Cylinder Recordings

Originally published on historia.ainurin.net (2006/10/30)



The Cylinder Preservation and Digitization Project at the Department of Special Collections, Donald C. Davidson Library, University of California (Santa Barbara - phew, that's some name!) has made available an incredible amount of digital versions of cylinder recordings from the late 19th and the early 20th century. Browse through themes such as Jazz, Dance Bands, Swedish or Finnish or Japanese music, ethnic humor at the expense of Italians, Irish or Jews, and contemporary events such as the Great War or the Prohibition.

Thomas Alva Edison's invention, the phonograph cylinder (in wax and celluloid), was not easily defeated by the disc. Today, restoration is hard work, since celluloid deteriorates with age, and wax is notoriously fragile. Although Edison was not the only one to produce them, the age of cylinder recordings ended when the Edison Company left the recording business in 1929.

Goldenbird fans can enjoy the novelty jazz song that Mayann is singing on stage in chapter one: Jazz Baby, performed by Rachel Grant (a k a Gladys Rice) in 1919.
Afterwards, you may refresh your Italian with this basic lesson from the 1900's. It seems that it is rather difficult to catch a train directly to Milan. But it is a pretty language, no?

The New Woman

Famous Bolshevik feminist Alexandra Kollontai wrote an article in 1918 about "the New Woman" as a literary character in her revolutionary work The New Morality and the Working-Class. Some of her summaries of different "New Women" in contemporary novels remind me of Goldenbird characters! I haven't read any of the quoted books before, so I hope that this is a sign of "being in touch with the Zeitgeist", not plagiarism...
In Colette Yver's The Princesses of Science (1907), Kollontai finds a Goldie lookalike:

[...] the woman doctor Laucorojelo, the typical single woman, strides with sure step, her beautiful head held high. Science and the practice of medicine constitute the substance of her life. The clinical wards are at once her temple and her home. She fights for recognition and respect among her male colleagues; gently but unyieldingly she rejects all attempts to win her over to marriage. She needs to be free and alone for her beloved activity, without which she cannot live. She is severe in dress, she apportions her time strictly, she struggles to acquire a practice and experiences the triumph of self-love with the victory over her male colleagues as diagnostician.

Mayann is easily recognizable in the summary of Grete Meisel-Hess' heroine Maya in The Voice (Die Stimme, 1919):

The restless, temperamental Maya's impetuously pushes forward. She has an ironical disposition. To her, all experiences are but stages on the way to herself – to the shaping of her personality: struggle with her relatives for independence, separation from the first husband, a brief romance with an Oriental hero, a second marriage [Cut! Cut! Don't spoil the story for us, Comrade Kollontai!] until Maya finally finds the man who exhibits respect for her inner "voice," this symbol of personality, who recognizes her importance and knows how to create an inwardly free love bond about which Maya has dreamt all her life.
[...] Unconsciously, she follows Goethe's counsel: "to begin one's life anew every day, as though it were just beginning ..." "My stronger, more courageous will, which nothing could break, saved me – my unconscious will to self-preservation. It led me through life like a guardian angel," says Maya of herself.

But where's Lou?...
Although Kollontai made an important point about the "New Woman's" independent attitude in relationships with men, this "New Woman" still maintained relationships to men and was defined by them as modern and "single". Even the woman doctor mentioned above had a harmonious long-distance relationship, which transformed her to a "feminine" creature in private life. Thus, there is no place for Lou among Kollontai's "New Women", because Lou essentially refuses to be defined through heterosexual relationships. (She certainly has male friends like Andy, but she insists in treating them according to the rules of "male" friendship, whether they like it or not.) But Lou would never say: "I curse my female body; because of it you do not notice that there is still something else in me – something more valuable", as one heroine exclaims. She dresses in men's clothes to get attention, not to avoid it. This makes her a *real* New Woman in the sense of Kollontai's conclusion:

The influence of women earning their own livelihood spreads far beyond their own circle. With their criticism, they "poison" the minds of their contemporaries, they smash old idols, they raise the banner of revolt against those "truths" with which women have lived for generations.

La Siréne des tropiques

From Josephine Baker's first movie, La Siréne des Tropiques (1927). Josephine played a native girl on a generic tropical island, who falls in love with the young French engineer played by Pierre Batcheff.
Found in an interesting article by Ylva Habel, film historian: To Stockholm, with Love: The Critical Reception of Josephine Baker, 1927-35

"If we adjust our tastes to those of the lower races, it will be the downfall of our culture," thundered an anonymous "letter to the Editor" in Stockholms Dagblad (23 July 1928), when Josephine Baker appeared in person on a Swedish stage for the first time in history. Another preached: "Don't we have enough leg-shows and flirtation in [Ernst] Rolf's and Karl Gerhard's revues [...]? … is there no longer any prohibition in Sweden against showing a woman's entire torso?" They did not stand unchallenged:

Why should our delight over the encounter with this deeply natural human being be interpreted as a sign of the depravation of our times?
[...] those who have the capacity to live in the present and to love its art forms, and in the best cases, its deep sense of decorum, should be glad to have known Josephine Baker, the international stage revue's most loveable child of nature.
(Signed 'Unbiased Theologian' - sounds like Falco, doesn't it!)

The confused but intrigued Stockholmers imagined Josephine as an unspoiled child of nature, although there were years of hard work behind her stage persona and performance. In the 30's, when she developed her look in a more divalike, chansonette-singer direction, some critics accused her of being crafty and manipulative (and indirectly admitted that she was an intelligent adult!). It is sad to note that even her most ardent admirers were affected by exotism that overlaps racism. It is difficult to find articles that gave a "human" image of her as an independent person capable of rational decisions and smart career moves without condemning her for crossing some invisible limit of acceptability.
What I find most interesting is how some reviewers depicted her as a messenger of continental European civilization to a peripheral, puritanical North. For these reviewers, she was not just a charming "primitive" - she was a symbol of Paris, city of lights. And that is exactly what she would become during her long career.

Ruth Bayton

Ruth Bayton, originally uploaded by punalippu.

Photo: d'Ora, Vienna. From the cover of Swedish photoplay magazine Filmnyheter, 1928:1.

Ruth Bayton is practically unknown on the great internet, but my guess is that she was a British black dancer. There's an interesting article about black artists in 1920's Britain that mentions her, available on Jstor (if you have access to this database).

I'd really like to know more about her, so if you can help, I'd be happy...

Bessie Coleman

Just in case for a future story about aviation, I post this article, which originally appeared on the Goldenbird blog. (The comic would feature Mayann going to a pilot school in Paris, a mysterious Finnish ace, a spy plot that Falco tries to unravel, and some of our mischievous Italian friends...)

The first black American pilots were trained in France in the 1910’s and 1920’s. No American aviation school would accept them. Among these pioneers, Bessie Coleman was the first woman. She is another source of inspiration for Goldenbird's leading lady Mayann, and indeed for any pioneering woman in reality and fiction.

Bessie Coleman was born in Atlanta and grew up in Chicago in the 1910's. She became inspired by the stories of soldiers returning from the Great War in Europe. With her own hard-earned money (she worked as a manicurist) she wouldn't have made it far, but some well-off Chicago African-Americans provided her with financial support, realizing her PR value.
Learning to fly was a challenge for the nerves in 1920. One French school refused to enroll Bessie, because it had already lost two female students in deadly crashes. During her training at the Ecole d'Aviation des Frères Caudron, Bessie was shocked by the death of a fellow student. Her dream of flying would demand hard work and sacrifices from her in life.
In 1921 Bessie earned her flight certificate and returned to the USA, where a showbiz rumble was awaiting her. Throughout her career as a performer, she refused to attend aviation shows with segregated audiences. Tragically, her life ended much too soon, like Florence Mills's in the previous post. In 1926, one year before Mills, she died in a flight accident along with her mechanic.
Bessie Coleman left a legacy that was very much appreciated in the African-American community in her time (10,000 mourners attended her funeral in Chicago, and another pioneer, William J. Powell, founded the Bessie Coleman Flying School in her honour), but has only in the last decades become wider known. The first time I wrote about Bessie, a year and a month ago, I couldn't seem to find so much information about her. Now I have found not only one, but three inspirational children's books about her life! (Fly High - Nobody Owns The Sky - Fly, Bessie, Fly!) There is also a lovely action figure still available. The actress and professional storyteller Joanna Maddox also appears in one of her children's shows as Bessie Coleman.
For schools (and why not adults?), there's poet Nikki Grimes' Talkin' About Bessie, illustrated by E.B. Lewis, and decorated with multiple awards.

There are hints on the web about a biopic with Angela Basset, supposedly filmed in 1998 or 1999: Wings Against The Wind, with a dreamy cast of Danny Glover, Gerard Dépardieu, Don Cheadle and others. I don't know if this film was ever made, since there is no definite information about it anywhere. Pity!

Florence Mills

The heroine of Goldenbird is the cheerful little jazz dancer Mayann Sparks. Like Josephine Baker, she was born in St Louis, Missouri, and naturally she has a lot in common with la Baker... especially her childhood. However, she is as much inspired by the trailblazers of la Venus Noire, who are less well known today. Florence Mills, "the Queen of Happiness", is one of them. Sadly, she died very young, but during her short life she became a star in America and Europe, and incomparably beloved in Harlem. There are no recordings of her voice, only contemporary descriptions: "like a hummingbird", "full of bubbling, bell-like, bird-like tones", "a tempestuous blend of passion and humour", "strange high noises", "an enraptured bird" ...

An American critic wrote: In her small throat she hides all manner of funny little sounds that flutter out like sparrows from an inexhaustible nest.
I imagine Mayann with a voice like that, which cannot be heard (she is a drawing, after all!) but that has a bizarre, magical effect on people.
Florence Mills was also a great dancer, and it has been said that the reason behind her reluctance to make recordings was that she preferred to interact with a live audience. In an age before modern sound production, before there even were microphones on stage, the studio environment must have felt uninspiring.