers, to have fun with music; personal singing (at home, friends, church, school, clubs, taverns) was most people's music life.
My mother, born in 1910, went to her cousins' house to sing; by age 3, she was learning to sing almost before she could speak properly. But by age 33, talkies had hit; her idea of music was the light-opera romances of Jeannette MacDonald. This was a dividing line, the earlier half was, in general, when the only music you had was what you made yourself, exclusive of rare experiences like hearing professional performances from off-Broadway shows & opera. Most families didn't have a radio even by the beginning of World War II, just as they didn't have a t.v. during the early 1950s when I Love Lucy hit. The most common medium of music in the pre-electronic era was a kind of small, piano magazine called parlor-music, for playing on piano or guitar.
I have just remarked upon my father, 1908-1976, liking the song from the "Yankee Doodle Dandy" movie, "H - A - double are - I - G - A - N spells Harrigan" (James Cagney, Joan Leslie). I was wondering if the lyric "Divil a man can say a word agin me" glorifies satan? (It seems not, that name may signify, "opposition", like the root diabolos.)
So I wondered, how did my father come to prefer the Harrigan song, if he only saw it in a movie theater in the early 1940s, then he could only see the movie again, after t.v. replayed the movie, from the 1960s on?
How did that song live on in his memory?
I learned more, about the fact that my father really liked the 1912 song "Alexander's Ragtime Band", which was Irving Berlin's first big hit, and sold 1 1/2 million copies around 1912.
I figured that my father had been a small child, hearing that song sung to piano accompaniment. (I since learned that my 84 year old wife liked Glen Miller's "Moonlight Serenade" from hearing it on radio about the same age.)
There is a lost era of culture, not just 125 years old, but extending back to all ages of culture, long before radio & talkies, when people's experience of music was much more personal than just passively listening.
Interesting I’ve liked “Sixth Street Rag” myself.
Just goes to show that the push to become more “diverse” is actually have the opposite effect. As we globalize and crush everyone together, the “melting pot” means we’re all the same. That’s unfortunate.
I’m guessing that
Ordinary music life = Popular music history.
Don’t forget that most Americans were regular church goers back then. The influence of Gospel and other kinds of religious worship had a profound effect on popular music, especially in it’s beginning stages. Country music and The Blues became merged at some point in the late ‘40’s and early ‘50’s.
This evolved into what was later called Rock and Roll or Rhythm and Blues.
Some entertainers retained their original Gospel approach, such as Mahalia Jackson, while others’ just as creative embraced the more secular, such as Ella Fitzgerald.
Mahalia refused to sing anything clearly secular, turning down lucrative request after other lucrative requests.
It probably would be more accurate to say that the golden age of music in common life was around 1720-1920, when there were enough non-poor people to have the free time to learn how to play/sing music and the literacy to be able to read words and music. It is no coincidence that this is also the time of the golden age of classical music, from Vivaldi/Handel/Bach to Brahms/Tchaikovsky/Puccini. When singing switched from bel canto to crooning, it was the beginning of the end, though it took a whole cycle of four generations to get to the end, with classical music going avant-garde nuts and popular music going cookie-cutter bland, needing sex, choreography, and fireworks to make it palatable.
We'd all sing songs at YMCA camp, at school...it was a community-binding ceremony (of sorts, I think).
Until it became culturally "uncool"...spearheaded no doubt by the Marxist cultural agitators.
In"Catch Me if You Can", remember how 'cringey' the scene was with Martin Sheen singing with his family to - remember it? - 'Sing Along with Mitch'?
Group singing was a kind of cultural glue that united us
...until our more modern 'betters", marxists who wanted us divided pronounced it passe, unsophisticated, something only the yokels do...yeah, that's the ticket.
“”I’ve liked “Sixth Street Rag” myself.””
What happened to the other half of the street?
You’re writing about REAL music.. Today’s noise bears no resemblance to what is called “music.”
My family had a Victrola given to us by an uncle when his wife passed away. I was just a kid but his wife must have been the music lover in the marriage. That grand old man lived to 105 and his sister to 107 - they had no children.It came with a LOT of 78 records and we played every single one of them for years growing up. We moved it from PA to our home in NY state. My family loved to sing - around a piano my sister played and on car trips.
I find appalling by “WHAT” appears on stage today for millions of dollars - barely clothed...and everyone knows WHO I’m talking about. Even worse was the future King of England taking his two oldest children to one of “the” concerts recently.. Who in their right mind would want their children entertained by someone who has to flaunt her body to grab a crowd’s attention? Yes - I’m an old fuddy duddy and I wouldn’t have it any other way. I grew up in a different time.
We had our great female singers in the ‘40’s (Andrews Sisters, Jo Stafford and not so old Anne Murray) and none had to appear practically nude for us to enjoy their talent. The only who was semi-nude was Esther Williams - LOL.
Right now I’m listening to beautiful music by the pianist John Arpin...THAT’S music!!!
“”The only who”” = the only ONE who.........sorry!
How much is that doggy in the window?
The one with the waggily tail.
Probably from the radio. Long time ago. You triggered the memory.
Thank you all for writing your impressions. It really means a lot to me, the way I spend a lot of time thinking about this issue.
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