Victorian ballads and early 20th century English pop music

[berk]

If you've seen the Robert Altman movie Gosford Park, you'll recall one scene where Jeremy Northam, as the multi-talented Ivor Novello (check out his bio (http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0637040/bio) at imdb), sits at the piano and sings a couple songs while Altman moves the camera around the room to all the different converstaions that are going on.

The few times I've ever heard that kind of music I've liked it. Does anyone know much about the era? Which artists to look for, which songs were popular, if anything's available on cd, etc? I suppose we're looking at WWI and the 20'a & maybe early 30's. I said "English pop music" in the thread title, because it sounds a little different from some of the more jazz-influenced American pop sounds from that time, but perhaps it's just another branch of pop music in general, not specifically British. I'm thinking of the kind of music Paul MacCartney was emulating with "You Gave Me the Answer" (from the Venus & Mars album). Perhaps Queen's "Seaside Rendezvous" and "Loverboy" might be other examples of the influence of this style on later popartists, although I think with the latter two songs Mercury was trying to evoke the style and era rather than recreate the sound of the music. I see there is a cd available called "Ivor Novello: The Complete Collection" which I might try to get. I guess Vera Lynn and that kind of thing would fit as well, but I'm not thinking specifically of WWI stuff.

I also love the old Victorian song "After the Ball Was Over", a sentimental ballad about a lost opportunity in love; heard it on cbc radio years ago on "Ideas". Great melody. The lyrics are good too, you really get into the story. Does anyone know if that kind of thing is available on cd? I've had no luck at allmusic with that one.

I'm also interested in Victorian hymns like "Jerusalem" (with which every prog rock fan is familiar from ELP"s killer version on Brain Salad Surgery). I found a few interesting possibilities at allmusic for those, just by searching for albums with that particular song on it. (e.g. "Favourite Oxford Hymns"). [Trivia note probably of no interest to anyone not from Newfoundland: Sir Hubert Parry, the guy who set Blake's poem to music, also composed "The Ode to Newfoundland" to Sir Cavendish Boyle's words].

[Jonathan Bogart]

Just a note to say that I really want to respond to this more fully, but don't have time at the moment. Here are some initial thoughts:

"After the Ball" (1893) is notable for being the first million-seller in American popular music history. Back then, these things were reckoned by copies of sheet music sold, not copies of records; but since everyone and their grandmother played the piano, it came to the same thing. The composer of the song used it to found the New York-based music publishing industry (it had previously been split between Boston, Philadelphia, and Chicago) which dominated popular music in the first half of the twentieth century. There is no definitive recorded version of "After the Ball," for the very good reason that there were no definitive recordings of anything for another thirty years: it was just people singing songs on records.

It sounds like you're becoming interested in the "straight" popular music of the period. The parlor-piano stuff that the females in the family approved of. (There was plenty of racy, racist, and just plain stupid music out there for the men and the boys. Not to mention the "underground" music being made by the ignored and disenfranchised: blacks and hillbillies.) There is a definite difference between English and American popular music here: American parlor music is actually more drippy and sentimental than the English stuff. Americans tended to sing about mother, and dead children in heaven, and "Daddy won't you please stop going to the saloon?" The British, un-hung-up about alcohol and less given to idealizing the family (and much less religious-minded) were generally lighter of tone, singing either about love in a general sense, or -- more likely -- silly music-hall songs that were better-constructed than their vaudeville counterparts across the sea. (Harry Lauder is probably the master of this genre, though don't bite if you have an aversion to Scots.)

Allmusic is just about zero help with this period. It was designed for the CD era, and can just about accommodate the LP era, but for the era of 78s and wax cylinders, it's useless. What I know, I got out of books, KaZaA, and the odd CD reissue that I found in stores.

Vera Lynn is WWII, not WWI. Not a fan.

If you like Ivor Norvello, you need to hear Noël Coward. And his best interpreter (aside from himself), Gertrude Lawrence.

[Slam_Bradley]

Not exactly what you're looking for (I don't think) but there are a number of discs available that are recordings of the old piano rolls that were produced for player pianos in the very early part of the 20th Century. I have a copy of Gershwin Plays Gershwin: The Piano Rolls which has 28 of the 130 rolls he produced from 1916-27. I know there are discs available for Jelly Roll Morton and Fats Waller as well. It's interesting stuff.

[berk]

Slam Bradley: Thanks. You're right, that isn't exactly what I was asking about, but I do happen to be interested in that early 20th-century, jazz-influenced piano music as well. I'll be looking for the ones you mentioned.

Jonathan Bogart: Thanks for the info. The only recorded versions of After the Ball I've seen are from various recordings of the Jerome Kern musical, Showboat, in which it is excerpted (Showboat is one of my favourite musical works, by the way). I'm pretty sure they played an entire version on Ideas when I heard it, but it was a long time ago and I could be wrong.

Do you have any particular Noel Coward recommendations, as far as cd's are concerned?

[Jonathan Bogart]

Do you have any particular Noel Coward recommendations, as far as cd's are concerned?
There's a "Chronological Coward" series out there, which is great for completists. There are lots of radio medleys and excerpts from shows, which make for great historical artifacts, but are less satisfying as pop. Otherwise, I don't really have any recommendations, other than keeping your eyes open for a decent compilation. He's usually found under "Vocal," sometimes "Easy Listening," in CD stores. Gertrude Lawrence (who was his favorite singing/acting partner, and for whom he wrote many songs) has several good compilations out. Try to find her version of "Parisian Pierrot," which is in my top ten favorite Twenties songs.

Having thought about it a little more, I'm not sure I can do better than to point you in the direction of Archeophone Records (http://www.archeophone.com/index.php), the reissue label for American popular music from the 1890's through the 1920's. A useful British counterpart (though sometimes prohibitively expensive) is Pearl Records (http://www.pavilionrecords.com/) (click on "Pearl"). Their "Music from the New York Stage" series is damn near indispensable, and I really wish it had been continued into the Twenties.

However, there's a cheaper method. If you have KaZaA or a similar file-sharing program, do a search for "acoustic music" (the recording process before about 1926 is called "acoustic," because that's what it was: you made sounds into a can, and the vibrations were cut into a disc or cylinder. After 1926, the electrical process took over, and it had much better fidelity). You'll get a lot of useless rock bands doing radio shows, but with any luck you'll find files with names like "Lucy Gates - The Cuckoo Clock 1916 Columbia-2132 (46671)." All music recorded before 1922 is in the public domain in America, so it's fair game to download, and British copyright law's cutoff date is creeping up on 1950, which is why many of the better compilations of pre-hi-fi recordings out there are British. (I would expect Canada's copyright laws to be similar.) Anyway, you'll come up with a LOT of "coon" songs and otherwise "ethnic" or "humorous" recordings, the joke of which you've gotten as soon as you've read the title, and it's not even funny. Also a lot of ragtime and pseudo-ragtime, both instrumental and vocal (and much of it very good), which I take it isn't what you're looking for. But there's some worthwhile stuff in there too: look for song titles that attempt elegance, as those will be the ballads and parlor-room songs you're looking for. A warning: recordings from the 1890-1925 period are as far from hi-fi as you can get. It's often little more than a hollow voice and some scrapings in the background which might or might not be instruments that might or might not be tuned, surrounded and muffled by a thick roar of surface noise. The earlier the recording, the worse it'll sound. If you have a high tolerance for, say, industrial music like Throbbing Gristle or noise-rock like the Boredoms, it'll stand you in good stead when trying to listen to this music. I have a fairly large collection of these songs on mp3 (about 1,000), though I couldn't find a copy of "After the Ball." If you'd like, I can send you some songs, either via e-mail or on a CD-R. PM me.

Some more composers' names to throw at you:

Jerome Kern, especially with P. G. Wodehouse as his lyricist. The "Princess" shows they did together in the 'teens (with Guy Bolton writing the books) were as revolutionary as anything that has ever been staged. Wodehouse and Bolton were British, and Kern had his first hits in London: the best music of this era was often transatlantic.

Victor Herbert, the American king of operetta (though he was born in Ireland). "Ah! Sweet Mystery of Life" is one of his great songs. Also, his Austrian (but then American) peers like Franz Lehar and Rudolf Friml. I'm afraid I don't know the English operetta scene too well, though of course there was a lot of crossover with the American. I do know that the producer Charles Cochrane was a name to conjure with in the musical-theatre world of London from about 1905 to 1930; looking for information on him might yield some leads.

There's a recently-released CD (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/B0002M64Z6/002-6665578-8894452?v=glance) out there featuring current singers and bands covering the songs of Steven Foster, who was the first genuinely American composer of popular songs. Everyone knows some of his songs: "Dinah," "She'll Be Comin' 'Round the Mountain," and so forth. He also composed a lot of very popular ballads that were still well-known a century later: "(I Dream of) Jeannie with the Light Brown Hair," "The Old Folks at Home," and similar stuff. I haven't heard the CD yet, but you might want to check it out.

Randy Newman is the only fairly-current musician I've heard who at all bothers with this sort of music: his soundtrack for Ragtime is, despite the title, full of very Edwardian music. All instrumental, though, and original. If you don't already know his album Good Old Boys, I'd recommend it, if only for the very Foster-esque intro to "Louisiana 1927."

If you can read music (or can fake it), try used-book stores and antique stores, which often have sheet music from the period, sometimes for ridiculously low prices. You'll almost certainly find some undiscovered gems that way. Also, old hymn-books are nearly always available and dirt-cheap.

This may be the least well-documented vein of popular music in the twentieth century. Partly that's because it was the "straight," "normal" (and white), music that ragtime, jazz, and rock 'n' roll all rebelled against: telling the stories of the rebellions has always been more lucrative than rediscovering another, just as valid, musical heritage. It's worth noting that the English tradition of popular music and music-publishing goes back to the late 1700s and Vauxhall Gardens, so there are over two centuries of forgotten music just sitting there, ignored by just about everybody, because it existed (and made some composers extremely weathly) before the era of recording. Also, I'd try not to get too hung up on the distinction between popular music and classical music. Before jazz, it was a pretty slippery slope.

I don't know how helpful this has been: my areas of interest have inevitably been more American than British (partly because of availability, partly because, hell, I'm American), even though I think of myself as an Anglophile. I enjoyed Gosford Park (it's one of the few DVDs I own), and Northam and Altman did a great job with the Norvello character. One last thing I would suggest is reading books that feature the kinds of characters that populate the movie. Wodehouse, Dornford Yates (his comedies rather than his thrillers), Angela Thirkell, E. F. Benson, and Evelyn Waugh are all good for name-dropping as well as for sheer reading pleasure. You'll often come across snatches of popular songs that a little Googling can help find.

My final recommendation would be to go to your local library. There are sure to be books on the history of popular music that will tell you anything you want to know about the period. There may also be CDs of repertory companies performing the era's music, or -- if you're very, very lucky -- compilations of those old recordings themselves.

Good luck!

[berk]

Thanks again, Jonathan. Lots of good suggestions there, and I'll certainly try to follow up on as many as I can. amazon.ca does list an Ivor Novello collection, so I'll probably order that as soon as I accumulate a few other things I want to get from them. It's partly from reading people like Waugh, Wodehouse and Benson that I became interested in music from the era. Hadn;t heard of Yates or Thirkell, though, so I'll try to have a look at them sometime. I believe Wodehouse even wrote lyrics for some Novello songs. I didn't know about the Princess shows, that sounds very intriguing, especially since I'm already a big fan of Jerome Kern. The operettas are a good call, too. I've always meant to check out more of that genre.

[Rob Allen]

Here's an odd suggestion - I read once that Tiny Tim, the falsetto-voiced, ukelele-playing weirdo from the late 1960s, was actually a genuine scholar and lover of early 20th century popular music. He had limited musical talent, and genuinely believed that the falsetto and the ukelele were the best options he had for performing the music he loved. Maybe he was right. Anyway, his albums may have examples of the kind of songs you're looking for.

[berk]

Thanks Rob. I'm old enough to remember Tiny Tim, but had no idea he was anything more than a slightly grotesque novelty act. If nothing else, it sounds like his albums might be a good place to look for song titles.

[Jonathan Bogart]

On a similar note, Ian Whitcomb is a name to look for. He was a one-hit wonder in the 60's with the garage-rocky "You Turn Me On," but since then, he's been one of the leading British musicologists in the early-part-of-the-twentieth-century field. If you can find any of his later albums (they don't show up in this part of the world), they're dedicated to recreating the sound of British and American pop from the Gay Nineties to the Roaring Twenties.

Leon Redbone is another, more familiar "preservation music" name; I'd recommend anything he's done without reservation.