Reading a recent book, “The Book of Lost Books”, which discusses all the major known books that have since been lost, I got to wonder, what about musical recordings?
What past musical recordings did we once have, but are now lost? I know I can’t read what went up in flames at the Great Library of Alexandria, so now tell me what I am missing musical-wise.
Buddy Bolden is supposed to have recorded a couple of cylinders. No recording of him survives today.
Very little since the 1940s. Before that, a lot of stuff that was recorded is gone, unless a copy of a lost 78 turns up.
Before recording, a lot of written music has been lost, some of which we know about and some we’ve never even heard of. Chances are there are lost works by every major composer before the 19th century, and doubtless some from the last couple of centuries.
Before musical notation became common, there’s pretty much nothing that has survived.
I know Scott Joplin wrote a ragtime opera called The Guest of Honor. Nothing from it survives. I suppose we must be grateful Treemonisha is still here, but I don’t know if the politically correct crowd would approve of it being done anywhere. A pity, because it is wonderful, and no more objectionable than Porgy and Bess. So the white guy’s jazz opera gets staged and the black guy’s ragtime opera is ignored. Ironic.
But it hasn’t been ignored, Two Many Cats. It was also lost for fifty years. In the early 1970s Atlanta staged a production of it. Houston Grand Opera Company also had performances and made a cast recording which is available at Amazon and has had good reviews. I know that it’s been on Broadway and last January it was staged in Memphis. I’m sure there are other places that I am not aware of. I expect that we will hear more and more about it.
There’s a bunch of music mixed in this list.
The great Paragon Ragtime Orchestra tours with Treemonisha periodically and will again beginning in February 2011. If you are interested, please read Rick Benjamin’s notes, for he knows whereof he speaks.
ETA: On looking at the Paragon site, that is the Memphis date that Zoe mentions.
Drive Shaft and Geronimo Jackson.
The Cherry Sisters – legendarily bad performers who were supposedly unaware of their awfulness. I’d be curious to hear if they really were worse than, say, Debbie Boone, or some of the people I’ve performed musical theater with.
I’d heard for years that they never recorded, but there is this:
http://www.wfmu.org/LCD/Early/cherry.html
So there exists a possibility that we can hear one of them performing.
Also – it’s not musical, but I mourn its passing – Arch Oboler’s Lights Out show. Apparently (according to a radio theater guy I know) someone literally dropped a stack of his fragile recordings, and the only known recordings of many were thus lost. This includes the famous Chicken Heart episode, referred to in writings about the show and by Bill Cosby. Oboler recreated it for a record album in 1962, and I have a re-creation done only a couple of years ago, but it’d be interesting to have the original one, if only for historical and nostalgic reasons.
I’ve got that 1962 album. There’s some pretty intense stuff on there!
I was just reading about the Cherry Sisters recently, glad they were mentioned! It’s kind of strange to think there were aficianados of the Awful a hundred years ago, one thinks of it as a snarky contemporary mindset. (have to say, reading the title of this thread, my first thought was ‘whatever happened to my Queen album that ‘disappeared’ from that party we held at Mark’s parents’ house in the 70’s, when they went out of town for a weekend?’ I never did get that album back, nobody knew nothin’ - it was STOLEN, I just know it!)
Well, I’m glad to hear it. The only performance I had heard of was that Atlanta one back in the Seventies, and I saw it on videotape. I hadn’t heard of the other productions. Certainly the Lyric Opera of Chicago never touched it. I figured it was because of a Song of the South type of problem. I’m glad it’s finally coming into its own after all these years. The Seventies was a long time ago.
The 1967 Pink Floyd song “She Was A Millionaire”, written by Syd Barrett, is thought to be lost. The song was strong enough to be considered for release as the Floyd’s 3rd 1967 single but wasn’t released. No copies of the song are known to exist save for a very loose instrumental rehearsal recorded in 1970 during the Barrett LP sessions.
Is it scary enough to make you want to spread jello over the kitchen floor?
A photo exists of the night the Beatles spent a few hours with Elvis at Graceland. Apparently, it was rather an awkward meeting for all involved, but at some point they all started jamming.
Nobody recorded the results but I think that would be something to hear, if only for the historic value.
Here’s a 2007 piece from Rolling Stone on lost music. It does include things that aren’t truly lost, they’re just not readily available to the public (e.g. whatever Kurt Cobain demos that Courtney Love might own), as well as uncompleted projects.
Not a recording, but in 1992, while Pearl Jam was on tour in Europe, two of Eddie Vedder’s notebooks were stolen from the band’s dressing room. One of these was apparently a personal journal and one was his book of lyrics in progress. Some of these songs probably would never have been recorded anyway and I guess Vedder may have salvaged some from memory, but this theft most likely did cause some Pearl Jam songs to be lost in the sense that they were never completed or recorded.
When the album Axis: Bold as Love was first produced, Jimi Hendrix lost the original mix of the first side of the album. They had to remix the whole thing, and they claimed that some of the songs, in particular “If Six was Nine” were never quite the same.
Jimi left the tapes in a taxi, so it’s interesting to think that it’s possible, albeit HIGHLY improbable that it’s still out there, in some cabbie’s possession.
The original demo tapes for Band on the Run were stolen from Paul in Lagos. He waxed philosophic about it years later, wondering if the mugger ever realized what was on the cassettes that he took.
There’s smoke and fire and Jello!