NateO wrote:
George,
I very much enjoyed your article in this issue. I had been looking forward to reading it since you mentioned it on our last visit! I learned a great deal about the early history of religious recordings. I am definitely considering investing in the book you discussed. I tend to enjoy the religious recordings, even the later, less upbeat ones that seem to pop up everywhere.
I was particularity interested to read about the cylinder by Ann Maria Sawyer record you owned. You played it for me on one of my prior visits, and I was thrilled to read about it's history. It amazes me that recording was made a century before I was born!
I'm looking forward to your next article!
Thanks for your kind words, Nate. As I wrote in the article, it was a revelation (no pun intended) for me to discover that my long-held prejudice really had no basis. I don't know everything about antique phonographs, but I
was pretty confident that I knew what I liked! Thanks to encountering that book and its 3 CDs, a new genre was opened to me. Better late than never, I guess.
Here's a photo that wouldn't fit into the (already too-long) article. It's the interior of the Methodist church I attended until age 10. I took this photo (and the exterior shot which appears in the article) in early October of this year, but the place is virtually unchanged from my boyhood. When I first read
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer in grade school, this was the church I envisioned during the funeral when Tom, Huck, and Ben Harper marched down the aisle; attending their own funerals. I spent many Sunday mornings sitting in those pews daydreaming, listening to religious music much like that found on so many of our early records.
I suppose that religious records repelled me partially because I'm not openly religious anymore, although I pray every day. To play Sacred Music might imply my own support of the sentiments of a particular song, or even the Church which espoused it. Yet, I can play schmaltzy "Heart Songs," or racially degrading "Coon Songs," or corny "Uncle Josh" recitations without any personal connection to the lyrics. Why could I look upon
those records as historical documents, yet the religious records as somehow insidiously proselytizing? I don't know...maybe there have been too many people over the years standing on my front porch with Bibles in their hands...
In any event, I can now accept Sacred Music as just another genre of early recorded sound, and I'm thankful to Archeophone for having provided me with that avenue to discovery through such an enjoyable book (
Waxing The Gospel) and the accompanying CDs.
George P.
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