30. Hoagy Carmichael & The Paul Whiteman Orchestra, “Washboard Blues”
(Hoagy Carmichael/Fred B. Callahan)
Victor 35877-B, 1927 · mp3
Hoagy Carmichael is perhaps the quintessential American songwriter: a songwriter for the entire nation, rather than for the narrow canyons of Manhattan or the overdressed stages of Broadway. See, if you haven’t yet, the movie that first paired Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, To Have And Have Not, where Hoagy plays a wisecracking pianist; craggily handsome in rumpled shirtsleeves, his fedora pushed back far on his head, a cigarette perpetually dangling from his thin lips, he plays like a wastrel genius and sings in a woodsy croak that sounds better every year: folksy, human, irreversibly American. It’s not the kind of voice you’re used to hearing in the pop pantheon of his Tin Pan Alley confederates; it’s far too lived-in and Midwestern. In another life he could have been Woody Guthrie; in a third, he could have been Atticus Finch — he was practicing law when he heard a song he had written on a record. He packed it in and went to New York, where his college friend Bix Beiderbecke was playing in Paul Whiteman’s orchestra. Whiteman knew talent when he heard it, and arranged a for twelve-inch recording of “Washboard Blues,” where Hoagy played piano and sang for the first time on record. Most 78 records were ten inches, which is why this song is longer than most — the tune takes its time to develop, and turns into a miniature epic around the theme of a hardworking (black, servant-class) woman, and unlike every other white composer of his era (even Gershwin encountered raised eyebrows from real black jazz players like Duke Ellington), he immediately and obviously Gets It, he’s not affecting a damn thing, he knows life is shit and music is there to make it better, he doesn’t try to ennoble anybody (that’s not his place), he just finds his songs and makes a living like the people who were his real confederates, the jazz musicians, black and white, who toiled in the pits and on the bandstands and at after hours nightclubs. He had as many, and fully just as great, hit songs as Gershwin or Porter or Berlin or Kern, but he was never one of them; he was a jazz guy first and foremost, and that’s why he still sounds so good in an era which has all but effaced non-vernacular music from cultural memory.
29. Vernon Dalhart, “The Prisoner’s Song”
(Guy Massey)
Victor 19427, 1924 · mp3
Record collectors are a curious bunch, and none more so than the rare breed — perhaps no more than a few dozen all told — who more or less single-handedly rescued the great folk, string-band, old-time, early jazz, and related musics from the dustbin of history beginning in the 1950s. The stories they tell of driving through verdant Southern hills and down lonely dirt tracks in search of anyone who might have some old 78s they could buy are like Don Quixote’s tales of knight-errantry to those of us whose experience of the music is entirely digital, but there’s one thing they all agree on: every collection they came across was befouled with dozens, or hundreds, of records of the man they call, with varying degrees of vituperation, “Vernon Shitfart.” No matter what other unheard-of, tiny-issue pressings might lie in those one-room shacks in forgotten hollers, everyone had his records. Vernon Dalhart was the man who convinced the record industry that there was a market for country-style vocals, and despite what the collector-ideologues think, he had as much right to the label as anyone; he was born in Texas and actually worked as a cowboy for a time. But he also went on to study voice at the Dallas Conservatory of Music, sang in productions of Puccini and Gilbert and Sullivan, and he recorded everything under the sun beginning in 1916, from light opera to ethnic-stereotype comedy to this, which by some estimations was the biggest (non-“White Christmas”) seller in the first seventy years of recorded music. Authenticity is a bugbear for damn near every school of musical thought, and Vernon Dalhart gets the blame for being the least authentic country singer even while being the first commercially successful country singer. This song is a standard country lament, heartstring-tuggingly direct in its emotional appeal, and Roy Acuff (whose country credentials no one has ever questioned) would borrow the melody for his landmark gospel-country song “Great Speckled Bird.” Country’s always had a schmaltzy pop moment for every instance of stark beauty: the light opera singer Vernon Dalhart just got there first.
28. Clarence Williams’ Blue Five, “Cake Walking Babies From Home”
(Clarence Williams/Chris Smith/Henry Troy)
Okeh 40321-A, 1925 · mp3
If you don’t know the musicological, cultural, and racial history, this is just a fun, raggedy tune with a sharp tempo and delightful performances from Eva Taylor (vocals), Louis Armstrong (cornet), and Sidney Bechet (soprano sax, sort of). But if you do, it’s the sort of epoch-making, foundational moment that can take your breath away when heard in the right frame of mind. I think of it — I can’t not think of it — as the ultimate hot jazz song, the summation of a hundred years of back-and-forth dialogue between black and white, rich and poor, slave and free, Celtic and African, blackface and black pride, gullah and waltz, walkabout and breakdown, ragtime and marching band, blues and foxtrot, jazz and jism. (Forgive; there’re linguistic corellations.) Stomp and swerve, sweet and hot, eternal cool, unbridled frenzy without a hangover the next morning making you wish you were dead. Bliss. But about the cakewalk. Its origins are obscure, but more or less it was a dance where slaves imitated (and mocked; why not?) the stately dances of their owners, with a little African improvisation thrown in to make things interesting. Minstrel shows always ended with a walkabout: basically a glorified cakewalk, with as many levels of mockery, hatred, or sincerest flattery as are available in any human activity, blacked-up whites imitating blacks imitating whites. But black minstrels did the walkabout too, only better, and the cakewalk remained and developed as a black form. Bert Williams and George Walker brought Clorindy, Or The Origins Of The Cakewalk to the Broadway stage in 1898, and set off a genuine craze; cakewalks became once more all the rage in high fashion, in the 500 families that made up New York society, and in Buckingham Palace. So, whites imitating blacks imitating whites imitating blacks imitating whites. This is (part of) the history to listen to Clarence Williams with. Another part is the African swerve of the brass set against the Celtic stomp of the banjo; the BPM are at drill ’n’ bass levels here. A third is the “birth of jazz” theme here; Williams had come up in Storyville hustling for piano gigs and sheet-music sales, worked with just about every early jazz great, and talent scouted most of them for Okeh records, and New Orleans boys and girls cut this record in New York in the same way, and for the same reasons, that early Christianity left Jerusalem for Rome. The center of civilization is the only place where you can change the world.
27. Helen Kane, “I Wanna Be Loved By You”
(Herbert Stothart/Harry Ruby/Bert Kalmar)
Victor 21684, 1928 · mp3
Two cultural associations which have (somehow) survived the ravages of history are probably the best entry point into this song and to Helen Kane in general (that is, if any are needed: like most great pop it stands on its own and needs to make no apology to the losers who can’t get it): Marilyn Monroe and Betty Boop. Marilyn first: she sang this song in Some Like It Hot, in the role of a 1920s singer who incidentally would never have been looked at twice in the real twenties; womanly curves were decidedly passé in the era of the flat-chested, sleek-headed flapper (with the exception of Mae West, but she was never so much a sex symbol as a genius marketer who made sex a symbol for Mae West). It’s one of the few tolerable performances of Monroe’s highly undistinguished singing career (exhaling is not a substitute for vocalizing), and works mostly because of the cultural memory of Kane’s all-conquering hit. And now to La Boop. The cartoon character was created as a parody of Helen Kane, with Fleischer standby Mae Questel (she also played Olive Oyl) doing a pitch-perfect imitation of Kane’s girlish Bronx-accented chirp. When Betty Boop proved to be more successful than Kane — a night at the movies was cheaper than a performance by one of the biggest names in show biz as the Depression got underway — Kane sued the moguls for wrongful appropriation and lost, with the result that Betty Boop is a pop icon and her inspiration is forgotten except by historical obssessives like me. But “boop-oop-a-doop” remains fixed in cultural memory as a signature sound of the Roaring Twenties, a sort of virginal white scatting for an era which found its ultimate expression in nonsense and language play, whether Gertrude Stein and James Joyce, George Herriman and Billy DeBeck, or “twenty-three skidoo” and “vo-de-o-do.”
26. Adelaide Hall with Duke Ellington’s Orchestra, “The Blues I Love To Sing”
(Duke Ellington/Bubber Miley)
Victor 21490, 1927 · mp3
In November 1927, Adelaide Hall was one of the chief mourners at the funeral of Florence Mills, a cabaret and revue singer, dancer, and comedienne who was arguably the first black female superstar and who had done much towards legitimizing the field of jazz song and dance in the eyes of the theatre-going New Yorkers who constituted the guardians of fashionable taste in the 1920s. Florence had died just a few months after returning from a year-long tour in Britain, where she had been acclaimed and fêted to a remarkable degree — she even makes an appearance as period flavor in Brideshead Revisited — and her death was keenly felt as the loss of the most famous, talented, and skilful black performer of her age. One of her many talents, as the critic Gilbert Seldes put it in his landmark study of popular culture The Seven Lively Arts, was to reverse the common jazz trope of making the saxophone imitate the human voice — she sang as though her voice were an instrument untethered by words or sense, though full of meaning. Her high, sweet soprano did not record well on the acoustic instruments of the day, but her friend and protégé Adelaide’s richer alto did, and Duke Ellington took advantage of the fact to make a pair of legendary records with her not a year after Florence’s death. “Creole Love Call” is perhaps the better known, an entirely wordless jazzing-up of Rudolf Friml’s hit “Indian Love Call” from the 1924 operetta Rose-Marie turned into an eerie, haunting piece that evokes the humid, mysterious voudou Louisiana of popular imagination. But “The Blues I Love To Sing,” in which the title phrase are the only lyrics in an otherwise fully improvised piece (asides like “oh, you’re killin’ me!” to Bubber Miles as he thrills through a muted-trumpet solo don’t count), is a funkier, looser number, built on the rhythmic foundation of a booming upright bass, slapping and thumping its way to a slow, sexy grind which Adelaide’s growling, knowing trills and gurgles of nonsense syllables heat up to just this side of explicit. Florence, when she was done blushing, would have been proud.
25. Joe Venuti & Eddie Lang, “Wild Cat”
(Eddie Lang/Joe Venuti)
Okeh 40762-A, 1928 · mp3
For a few seconds it sounds like we’re in the wild backwoods of Appalachia, and we’re about to witness another great fiddle stomp from an obscure country musician — but then the guitarist plays a jazz progression, and we’re in New York, in the heart of sophisticated jazz-pop, and the inventive harmonic and rhythmic ideas flow fast and furious. Guiseppe Venuti and Salvatore Massaro were Philly boys who had grown up taking the same classical music lessons that every other musically inclined Italian kid did; they were destined to play backup for Caruso, or whoever the next Caruso was. Except they both caught the jazz bug, and forget that old-fogey respectable sheet-music stuff, this is where it’s at. Except of course that they remembered enough about those lessons to never just ring the same old blues changes; they were harmonically adventurous in ways that jazz as a whole wouldn’t start to be for some years yet, without forsaking the Prime Directive of pop music, which is that the punters can dance to it. They recorded prolifically with whoever would have ’em — Lang in particular souped up many an otherwise-forgettable jazz-pop number with his fluid, harmonically intricate guitar playing — and it was while both were in residence with the (self-titled) King of Jazz Paul Whiteman that they recorded a handful of numbers that would have reverberations in the world (and I do mean world) of jazz in the centuries to come. For a young Roma kid in France named Django was listening hard, and his buddy Stéphane too, and thereafter jazz would never be an exclusively American (though always essentially American; I mean come on) form. Lang died in 1932 following complications from a (sigh) tonsillectomy, and Venuti found that his moment had also sort of passed along with his friend, although a revival in the 1960s and 70s helped pay an old man’s bills. Sure, without Eddie Lang there would be no jazz guitar, and without Joe Venuti there would be no jazz violin — and western swing might not have happened either, come to think of it, and no one wants to live in that kind of world. But way back here in the far-flung present of 1928 they were young men only intent on burning up this patch of space and time, which by the grace of Thomas Edison and legions of nameless technicians was hooked onto a passing chunk of shellac that rises, bobbing, to the top of the current in this patch of space and time, and we too get to delight.
24. Charlie Poole & His North Carolina Ramblers, “He Rambled”
(Traditional)
Columbia 15407D, 1929 · mp3
This man right here is country music ground zero. Forget the commercial heroes and the ones who were first on wax and the ones who have monuments to them in Nashville and Bristol. Charlie Poole invented bluegrass and honky-tonk both, and didn’t particularly care that he had done it either. A hard-living, hard-drinking man who only managed to die after a thirteen-week bender (hell, Hank Williams took just one night to do it), his taut, insistent banjo style and uninflected songs of riotous living, howling sin and resigned damnation predicted not just an entire school of country music but the rock & roll that jumped snarling from its loins. A baseball injury as a child had left his picking hand malformed, and when he bought his first banjo with the proceeds from an illegal moonshine still, he had to develop his own unique style of picking, less virtuosic than full of character and purpose. His North Carolina Ramblers were a banjo-guitar-violin combo whose membership turned over regularly, but Poole was the center of gravity and the one who set the agenda for the music, less a bandleader than a rock star (but think Lou Reed, not Mick Jagger.) “Don’t Let Your Deal Go Down” was his first recording and biggest hit, but my favorite of many intensely great songs is this one, a sardonically gleeful tale of a two-fisted fighter, drinker, jailbird and casual murderer who “rambled till the butchers [or possibly vultures] cut him down.” It wasn’t necessarily autobiographical — Poole’s songs were mostly drawn from traditional sources, not written by himself or anyone he knew — but the music pops with a joie de vivre which can’t be faked, and the wry satisfaction in his otherwise emotionless voice is hard to miss. Poole was by no means a singular figure; the era and the country were both littered with similar “folk” “old-time” “hillbilly” musicians (all of which are hopelessly inadequate to describe him or his music) who together pushed the old, shaggy, miscegenated music of the hills and the rivers into the modern world of telephones and automobiles, carving a future out of the past, and making with the instruments of antiquity (or what passes for antiquity in America, i.e. thirty years ago) a raucous noise that the children of the space-age sixties and beyond would find speaking to the very depths of what for lack of a better word we might as well call their souls.
23. Bing Crosby with Paul Whiteman’s Orchestra, “I’m Coming, Virginia”
(Donald Heywood/William Marion Cook)
Victor 20751B, 1927 · mp3
Will Marion Cook may be the saddest story in the multi-volume set of sad stories which is the history of American music. At least it’s one of the saddest we know. (How many thousand stories of unfulfilled potential and thwarted ambition go down unrecorded?) Cook was an absurdly talented and ambitious composer in the latter half of the nineteenth century, probably the first person to ever have a realistic shot at inventing an American classical music that could stand up to the national classical musics of Europe; he studied with Dvorak in Europe and had ambitions to produce an opera cycle that would stand up to the majestic creations of Wagner. Only problem: he was black, and in America black people didn’t have ambitions and if they knew anything about music it was all instinctive because they were such a jolly, simple people. No one wanted him. (To be fair, Cook was also a pretty arrogant, abrasive fellow in his own right; but that never hurt, say, Schoenberg.) Cook was forced to the indignity of being a musical director for black Broadway shows. Groundbreaking, historic black Broadway shows starring Williams and Walker (the aforementioned Clorindy featured a Cook score), true, but still; no living for a genius. (Or so he thought; NAACP anthem “Lift Ev’ry Voice And Sing” is nothing to be ashamed of. For a fairly recent reappraisal of Cook’s theater music, have a listen to this public radio show.) Cook ended his career writing a lyric for this happy-go-lucky jazz tune firmly in the silly “Swanee” tradition of blacks pining for the good old South; Ethel Waters made the first recording with a band conducted by the master himself. But here it’s sung by a young Irish fellow out of the Pacific Northwest with a voice tailor-made for the novel nuances of the microphone and the barrier-breaking intimacy of radio, backed by the stylish heat of Paul Whiteman’s band with Eddie Lang sitting in on guitar. Bing Crosby was the first white jazz singer (testosterone division), and his laid-back sense of hep would set the cultural agenda for the next thirty years or so, long past the point that he was anything approaching hep himself. But back here, he was stone solid, man, a total cat.
22. Dock Boggs, “Sugar Baby”
(Traditional)
Brunswick 118, 1927 · mp3
Greil Marcus wrote Invisible Republic (later retitled The Old, Weird America), a study of Bob Dylan’s Basement Tapes sessions with the Band in the summer of 1968 because, as he admitted later, he’d wanted to write about Dock Boggs and that was the only way he could get a book deal out of it. Boggs was a Virginia native who had been picking the banjo since about the same time he’d gone to work in the mines — at twelve years old. His guitar-like fingerpicking style, developed independently of current Appalachian banjo tradition, was both innovative and unadaptable to modern music, much like Boggs himself, who had learned just as much from the black miners who played the blues as from local and family country musicians. But his style was his own: unsuitable for dance bands or the jazzy innovations of bluegrass in the decades to come, it could only function as accompaniment to his voice-of-death narratives of loss, murder, and indifferent terror. (This, as Marcus notes, is one of the greatest flaws in the naïvely pious idea promulgated by left-leaning folk revivalists, that folk music was somehow created by The People as an undifferentiated mass. Boggs was an original, just like everyone else.) His 1927 recordings for Brunswick, which he had hoped could start him on a music career, did nothing, and he went back to the mines until retiring in 1952, when he was tracked down by left-leaning folk revivalist Mike Seeger thanks to his inclusion — twice — on Harry Smith’s Anthology. He got to tell his story, play festivals, and even record again, though he never sounded any older than he does here, when he was twenty-nine years old and sounded like the voice of American fate. Compare this record with Dylan’s 2001 “Sugar Baby” on Love And Theft; Dylan sounds like some sentimental moon-June-spoon crooner in comparison, even with all his apocalyptic imagery and crisp put-downs. Boggs is the real deal.
21. Fred Astaire & Adele Astaire, “The Babbitt And The Bromide”
(George Gershwin/Ira Gershwin)
Columbia UK, 1928 · mp3
One of the great American pastimes, on a level with baseball, moving pictures, and handgun violence, has always been making fun of the squares. This was the pop understanding of Sinclair Lewis’s novel Babbitt (and just think about that for a second; we’re talking about a period in our national history when people had pop understandings of a serious literary book) — and “babbitt” became part of American vocabulary, a sort of Middle American strawman without an aesthetic, political, or intellectual idea in his head, just a mania for commerce and a conscience drugged by religion and barbiturates. It was (and remains; think Kevin Spacey in American Beauty) a potent figure of satire and of revolutionary antipathy. The Gershwins were New York sophisticates by 1928, having been collossally successful showmen for four years and the center of a literary, social, and cultural whirl that included everyone from hyperliterary European sophisticates to jazz cats and puzzled boxers who could at least relate to George Gershwin as an athelete. They wrote “The Babbitt And The Bromide” with no particular agenda in mind (though they would prove themselves adept at actual political satire three years later with the Pulitzer-winning Of Thee I Sing), just a comedy number for their stars Fred and Adele to sing and dance. (The babbitt’s acquaintance the bromide wouldn’t exactly have been valued by New York sophisticates either, who were always on the lookout for a novel epigram rather than a piece of conventional wisdom.) Astaire would reprise the number with Gene Kelly in the package musical Ziegfeld Follies; its inclusion in the That’s Entertainment! anthology of MGM musical numbers means that it’s never really gone entirely out of the public consciousness. But I much prefer Fred’s performance with his sister Adele, whose comic, mugging performance refuses to take the pretty weak satire at all seriously, and turns it into a showcase for that other great American pastime, goofing off.
