The Cosmic Jukebox?

 A few days ago I finished reading Electric Shock, a not-quite comprehensive history of recorded popular music, written by the British journalist Peter Doggett. I highly recommend the book, despite a few blind spots displayed by the author (and too much attention paid, so far as I'm concerned, to British band-leaders in the period between the world wars... and really to British pop music overall), and I am completely blaming Doggett for the fact I've done virtually no writing at all in September.

The reason for this is buried near the end of the acknowledgments at the end of the book (and we're talking about 736 pages here, including the index), where Doggett comments that through YouTube he was able to listen to every top-selling record ever released. And we're talking about songs recorded as long ago as 1890.

So I thought I'd spend a little time trying to verify his claim. And yep, so far he seems to be right.

John Philip Sousa? Check, an 1890 recording of Semper Fidelis by the US Marine Corps Band.

Recording of the first true "pop" song? Check, an 1893 recording of "After the Ball" by George G. Gaskin. (I don't advise listening to this one; it's puerile mush, really. Not unlike most of the work of Max Martin.)

First recording superstar? Oh, absolutely. YouTube is chock full of the early records (and they were all early records, 'cause the man died in 1921) of... Enrico Caruso. Man released nearly 250 records in the first two decades of the twentieth century, and he had a contract (with Victor) that paid him $2,000 a year just as a retainer. The estimate is that he earned something like five million dollars from those 247 records. That's the equivalent, today, of about $138 million.

But I digress.

Spirituals and blues? Here's "Poor Mourner" by the Dinwiddie Colored Quartet from 1902 (a recording old enough that an announcer shouts at you what you're about to listen to, as if you were at a vaudeville show). And "Memphis Blues" from 1914, leading to an explosion of blues records in the early 1920s.

Early jazz records? Oh hell yes. Original Dixieland Jass Band (later Jazz Band) all over the place, beginning with 1917's "Livery Stable Blues".

And here's the first recording of "I Ain't Got Nobody" (known, in 1916, as "I Ain't Got Nobody Much"), by Marion Harris.

So, for better and/or worse, I have spent the past three weeks building two spreadsheets: one contains a line for every song Doggette mentions in the text of his book. (I may have skipped one or two of the songs from Czechoslovakia.) The other contains a line for every recording artist Doggett mentions. And these two are not perfectly matched: Doggett has a habit of dropping names without mentioning any of the actual recordings made by these people. (The example I remember at the moment is Jimi Hendrix, but there are lot of others.) The artists sheet has 1,718 singers or group names in it; the song sheet has 1,054 titles in it...

...And so far, I've found a YouTube video for every song I've checked. In the process I've learned a lot about pop music. I expect to keep learning, because while the basics of the lists are finished* I still have to add notes, YouTube URLs, and dates to the various entries.

I'm probably never going to learn to appreciate Pat Boone, though.

*I rushed as quickly as I could through the basic work in order to finish before the book had to go back to the library.