Whistling Coon by George W. Johnson, Berliner record, 1896. Original pressing. Pre-dog record. скачать в хорошем качестве

Whistling Coon by George W. Johnson, Berliner record, 1896. Original pressing. Pre-dog record.

Berliner record #:310 HISTORY:: George W. Johnson was the first black artist to be recorded, when cutting "The Whistling Coon" in 1890 for both the New Jersey Phonograph Company and the North American Phonograph Company. I have given detailed biographical information about George Johnson in my review of that recording, and in my review of his "The Laughing Song", recorded in November 1896 and released in 1897. Due to the phenomenal popularity of those two titles, and also because in the early years of recorded music phonograph cylinders would quickly wear out and because of the limited technology to mass produce cylinders in the early 1890s, George performed these two compositions in the studio literally hundreds of times, including this performance of "Whistling Coon" recorded for Berliner on 18 November 1896. This record is of the same fairly limited musical quality as his other extant records of the song, no more and no less, but that does not diminish the historical importance of George W. Johnson in African American music history. Johnson recorded his two main hits The Whistling Coon and The Laughing Coon over and over again in the 1890s. In the early 1890s you could only make five records at a time from one performance in the studio. Johnson made 25,000 thousand copies of The Whistling Coon this way which means he performed it an incredible 5,000 times in the studio! There are at least two different versions of the song which can be heard free online now- one from 1891, this one from 1896 and a third version recorded as a Berliner disc in 1897. Johnson admitted to feeling like a race traitor for depicting his own race in such a stereotypical way. Yet the fact remains that he was the first ever African-American artist on record- some thirty years before the blues craze of the 1920s. This is an historic recording for good and bad reasons.