The return of Reuben and Cynthia

 

DOWNLOAD: Reuben and Cynthia, more

So, for years, when EQing 78s, I've been using the same noise-sample type in the Denoiser section of my MAGIX program.  I never questioned why this setting is the default--I'll have to study the ol' Help screen.  (It's never too late to consult the instructions.)  Anyway, my program's Denoiser window is oddly set up, to an extent--the noise-sample type appears in two places: on top of the "Create Noise Sample" portion, and below the spectrum view.  Again, I never questioned the default noise-type setting-- "DeRumlber weak (Vinyl)"--and I always figured a little derumble filtering is good for a file.  Anyway, I finally changed the preset for this, and I saved the preset, hoping that this would make it the default preset, but... no.  So, to the Help screen I need to go.

Meanwhile, my new choice for the noise-sample type seems to be working a lot better, as far as noise reduction on noisier 78s.  So I'm happy.

And so I have some improved 78 EQs, including the racist-but-perfectly-accepted-for-its-time Alagazam (To the Music of the Band), which is a clever and catchy number, with the great Peerless Quartet in top form, no matter how embarrassing the, shall we say, flavor of the number.

Reuben and Cynthia, from the 1892 hit musical A Trip to Chinatown (Charles H. Hoyt-Percy Gaunt), is first on our playlist, and the number--kind of a proto-country banter song--seems to have become identified with "hillbillies" and hillbilly/country music.  The melody has a folk sound to it--or, at least, the sound of something mid-19th century rather than late 19th-century--and of course it might have a folk source, but so far I've found nothing to support this.  The same musical gave us After the Ball and The Bowery.  Last time, I mentioned the amazing piano work (which is still amazing), and the approximately four seconds of Corinne Morgan  singing in the background as the record starts, just before the announcer comes in. Both apparently missed their starting cues.  The male voice is Frank C. Stanley, who recorded a ton of solo and quartet sides (he was a member of the Peerless Quartet).  He died in 1910.

I'll repeat my account of The Royal Purple--Come Fill Your Glasses up: The 1914 Williams Mandolin Club 78 was a freebie included with an eBay order.  I was astonished by what I heard, because it is very much like the African-American string bands I'd heard on acoustical recordings from the same period, except, in this case, the Mandolin Club (along with being middle-class Caucasian) was evidently recorded as is.  It wasn't pared down, as we might expect, to four or five players, with the percussion close to the horn (that's why you have to really listen for the drumming on this side).  And, since I have no idea how a large string club/orchestra should sound with the acoustical process, I had to make my best guesses--about nine of them--before deciding my file was as good as I was going to get it.  And, in today's post, you hear a whole new restoration which is closer to the very dull fidelity of the raw file, which you can hear at the Library of Congress' National Jukebox.  You can hear what I had to work with, though of course I used my own copy (the LOC recordings are not downloadable).  The second part of this record, the one that picks up in tempo and charges ahead in near-ragtime fashion, is an 1896 text named "Come Fill Your Glasses Up", which was matched to a strain from Sousa's Corcoran Cadets march of 1890.  High school and college mandolin and banjo clubs, which were often augmented with drums, reeds, and brass (there seems to have been an anything-goes ethic), were a big thing from the 1880s to the early 1920s.  They represent nothing less than middle-class (or at least upper middle-class and upper-class) white kids imitating an African-American model, which sort of flies in the face of the "Whites never heard anything black" cliché so essential to the false narratives that go with jazz and rock, in particular. These clubs didn't up and vanish, but they seemed to become less common after that initial boom.  And the Jazz Age of the 1920s seems to have completely changed the character of these outfits (though I'm generalizing from what little data I have). "Massed" string bands--clubs--existed all over the country--New England, the Midwest, Colorado, etc., and there were men's and women's groups.  Here's the not-tiny 1917 Oxford University (of Ohio) mandolin club.  Good grief.  And you'll notice a banjo and some other non-mandolin instruments... 

Our third 78 is the 1915 Peerless Quartet number mentioned above, and this rip is a significant improvement over the previous one, as is (to a greater extent) Reuben and Cynthia.

Then we have quieter rips of Mellie Dunham's country outfit, from 1926--two contra dances (closely related to square dances) by this New England fiddler and his men.  New England country is a neat thing, given that we don't generally associate New England with hillbilly music.  Then, UK-born Charles D'Almaine, from 1905, with a Medley of Old Time Reels, and it's always cool to find the phrase "old time" being used in 1905.  D'Almaine was a very accomplished musician--as in, the type typically not regarded as "authentic"--and he was not even from here (my "here," that is).  So how can he be regarded as anything close to the real deal?  Well, he came from a spot close to the source of many, if not most, of the old time reels in question, so I'd say he passes the authenticity test--which, in real life, is set up so that it can never be passed.  Authenticity, as the concept is employed in real life, falls into the "necessarily true" category in logic--something is so because it is so.  More specifically, it's defined so narrowly as to ensure that only a few, favored individuals will fit the highly imprecise bill. 

Enjoy!  And I'm proud of the restraint I showed with the Williams College Mandolin Club.  You can only "add" so much audio detail to an acoustical recording before you've ruined the dynamic balance and increased the distortion.  But now we know why large groups of stringed instruments were so rarely recorded in full.

And I just figured out how to embed the Nation Jukebox file:

Lee