Life in a Northern Virginia suburb of Washington, D.C. Books, movies, art, theater, conservation, and Etruscan typewriter erasers. Blogged by David Gorsline. 
Latest movie scores [5 max]
::: 3 The Fallen Idol (1948)
::: 5 Brazil (1985)
::: 3 Pursued (1947)
::: 2 The Ice Harvest (2005)
::: 3 Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959)
::: 2 They Made Me a Criminal (1939)
::: 3 The Major and the Minor (1942)
::: 3 The Anniversary Party (2001)
::: 2 Rent (2005)
::: 3 A State of Mind (2004)
Sunday, 19 March 2006
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Jody Rosen on a forgotten genre of roots music: pop songs from the wax cylinder days (1890-about 1925). The music was silly, sometimes racist, and seminal.
One enjoyable record, which distills the period's pleasing mix of pop hooks, belly laughs and sheer strangeness, is the vaudevillian Eddie Morton's "Don't Take Me Home," a jaunty ragtime novelty about a husband who runs off to war to hide out from his henpecking wife. Morton sings the verses pretty straight, but in the fiendishly catchy chorus—"Don't take me home!/ Pleeeease, don't take me home!"—his voice ripples across the frantic oompah beat, a long sobbing phrase that's halfway between an Irish tenor's flourish and the yelp of a dog whose tail has been stepped on.
Rosen points to compilation label Archeophone Records and notes that a 6000-cylinder archive has been digitized and is freely available through U.C. Santa Barbara. (And N.B. the site's cool favicon.)
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