1903–1925 · Victor, Edison, Columbia
Billy Murray
The best-selling male singer of the phonograph's first quarter-century: crisp diction, comic timing, and a voice built for the recording horn.
40 recordings
The Radio Planet presents
The FirstRecordings
Before the microphone there was a horn. Singers stood in front of it and shouted; bands crowded around it; a needle cut the vibration straight into wax. Everything you hear here was made that way, between 1900 and 1925, without a single electrical component in the chain. It is the first quarter-century in which human beings could keep a sound — the parlour ballad, the vaudeville stage, the first jazz record ever issued, the blues side that forced an entire industry to change who it recorded.
82
Recordings
3
Artists held
4
Hours
1900–1925
Acoustic era
How to listen to it
These are transfers from surviving discs and cylinders, not restorations. There is surface noise, the low end is largely absent, and the recording horn favoured whatever was loudest — which is why the banjo and the military band sound so much better here than the piano or the string section. Give it two minutes and your ear adjusts; after that the performances come through with startling directness. Some of these people were born before the American Civil War ended.
The Parlour
What people actually bought
The comic song, the sentimental ballad, the close-harmony quartet. This is the commercial centre of the acoustic era — the records that sold in the millions and furnished the front room of a generation.
1905–1922 · Victor, Edison, Columbia
Ada Jones
Comic dialect songs, sentimental ballads and the famous duets with Billy Murray, from the first decade in which women's voices reproduced well on disc.
30 recordings
1903–1925 · Columbia, Victor
Henry Burr
Born Harry McClaskey in New Brunswick, Burr made some twelve thousand recordings — the sentimental ballad in its purest commercial form.
12 recordings
Provenance
Every recording here is a transfer from an original disc or cylinder held by the Internet Archive, and every one is in the public domain. Titles, dates and durations are taken from the archive’s own metadata; where a source gives no date we leave the recording undated rather than guess. Covers are set here in period type: no label artwork survives in the public domain for most of these sides, and we do not invent one.