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We’ve been buried in music for the last while and finding out some amazing things. Like Al Jolson earned 2,000 dollars a week in 1916 and was the highest paid celebrity in the world by 1920 with a theatre named after him! Our music trivia is not just for pub quizzes. Here in Athena Media we’ve been preparing for the launch of a new radio series on RTE lyric fm called High Fidelity - a century of recorded song. It is the story of recorded music and song from Edison to iTunes and we’re lucky enough to have two of Ireland’s most dynamic vocal performers presenting the series, namely Jack (Jack Lukeman) and Julie Feeney.
We had the idea of bringing the two of them together and creating the story of sound, song and singers some time back and ended up pitching it to RTE as an independent production. In the end it has become a 26 part series stretching from Caruso to Pavorotti with Lead Belly, Frank Sinatra and Bob Dylan in between! We’re mapping a narrative which begins with Thomas Edison and his invention of the phonograph in 1877. Edison has to be one of the most fascinating characters in the history of invention and science. He left school early, basically took to the trains at 14 selling his won newspaper which was the best of all the official ones - kind of a Google aggregator of his day! By 15 he saved a small boy from the path of an on-coming train and the father, the train operator, is so grateful he teaches the boy Morse Code. In that time knowing Morse was a bit like having all the web code of silicon valley at your fingertips and it was this doorway which gave the innovative and lateral thinking Edison the key to his telecommunications inventions including in sound. But the battle for sound was one between him and Emile Berliner and in the end it was Berliner’s gramophone and gramophone discs which won by by the close of the 1920s.
For us the research is a journey of discovery, not just about the technologies which have given us sound recording and which today allows us to shift time and location and effortlessly move songs from cyberspace, but about the histories of song and singers. We got lost the other day in Robert Johnson’s story. The blues composer and guitar player who was said to have ’sold his soul to the devil’ in order to the play the blues and who was dead by 27 at the hands of a jealous husband of a woman he was seeing. Johnson may not be first in your books when it comes to music but his legacy - for such a short life - is stark with songs like ‘Sweet Home Chicago’ which you all remember from The Blues Brothers movie in the 80s but also because he remains the revered musician hero of people like Eric Clapton and Keith Richards who say Johnson’s playing was so good it might just be true the devil was involved. Of course the only reason we know anything of him - or his playing - is because he recorded songs. Recording a bunch of them in the early days of sound when he had little money and better things to spent it on.
Recording captures sound but it also captures the song and the voice of the singer. Poor Scott Joplin never got the chance to record. His legacy is all in piano rolls rather than sound recordings and what we see from the story of recording is that those recordings in wax or shellac are what have preserved our musical history. Caruso embraced recording and made a batch of records in 1902 when many of his peers were afraid it would destroy their audiences and keep people out of the opera houses. After all if people had your voice on a record they reasoned why would they pay to come and hear it? Ironically in a digital age where music flows like water the live performance has once again become supreme and artists know that recordings drive people to performance and the ‘live’ experience rather than anything else.
Its a 26 part series and a vast canvass of stories and lives from Paul Robeson,Marian Anderson, Hoagey Carmichael, Edith Piaf, Judy Garland, to name just a few. Jack and Julie will be on with Pat Kenny on Wednesday talking about the series and may even perform so tune in if you are about a radio or come and join us Facebook High Fidelity a century of song with Jack L and Julie Feeney