In 1931, America was in the midst of the Great Depression but, in cultural terms, it was booming. Hollywood was entering its golden age and, while the music industry was struggling to turn a profit, a handful of singers and musicians were riding high. Cab Calloway released “Minnie the Moocher”, about a rough, tough woman with a heart “as big as a whale”, which went on to sell a million copies; Bessie Smith sang unequivocally about sex in “Need a Little Sugar in My Bowl”; and the Duke Ellington Orchestra pushed at the boundaries of popular jazz with “Creole Rhapsody”.
All these songs and more feature in the latest instalment of Centuries of Sound, an audio treasure trove chronicling the evolution of recorded sound through monthly mixes, each of them devoted to a single year. Compiled with passion, care and a nerdy attention to detail by the Cambridge-based sound artist and languages teacher James Errington, the series is a magnificent audio collage, a museum piped straight into your ears. Along with Calloway, Smith and Ellington, the 1931 episode includes excerpts of Louis Armstrong, Paul Robeson and The Carter Family plus clips from Bela Lugosi in Dracula, Laurel and Hardy and Groucho Marx.
One of the many joys of the series, which was launched in 2017, is being able to dip in and out of different years at random. However, the early episodes provide a special fascination — they are not always easy on the ears but offer a remarkable glimpse into advancing technology and the ways in which sound was preserved for the ages.
The first recording is not Thomas Edison’s much-documented wax cylinder recording of “Mary Had a Little Lamb”, but a ghostly voice singing the folk song “Au clair de la lune”. The recording was made in France in 1860 by the printer and bookseller Edouard-Léon Scott de Martinville using a phonautograph, which translated soundwaves on to sheets of parchment — this was 17 years before Edison patented the phonograph. After that, the series jumps to 1878, and Charles Batchelor’s recording of the rattle of a Manhattan railroad plus a Hamlet soliloquy (actor unknown). 1888 yields a crackly phonographic recording of a 4,000-voice choir singing Handel’s Israel in Egypt, some whistling courtesy of a Mrs Shaw and, remarkably, the muffled voice of the British prime minister William Gladstone.
As Centuries of Sound works its way towards the present day, the volume of material available naturally expands, traversing styles, characters and continents — Errington helpfully provides playlists and expansive contextual information on each episode on the series website. Education isn’t Centuries of Sound’s raison d’être; the project is primarily a labour of love. But to work your way through this fascinating aural library is to open yourself up to pivotal cultural and historical moments and to lose yourself in the sounds of the past.