Musicians who worked in phonograph studios in the acoustic era were basically forced to fend for themselves for pay. The Musicians’ Union as we know it did exist starting in 1896, but there were still many things to improve on it. What is interesting is that, during the acoustic era, many unions were founded and organized within the world of the arts, but none of them had to do with recording.
Recording before 1925 was difficult; this has been well-established in this column. Once many musicians heard what it was like to make recordings, most of them vowed they would stay away from them. John Philip Sousa was a prime example of this mindset, famously being very opposed to recording in general. However, he only thought that recordings in the long term would delegitimize the appeal of live concerts and musicians—he wasn’t considering how difficult the process was.
There were very few musicians before 1910 who would have even considered recording, sharing similar beliefs to Sousa. But there was one musician two years younger than Sousa who had the opposite feelings surrounding recording. Edward Issler thought differently than most musicians of his generation; rather than find recording only a novelty, he found it to be one of the most fascinating things invented at the time, and therefore embraced it.
Issler became one of the most recorded people of the 1890s (if not the most),
