1930s publicity shots, 1870s make believe.

From the photo book Vintage Photographs of Arcane Americana

Hint:

Here’s the source book, including the old sheet music:

A giant buffalo-shaped building projected for the 1901 Pan-American Exposition at Buffalo, NY.

1. Doc Zip Hibler
2. Mad Cody Fleming
3. Widow Rollins
4. Sergeant Poulos
5. Pens Patterson
6. the Canadian Kid
7. Sox Clark
8. Ask-Me Dodge
9. the Ragan Twins (Mary and Madaline)
10. Paperman Dell
11. Sir Tom Rogers
12. Doc El Vison (“Lord Dietz”)
13. Population Charlie
14. Professor Mayfield
15. Joe “Fine Arts” Hanks, the punkmugger

(From Jimmie Rodgers: The Life and Times of America’s Blue Yodeler)

In case you were wondering what they called moving pictures in the olden days, it was lobsterscope. Also but not only:

• animaloscope
• cinnomonograph
• katoptiikum
• mutoscope
• phenakistoscope
• vivrescope
• xograph

Our regimental fund had run down and some of the musicians in the band had been without their extra pay for a number of months.

The regimental bands at that day were kept up partly by pay from the government, and partly by pay from the regimental fund. There was authority of law for enlisting a certain number of men as musicians. So many could receive the pay of non-commissioned officers of the various grades, and the remainder the pay of privates. This would not secure a band leader, nor good players on certain instruments. In garrison there are various ways of keeping up a regimental fund sufficient to give extra pay to musicians, establish libraries and ten-pin alleys, subscribe to magazines and furnish many extra comforts to the men. The best device for supplying the fund is to issue bread to the soldiers instead of flour. The ration used to be eighteen ounces per day of either flour or bread; and one hundred pounds of flour will make one hundred and forty pounds of bread. This saving was purchased by the commissary for the benefit of the fund. In the emergency the 4th infantry was laboring under, I rented a bakery in the city, hired bakers—Mexicans—bought fuel and whatever was necessary, and I also got a contract from the chief commissary of the army for baking a large amount of hard bread. In two months I made more money for the fund than my pay amounted to during the entire war.

Originally published December 5, 1890 in The Detroit Plaindealer. I found it in Out of Sight.

George P. Johnson – “Listen to the Mocking Bird” (mp3)
George P. Johnson – “The Whistling Girl” (mp3)

From Lost Sounds: Blacks and the Birth of the Recording Industry, 1890-1919

A November 29, 1890 item in the New York Sun titled “Whistling For the Wind”, which I discovered in Out of Sight: The Rise of African American Popular Music, 1889-1895 :

George H. [sic] Johnson, the whistling Negro inthe Battery scene of “The Inspector,” is a familiar figure on the North River ferryboats, where he whistles for pennies. Eighteen years ago he went with the Georgia Minstrels on a tour of the Old World. In Vienna they stayed two months. While there he fell in love with a white woman. She had no objection to his color, and they were married. Soon afterward they came to this country, and have lived happily together ever since. A daughter was born to them, and she has inherited the whistling abilities of her father.

When Dramatist Wilson approached Johnson on the subject of joining his company the whistler stuck out for a fair salary. He said that he could pick up over $15 on the boats, and get a regular salary from a phonograph company for whistling in their machines. Wilson had to pay him $25 a week.

Since his engagement he has had an offer from Mrs. William K. Vanerbilt, who wishes him to whistle for her one night after the theater performance. Mrs. Vanderbilt will not go to a variety theatre, but she is anxious to see all the best performers.”

I wonder about his daughter. As the years went by, how did she use her whistling? Maybe just to amaze people while she was walking down the street.

And what about his Viennese wife? What happened after she arrived in America?

NPR’s web site has a piece on him, too.

SWEEPING across the country with the speed of a transient fashion in slang or Panama hats, political war cries or popular novels, comes now the mechanical device to sing for us a song or play for us a piano, in substitute for human skill, intelligence, and soul.  Only by harking back to the day of the roller skate or the bicycle craze, when sports of admitted utility ran to extravagance and virtual madness, can we find a parallel to the way in which these ingenious instruments have invaded every community in the land.  And if we turn from this comparison in pure mechanics to another which may fairly claim a similar proportion of music in its soul, we may observe the English sparrow, which, introduced and welcomed in all innocence, lost no time in multiplying itself to the dignity of a pest, to the destruction of numberless native song birds, and the invariable regret of those who did not stop to think in time.

Do they not realize that if the accredited composers, who have come into vogue by reason of merit and labor, are refused a just reward for their efforts, a condition is almost sure to arise where all incentive to further creative work is lacking, and compositions will no longer flow from their pens; or where they will be compelled to refrain from publishing their compositions at all, and control them in manuscript? What, then, of the playing and talking machines?

John Phillip Sousa on the scourge of the phonograph, via Phonozoic Text Archive, originally published in Appleton’s Magazine, Vol. 8 (1906).