A Most Valuable Medium: The Remediation of Oral Performance on Early Commercial Recordings

We most often associate phonograph records with music of all types and from all eras. However, commercial sound recordings may also preserve and disseminate speech, which was one of their purposes, especially in the early days of recording. In this rather dense academic study, Professor Emeritus Richard Bauman, who has written extensively on sociolinguistics in other contexts, and historica l recordings expert Patrick Feaster examine spoken-word recordings marketed when records were first widely distributed in the United States, roughly 1895 to 1920. This is not a survey of all early spoken-word recordings—a much-needed work not yet written. Rather, it is an in-depth analysis of selected examples, representing different types of recordings.Spoken-word recordings were popular in these early years, taking such forms as mock sales pitches, speeches, storytelling, and sermons, mostly delivered by professional orators. Bauman opens in the introduction with “Advertising Plant's Baking Powder,” a vivid, amusing example recorded in 1896 by Washington, DC, entertainer George Graham. The product was fictitious, but Graham exhibited the verbal tricks of a streetcorner pitchman. In somewhat overblown prose, the author tells us that Graham “remediated, repurposed, and recontextualized from an oral performance in the service of advertising a product to prospective customers on a street corner or marketplace to a mechanically mediated display form, commoditized for its entertainment value to customers in the comfort of their homes, the sales pitch as a performance genre” (p. 2).Bauman spends the next few chapters analyzing specific types of early spoken-word recordings, starting with campaign speeches. In the days before radio and television, few citizens could actually hear candidates, especially state and national ones. So, in 1906, William Randolph Hearst, candidate for governor of New York, recorded excerpts of his speeches to be played at rallies around the state. Similarly, US presidential candidates in 1908 and 1912, such as William Howard Taft, William Jennings Bryan, Theodore Roosevelt, and Woodrow Wilson, recorded brief excerpts that emphasized key campaign themes. Notably, they did not generally contain the soaring rhetoric or emotional appeals we hear today in candidate speeches, but rather tended toward matter-of-fact explanations of policy. Although the author's description of these efforts is useful, he does not establish how widely heard, or impactful, these recordings were. Also left undiscussed is why no one made similar recordings during the 1916 election, which also was pre-radio and closely fought. Did such recordings fail to have much impact? Were they just a passing novelty?Chapter 2 deals with recordings of sermons, which tended more toward parody than piety. This was especially true of White entertainers’ re-enactments of Black funerals, which were demeaning and full of malapropisms and garbled references to the Bible. Bauman discusses such factors as meter and emphasis and includes full transcripts of some examples. He covers entertainers such as George Graham and humorist Ralph Bingham (“Brother Jones”), along with the famous Black entertainer Bert Williams, who recorded some of his well-known mock sermons. These are fascinating historical documents of period preaching, but again, what is missing is an adequate discussion on context. How much circulation or social impact did these recordings have? Later recordings, by authentic Black preachers such as the Rev. J. M. Gates and the Rev. A. W. Nix in the 1920s, fall outside the study's time span.Chapter 3 addresses storytellers on record and, in some ways, is the most insightful. It examines how traditional storytelling morphed into the new, audio-only medium of recordings, disconnected from the visual sense that communicates facial expressions, gestures, and so on. Most of these stories reflected rural United States, a kind of nostalgic “other” that was passing from the scene amid the rapidly spreading urban culture of the early 1900s. Examples include Cal Stewart's 1903 retelling of “Jim Lawson's Hoss Trade,” Edwin Whitney's 1908 recounting of the tall tale “The Farmer and the Hogs,” and Len Spencer's 1904 “Uncle Jim's Racetrack Story,” which comes complete with audience interjections and reactions, as if to represent a live performance.Chapter 4 examines in detail the work of perhaps the most famous early storyteller on record, Cal Stewart (1856–1919), whose character Uncle Josh Weathersby recounted semi-serialized stories from the mythical town of Punkin Center. His 1901 “Meeting of the Ananias Club” (named after the biblical liar) portrays a storytelling session in which local residents in a country store try to top each other.Chapter 5 examines the recordings of Charles Ross Taggart (1871–1953), a well-known platform entertainer known as Uncle Zed, “The Old Country Fiddler.” Zed was an old-time Yankee who played snatches of old songs on his fiddle and told tales of the small New England town of Pineville—about the school board, the Pineville Band, the arrival of the telephone, and even purchasing a Graphophone (a phonograph made by the label that made these records). Were these rural tales intended as nostalgia or ridicule?In a concluding chapter, Bauman introduces the concept of “schizophonia”—the separation of sounds from their original contexts of time, place, and even their makers (p. 160). This decontextualization of sound was addressed to some extent by accompanying photographs (seen in catalogs and other printed matter) and by live demonstrations of “record taking,” of which there were many. Finally, there is an accompanying discography by Feaster that provides technical details for the recordings, such as recording dates and numbers, and even CDs and current online sources for those recordings. This certainly will help readers hear for themselves the recordings discussed. The detail and precision of Feaster's discography illustrates the care taken with facts and figures in this book, which thankfully is free of errors—unlike many books and articles about recordings written by scholars from unrelated fields.A Most Valuable Medium looks at early spoken-word recordings through the eyes (and ears) of a linguistic expert, who was wise enough to enlist the help of an expert in early recording history. As a study of selected examples, it is one part of a much larger story, namely, how widely these recordings were heard and what effects they had on listeners in the early twentieth century. The present work only lightly touches upon these larger contextual elements.For an in-depth discussion of additional aspects of early spoken-word recordings, see Feaster's PhD dissertation, “‘The Following Record’: Making Sense of Phonographic Performance, 1877–1908” (Indiana University, 2007). Although unpublished, it can be accessed through Feaster's website (https://www.phonozoic.net/). My own book The Blackface Minstrel Show in Mass Media (McFarland, 2019) discusses the language used in early 1900s recorded re-creations of minstrel shows.A Most Valuable Medium is a well-crafted and important contribution to language-related studies of the early 1900s. Among other things, it draws attention to an underutilized resource in folklore studies: the commercial spoken-word sound recordings that presumably influenced portions of the population in the years before the widespread availability of radio and television.