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TRIGGER WARNING: This episode discusses minstrelsy and blackface and includes an 1890s recording by George Washington Johnson, presented as historical evidence. Racial slurs occur in the billing given to the performer and in the discussion around it.
In this episode, author Peter Doggett and host Nate Wilcox continue their discussion of “Electric Shock: From the Gramophone to the iPhone – 125 Years of Pop Music,” the second of two episodes on the book.
This one is about the first people the recording business ever made famous, and the wildly different deals it offered them. George Washington Johnson had no way to copy a wax cylinder, so every single one sold had to be recorded again — he sang the same laugh an estimated forty thousand times.
Ten years later Enrico Caruso sang once into a gramophone and the factory made the copies. Same business, different decades, completely different deals, and that is the story of the evolution of the American music business.
Also: radio’s sudden arrival in the 1920s and what it did to record sales, Bert Williams, Irving Berlin, and Al Jolson — the biggest entertainer in America in his day, and why almost nobody has heard him since.
With music: Caruso’s “The Lost Chord,” Bert Williams’ “Nobody” and “He’s a Cousin of Mine,” George Washington Johnson’s “Laughing Song” from the 1890s, and Jolson’s “When the Red, Red Robin Comes Bob, Bob, Bobbin’ Along,” cut for Brunswick in 1926.
This episode originally dropped in 2018.
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