What was the first ever American song to be recorded?
In an age of immediate access to a near-infinite volume of songs at our fingertips, it’s hard to envisage a world where our lives weren’t so readily scored by music all day, every day. Well into the 19th century, the only option to hear music was live, be it the bawdy folk tales in the local pub or the rich tradition of romantic ballads that swept across the Atlantic to a young America as the new nation was forming its own cultural heritage.
It was France that first sparked the possibilities of sound recording. Patented in 1857, Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville pioneered the phonautograph, a device that would receive audio through its cone-shaped horn and translate its vibrations as fluctuating lines on black sooted paper. Recorded before playback had even been considered, it wasn’t until 2008 that his earliest effort was finally brought to modern ears, California’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory using digital imaging technology to unearth an 1860 recital of the old French folk song ‘Au clair de la lune’, likely sung by Scott himself, and standing as the earliest recording of the human voice.
It was the prolific inventor and American industrialist Thomas Edison who pushed sound recording to its next vital step. Crucially enabling the ability to play what was recorded, his ’77 phonograph transmitted the sound through a needle on the audio captured via a spinning cylinder wrapped in tin foil. The new dawn of audio recordings was anticipated to delight children with ‘talking’ dollies as well as recording one’s final words on their deathbed, but it was on the streets where the phonograph’s commercial potential was first realised. ‘Coin-in-slot’ machines began to spring up throughout major US cities, where passersby with a spare nickel could hear a joke, a monologue, or, as would stand as the most enduring novelty, a song.
The phonograph played an essential role in dismantling the class barriers to high culture. While embracing the bawdy vaudeville enjoyed by the working class as pumped out of their proto-jukeboxes, a new era of accessibility to classical and opera was forged. Even as the 20th century loomed, most people hadn’t heard the works of Mozart or Beethoven in their intended orchestral totality, and many of the famous Italian tenors of the day had never been heard outside the Teatro alla Scala. In 1903, the Victor Talking Machine Company (VTMC) recorded Neapolitan opera singer Enrico Caruso, making him the art form’s first star and bringing him to America to play hugely successful shows.
So what was the first strictly American song recorded?
There are several ‘firsts’ in American recording history that could be claimed as the earliest song of US origins captured during sound reproduction’s infancy. New Orleans’ The Original Dixieland Jazz Band hold the historic distinction of first committing jazz to early records, passing through VTMC’s New York studio and cutting ’17’s Livery Stable Blues. The US’ famous military composer John Philip Sousa’s patriotic piece ‘The Liberty Bell’ is generally considered the earliest marching band recording, capturing The United States Marine Band’s rendition in 1894 with Sousa himself conducting in Washington DC.
Going back earlier in the decade is the first recorded country song. Discovered by chance at a Pennsylvania coal country auction, a box of wax cylinders bought for $100 revealed a long-lost New Orleans gem from ’91. Singing ‘Thompson’s Old Gray Mule’, it turns out that country music’s first recorded artist was the young Black man Louis Vasnier, a revelation less surprising when considering how most of the US’ modern musical foundations were pioneered by Black culture and rendered ‘palatable’ to middle-America by promoting the genre’s white artists.
To discover the first true American song recording, we have to go back to where it started. Recorded during a public sales demonstration of the phonograph in St Louis on June 22nd, ’78, an unknown salesman plays a cornet solo followed by the Boston nursery rhyme ‘Mary Had a Little Lamb’, intercut with laughter and an open admission of fluffing the odd line, unwittingly documenting the first blooper.
Silently shelved for decades as its 15-inch tinfoil strip was donated to the Schenectady Museum in 1978, now called miSci, short for the Museum of Innovation and Science, Edison’s first capture of English verse was again brought to 21st Century ears by the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, wielding today’s digital preservation techniques and pulling the remote pioneers and figures of history that bit closer, Edison’s hand-cranked cylinders and University of California’s 3-D image scanning breakthrough touching across the chasms of time with a shared sense of wonder and endeavour.
