Actionable Offenses: Indecent Phonograph Recordings from the 1890s
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CD Details
Performer: Various ArtistsEdition: Music CD
CD Release Date: 2007-05-16
Music Label: Archeophone Records
Soundtracks:
- Learning a City Gal How to Milk (Cal Stewart)
- The Tapeworm Story (Cal Stewart)
- Gimlet's Soliloquy / The Rascal Detector (Unknown, 2 indexed tracks)
- The Whores' Union (Unknown)
- Boarding the Folsom / A Few Conundrums (Unknown, 2 indexed tracks)
- Out of Order (Russell Hunting)
- Did He Charge Too Much (Russell Hunting)
- Reilly as a Policeman (Russell Hunting)
- Sim Hadley on a Racket (Russell Hunting)
- Sim Hadley on a Racket (James White)
- Michael Casey Exhibiting His Panorama (James White)
- Dennis Reilly at Maggie Murphy's Home After Nine O'Clock (James White)
- Young Cylinder "A": Stroll on Capitol Hill / A Hard Head (Home Recording, 2 indexed tracks)
- Young Cylinder "B": The Virtues of Raw Oysters (Home Recording)
- Young Cylinder "C": Jokes, Riddles, Verses, a Limerick, and a Toast (Home Recording, 8 indexed tracks)
- Young Cylinder "D": More Verses and Jokes (Home Recording, 9 indexed tracks)
- Young Cylinder "E": The Lady's Friend / a Song / The Irishman's Prayer / a Joke (Home Recording, 4 indexed tracks)
- Young Cylinder "F": Verses and Songs (Home Recording, 4 indexed tracks)
- Young Cylinder "G": Poem: "I Sit Here Thinking, Will, of You" (Home Recording)
Music reviews of Actionable Offenses: Indecent Phonograph Recordings from the 1890s
Music Review: Absolutly Fascinating
Rating: 4 Stars
This CD is a really interesting bridge across time. Since the recordings weren't made for wide public release, there's a sense of mischief and getting away with something that is rare in artifacts from this time period. I'm grateful that technology has made such interesting bits of history available to anyone.
Description of Actionable Offenses: Indecent Phonograph Recordings from the 1890s
New York City, 1896. A man walks into a bar. He sits down, orders a beer, and laughs long and hard at the bartender's newest story. It's a good tale, though too bawdy to repeat at home. The next day he goes into the same bar, gets his beer, and drops his change into a phonograph. He's listening through rubber tubes to a man telling a story similar to the bartender's. Without warning Anthony Comstock's defenders of decency charge into the bar, push him aside, destroy the record, and escort the bar's proprietor to jail for promoting indecency. The records on this CD are the few that Comstock's men missed. Scarcity and suppression have kept them silent for a century. Put aside the modern myth of a more genteel era: these late-Victorian performances are indecent even by--especially by--today's standards. And while not for mixed company, they spoke to many in the coarse language and crude humor of daily experience. They were stories told readily in the bar; yet they became legally actionable offenses when fixed in wax and played on a phonograph in that same bar. These newly-discovered recordings play like soundtracks to the moving images of prize fighters, scarf dancers, and kissing lovers flickering on the kinetoscope--the other nickel entertainment in the bar. The records and films were produced in the same years, in the same studios, by the same people. They were enjoyed in tandem by the same audiences. They were accused of violating the same standards of decency in communities where they were profitably exhibited. And together, they presaged the clashes between morals and mass media that would erupt regularly during the century to follow. This CD presents these extraordinary recordings in their unexpurgated entirety. It allows us to hear uncut and uncensored what new technology made possible and the protectors of public morals made illegal: "indecent" performances driven out of business, off the public stage, and into the privacy of unmixed company in the home.General CDs
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