I’ve been busy elsewhere and don’t have the wherewithal for a proper update. So how about a singalong? Here’s Billy Murray’s 1914 tune “They Start the Victrola.”
I know a couple in full dress and gown
Who used to go to the parties in town
But he got jealous of all of the fellows
She looked so pretty they kept crowding around!
He said, “With envy I'll turn them all green!”
He went and bought her a Victor machine
With that Victrola home, they never have to roam
‘Cause he gets her all alone!Then they start the Victrola, the little Victrola
And up comes the rug from the floor
At no more parties are they to be found
He likes to have her where no one’s around!
That’s why he bought the Victrola, the little Victrola
They never go out any moreAnd after dancing she’s all out of breath
He loves to take her and hug her to death!
Then they start the Victrola, the little Victrola
And go dancing around the floor!Sometimes he doesn’t go home until three
She sits there waiting, as mad as can be!
Then grabs his collar and starts in to holler:
“Guess you're forgetting that you're no longer free!”
She says, “Now dearie, you’re wasting your lies;
Cut out that innocent look in your eyes!”
Just like a silly goose, he hasn’t one excuse
Then they both say, “What's the use?”Then they start the Victrola, the little Victrola
And up comes the rug from the floor
At no more parties are they to be found
He likes to have her where no one’s around!
That’s why he bought the Victrola, the little Victrola
They never go out any moreAnd after dancing she’s all out of breath
He loves to take her and hug her to death!
Then they start the Victrola, the little Victrola
And go dancing around the floor!
Thoughts:
1.) Murray probably had no idea that his latest radio ditty augured one of the most salient and controversial trends of the electric media revolution. It would have been putting too fine a point on the matter, but I did consider boldfacing the verses At no more parties are they to be found and They never go out anymore because they’re so extraordinarily farsighted. (When an activity must no longer be exclusive to the particular space set up for it and defined by its occurrence there, society will sooner or later stop providing for that space. Have you been to any dance halls recently? Ever?)
2.) Then again, Murray did recognize that he was deeply involved in a dawning new era of popular art, commerce, and technology. Though you’ve probably never heard of him, he was basically the Michael Jackson or the Beyoncé of the early twentieth century. He sold hundreds of millions of records at a time when there hadn’t been any such thing as a professional recording artist just a couple of decades earlier. In a 1917 interview published in Edison Phonograph Monthly, he joked about the intertwining of his fate with that of the phonograph, which happened to be invented the same year he was born:
I squalled for the first time in 1877, and so did the phonograph. I didn’t do very much for ten years after that; but neither did the phonograph. Looking back upon those days now, I can understand just why Mr. Edison did not make any attempt to improve or market the phonograph he invented in 1877 until 1887, and why it did not commence to be a commercial possibility until the latter year. I was not ready to sing for it, that’s all.
3.) Marshall McLuhan on the phonograph:
[T]he phonograph was involved in many misconceptions, as one of its early names—gramophone—implies. It was conceived as a form of auditory writing (gramma-letters). It was also called “graphophone,” with the needle in the role of pen. The idea of it as a “talking machine” was especially popular. Edison was delayed in his approach to the solution of its problems by considering it at first as a “telephone repeater”; that is, a storehouse of data from the telephone, enabling the telephone to “provide invaluable records, instead of being the recipient of momentary and fleeting communication.” These words of Edison, published in the North American Review of June, 1878, illustrate how the then recent telephone invention already had the power to color thinking in other fields. So, the record player had to be seen as a kind of phonetic record of telephone conversation. Hence, the names “phonograph” and “gramophone.”
Sometimes it takes a while for a new technology to discover its most logical application(s). Remember that Amazon began as an online version of a mail-order book catalog, and that the first steam engine was built to pump water out of flooded mines. For that matter, the indispensable all-use miracle devices which practically define twenty-first-century life still go by the appellation given to their predecessors on the basis of their original purpose as machines for performing computations.
4.) Ever wonder why crooners were such a huge sensation in the 1930s? Because their signature style of soft, nuanced singing wasn’t possible to record before electric microphones and amplifiers entered the studio in the mid-1920s. This is also why so many recording artists of the acoustical decades (like Murray) sound like they’re shouting: they were shouting, because otherwise they wouldn’t be “heard” by the mechanical diaphragm communicating their voices’ vibrational patterns to the stylus in contact with the wax-coated cylinder or disc.
5.) Does anyone else find it remarkable that the ditty has been altogether extirpated from the landscape of popular music? We listen to ballads, anthems, tunes, jams, bangers, bops, and even the occasional rhapsody every now and again—but the ditty? Dead as the dodo. A lost art.
Great find, a song about Netflix & Chill a hundred years early.
The times they are a changing. But he still goes to parties and leaves her alone?