Musical Tastes & Hits for the Generation Before Radio & Sound Recordings

Cafe Society
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We nowadays think in terms of generations and their music. If I go to a place heavily frequented by 20 year olds, and they’ve got music playing, it will be current-crop stuff, but if it’s a venue densely packed with boomers the air’s going to resonate with music that became popular in the 1960s and 1970s, especially all that classic rock. And when my upper-70s parents go on one of those ocean cruises where they’re only a bit over the average age for passengers, the speakers play the crooners of the 1940s and 50s, Frank and Bing and the rest of 'em.

A few years back, Stephen King wrote a book, Black House, in which one of the characters is a blind DJ & radio personality who morphs into different characters depending on his audience; when he’s spinning hard-core punk tracks he’s this rabid and vacuously dark guy, etc; at one point in the book he’s putting on a show in a senior center for some extremely old folks on walkers and in wheelchairs and shows up in 1920’s zoot suit and spins the earliest of the big band era material and get them out of the floor. And that got me wondering what would have preceded that, going back in time.

I know not even KlondikeGeoff is old enough to describe from direct personal experience what tunes the folks who came of age in the 1910s and earlier were listening to, but I’m thinking maybe he would have heard the people who were one and two generations older than him talking about it, perhaps in contrast to whatever they were seeing the younger folks listening to.

This would have effectively been before radio and record player. The technologies may have been invented but people would not have had the equipment on hand so much, right? What I’ve always heard is that the popularity of music back then was driven by sheet music rather than individual performers’ recordings, is that true?

Anyway, there are a small handful of main ‘musical genres’ I think about from Way Back When but correct my mistaken impressions as need be?: The kids from the '10s were seriously into Gershwin, right, and Irving Berlin? Was that sort of one taste in music and then at the same time but not necessarily the same crowd of kids it would have been Scott Joplin & other ragtime? Or was that earlier? Then I think for folks who would have been quite a bit older, wasn’t there an era where a lot of really schmaltzy songs were popular, things like “The Quilting Party” and “Wait for the Wagon” and “Believe Me if All Those Endearing Young Charms” - -? But were the folks who liked that music KIDS at the time that they embraced it, so that it was the music “of their generation” in the same sense? And when would that have been, late 1800s? Would there have been a musical trend in between that one and the jazzier stuff like ragtime and Gershwin?

KlondikeGeoff, if you’re popping in… does any of this ring a bell, in the sense of you remembering people of a certain age / generation for whom this was “their music”, or even hearing people older than yourself describing yet older people liking that kind of music? Did they look down their nose critically at later musical trends when the younger generations were listening to the newer stuff?

I know I could Google some of this and get an answer to some of the timeline, but that doesn’t really make it come alive for me. I’m wondering if those earlier generations were defined by “their music” the way the more recent ones are, and stayed loyal to the music they came of age with and so on.

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Well, the teens was a bit early for Gershwin; he started in that era, but didn’t be a real success until the 1920s. Berlin, OTOH, became famous with “Alexander’s Ragtime Band” in 1914. That was just past the height of the ragtime era*.

Basically, in the 19th century there was little difference in music preferences between the older and younger generation. Ragtime in the era 1890-1910 was a break; younger people preferred it. Then after World War II, jazz was the great separator. Crooners came in during the 1930s and 40s, but that wasn’t the same sort or schism – it was more disliking the singer, not the song.

In addition, classical music was far more popular than today. Prior to around 1950, it was close to popular music in popularity, so much so that Spike Jones could parody classical pieces and expect his audience to get the reference. My grandfather, who would have been a teen during the ragtime era, only listened to classical.

At the same time as jazz and ragtime there were more mainstream music genres – sentimental songs that evolved as time went by, taking in elements from both.

You’re right that sheet music drove popularity, but the second factor were live bands in clubs who played the latest sheet music. Another, often ignored factor was the founding of ASCAP in 1914; prior to their work on getting royalties, nearly all songwriters died broke.** Once they got established, songwriters could live well enough on the royalties of their work, allowing them the time to write more.

*“Alexander’s Ragtime Band” from 1914 really wasn’t ragtime at all; the era was almost over when it became a hit.

**The only ones who didn’t were those for whom songwriting was not their main income.

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When you deal with times that long ago, you have to start by asking how consumers got popular culture.

Music was disseminated in a variety of ways which are fairly time-dependent so I have to hedge a lot in what follows.

The phonograph doesn’t really get popular until the early years of the 20th century, when two major developments occurred. Disks replaced cylinders and automatic disk stamping meant that performers didn’t have to play individually for each pressing (although some means of making several at one time had been possible). Even so, records were more or less a luxury item for many years. That meant that a family with a phonograph would share the music with everyone.

More or less the same can be said for sheet music, although the origins of Tin Pan Alley go back farther, to the 1880s. Sheet music was a major industry before the turn of the century. Still, the need for a piano somewhat limited the audience, although a piano was considered a sign of middle-class culture so they were comparatively widespread.

How much the available music separated out among age groups is harder to say. There was probably some differences, because sheet music - of which far more early examples survive than with recordings - could be turned out very quickly and in enormous quantities very cheaply. We know that every fad was turned into music, and fads were almost as numerous then as today. It’s more than likely that young adults were the audience for this faddish music because a) the young are behind most fads and b) adults disapproved of many of the songs.

A fad for songs about the telephone, e.g. - which really happened - is not the same as a generational taste. The Charleston and Lindy Hop and all those dances of the 20s may have created a coherent musical image, but there were dances before WWI that were as big hits. Certain entertainers, minstrel troupes, vaudevillians, and others had major followings in the pre-war era as well. They may have cut across age groups.

Formal entertainment theaters evolve over the second half of the 19th century into the vaudeville that blossomed by 1900. These were broadly general in their draw. I’ve never read any indication that some catered more to younger crowds than older ones. Nightclubs as we understand them don’t really come about until Prohibition. There were dance halls earlier and that’s where the dance fads are felt.

Every city and town had lots of musical performances, bands and singers and dancers, professional and amateur, traveling troupes and locals out for a good time. There are dozens of strains of Americana in music and dozens more in the folk heritages of all the ethnicities that came to America. People spent their time outdoors in all good weather and made music because that was the easiest entertainment. You’d probably find that all this music was sliced more vertically by type than horizontally with age groups sharing musical tastes. Probably some fashions existed within each type by age but by now we’re cutting things pretty finely.

To get a musical generation you need a way to get your product into a slice of the whole audience and still make money. My guess is that this didn’t happen until after WWI. That’s also the first time that you start reading about a major emphasis on a younger generation with distinct morals and tastes and habits. The Flappers were the first mass audience that can be identified nationwide as a distinct youth culture. They probably were the first to have separate music as well.

I’m tossing out a lot of generalities, sorta of typing aloud as I try to get a grip on the question. But every bit of music was new at one time and what we think of as schmaltzy may have been wild and cutting edge at the time. In another 100 years people will chuck Elvis and Lady Gaga into the same blender with Pat Boone and Debbie Gibson. I lived through the start of the Beatles when every “classic rock” song of the 60s was something brand new on Top 40 radio each week. It felt totally different then than the era does today. Before any of us were born… Generalities R Us.

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Having listened to a lot of the old Edison recordings that have found their way onto the internet, I’ve noticed that sentimental Irish folk songs seem to have been popular at the time recorded music was getting started. An example:

http://turtleservices.com/Mother%20Machree%2080293.htm

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I think my favorite early genre that no one remembers anymore is hot jazz. It’s the kind of jazz that got started in 1926-27 after they introduced microphones into recording, and went through to about 1933-34 when the big-band era started. A couple of examples:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uuj8hqDuPRU (from about 4:20)

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“Mother Machree” wasn’t a folk tune–it was written by Ernest Ball. The fashion for songs with Irish themes (sentimental or silly) began in the days of sheet music; most of the writers were Irish-American, but not all. A few had Minstrel Show experience. Here is a somewhat interesting study of the genre.

But people were playing & collecting folk music back then–Francis O’Neil, Chicago Police Chief, was a famous example.

And music moves in unusual ways. A P Carter, patriarch of The Carter Family, collected many tunes in travels through the Appalachians & recorded them under his name. Some of the songs were ancient folk tunes. Others had been written & published not that long ago–but good musicians can copy stuff they like after a few hearings, even if they aren’t really up to reading music.

Hymns were also popular, too. Even people who were not 100% religious would know these stirring tunes & might enjoy singing them out of church.

Then, there was dance music…

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This was also the era of the operetta, e.g. composers such as Johann Strauss Jr., Lehar, Herbert, Romberg, Friml and Kalman. It was more-or-less in the 20s when operettas morphed into musical theatre.

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I guess I should have said “inspired by” Irish folk music.

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Only a detail! You* did* recognize the fashion for Irish-themed music back in the day, whether the source was “folk” or not.

Popular music in the days before recording has also been called parlour music. The genre included Thomas Moore’s “Irish Melodies” & the works of Stephen Foster–who wrote for minstrel shows & the refined folk who entertained in their nicely appointed parlors. One “parlor” tune was “I’ll Twine 'Mid the Ringlets”.

A P Carter discovered a version with garbled lyrics & published it as that famous “folk” song–“Wildwood Flower.”’

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Then there was John Philip Sousa. The Sousa Band toured between 1892 and 1931, playing a total of 15,623 concerts. (Sousa never conducted on the radio until 1929, three years before his death.)