To my knowledge, their new King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band boxed set, Centennial, is the first time Archeophone has included full size LPs in a collection. They are accompanied by the same material on two CDs and two more CDs with additional material, as well as their often award winning album notes. The two vinyl discs, carrying the complete Creole Jazz Band recordings, add to the bulk and gravitas of the spectacular set, and are a nod to the popularity vinyl records have again achieved. Archeophone has had at least three prior releases for turntables, all in smaller than 12-inch formats, and until now they have always been the only format for that particular release.
It is an interesting approach. When the unique vintage material you are highlighting is limited in length you have two options. Fill out a full CD with related items, to make an aesthetically pleasing and coherent whole, the approach taken with The Missing Link: How Gus Haenschen Got Us From Joplin to Jazz and Shaped the Music Business, or concentrate on the extreme uniqueness of the material with a compact vinyl release in extravagant packaging. While cassette tapes had a good run with singles, buying a CD with two tracks always seemed off. When Archeophone has a priceless artifact to share they use smaller size vinyl releases to signal how special the contents are.
The two prior Archeophhone releases in this format I own were both exceedingly obscure, though perhaps not as obscure as their latest offering. The Unique Quartette Celebrated, 1895-1896 featured six titles on a ten inch record. Charles Asbury: 4 Banjo Songs, 1891-1897 was a 45 RPM. I prize those releases in a way I do not with digital files of similar 1890s content. When I place the needle down I listen more fully than I would to a CD or MP3 playing in one of eight open windows on my laptop. The medium is the message.
Back in 2009, from another label, I acquired a one sided 45 of a “recording” from 1860, a phonautogram experiment that could finally be played back with modern means, 20 seconds of barely intelligible haunting audio. Obviously that record has not gone in my garden party playlist. I may have only exposed it to a needle the day it arrived. Looking at it now, the packaging is almost minimalistic compared to what Archeophone includes with their releases, but 2009 was before the vinyl boom, and I give them credit for foresight that a 45 was the only way to give that special audio gravity enough to find a buyer. You don’t cut a CD for 20 seconds of sound, and a $1 download cheapens it. Important audio still demands physicality.
If the release I just described sounds fascinating, you are in luck: in 2017 Archeophone released that same track along with many other phonautograms on a 7-inch flexi disc. Find Edouard-Léon Scott de Martinville, Inventor of Sound Recording: A Bicentennial Tribute on their website. It includes a 48-page booklet on the inventor and his legacy. In addition to de Martinville experiments, it has phonautograms from the labs of Alexander Graham Bell, Thomas Edison, and Emile Berliner, nearly six minutes of sound preserved from a time before it could be played back!
In November, Archeophone is releasing a two-track 45 RPM record as historically important to the history of music as those phonautograms. It features a brown wax cylinder record, discovered in 2024, that contains the earliest music recorded in New Orleans, as well as the earliest known country music. A record that has been hiding from us since 1891, and is miraculously still playable 133 years later.
For several decades a single brown wax cylinder recorded by the Louisiana Phonograph Company has been known, recorded sometime in the early 1890s. A transfer to cassette tape that was hardly legible was included on a release on Document Records in the ’90s, and on Archeophone’s famous Lost Sounds CD from 2005. It was significant for being recorded outside of the North East, where most recording was taking place, and for being an exceptionally early recording from an identifiable Black man, but it remained an obscurity.
In the spring of 2024, a second Louisiana Phonograph Company cylinder was unearthed. It features the same Black man, creole performer Louis Vasnier, but this time he is joined by a piano and sings “Thompson’s Old Gray Mule,” a then recently penned title that would become a hillbilly and country music standard. Recorded in 1891, it makes a claim across time for being the earliest example of what would become country music. It also becomes the earliest known recording of music in New Orleans. Recorded when Buddy Bolden was 14, King Oliver was ten, Kid Ory was five, and a dozen of the men who would carry jazz out of New Orleans were in cradles or soon to be born.
In that context, every note and intonation becomes a clue about a much romanticized and speculated time in New Orleans music. Contemporary accounts show Louis Vasnier to have become a local phonograph star. The Louisiana Phonograph Company only had two recording acts, Vasnier and a band from which we have no recordings. A couple years in, Vasnier became their only act. Think about that, a major American port city with a single record company recording a single artist. Recording was still a marvelous novelty, still finding its footing as entertainment.
This was when cylinders for market were recorded at most a few at a time. The artist would spend a day performing the same title into a horn or two attached to a cutting needle. No two cuts were exactly the same. The public consuming these records did not typically have a phonograph at home. They would hear them played through tubes held to an ear from coin operated machines, or through a horn to an assembled audience.
From a historical perspective, one of the important things learned from this new discovery is about the recording process itself. In these early years it turns out, the knowledge of how to properly position equipment was not uniformly distributed. With around three years of experience by 1891, the tricks learned by the studios of the North East had not found their way to the New Orleans upstart.
Interestingly a few of Vasnier’s cylinders did find their way to New York, LA, and even Kansas, and appear in contemporary reports. His sermons were the most popular, they seem to be comic in intent, though advertised as representative of a genuine if fading “negro” style, and were enjoyed by both Black and white audiences in New Orleans. He recorded a catalog of at least 13 titles, and though on the surviving cylinder he is accompanied only by piano, his songs seemed to have been most often joined by banjo.
The music on this new cylinder is fully legible, and while it is not as clear as the Charles Asbury banjo recordings Archeophone released on a similar disc, it is enjoyable. At first I thought the “first recording of country music” claim might be exaggerated, but then I wrote myself into a corner trying to defend that stance. While lots of minstrel records of the following two decades have a similar style to Vasnier’s performance of Old Gray Mule, and few would consider those to be hillbilly records, this recording would fit right in with hillbilly records of the late ’20s. The effect would likely be even more pronounced if he had been joined that day by a banjo rather than a piano. Vasnier’s sound is certainly within the family tree of country music in a way distinct from the “negro delineators,” white or Black, then active in the recording studios of New Jersey.
It is also Black music played on the cusp of ragtime; Vasnier, by the turn of the century, found work in St. Louis as a vaudevillian. The pianist accompanying him is unknown, and the sound distant. A few keyboard runs are clear, and the general rhythm is felt, the right person would be able to gather insights from that two minutes. I would like to hear them. The vocal style is syncopated, it includes many fun additions in the form of vocalized sound effects, as does the sermon. Vasnier had real talent. As Richard Martin describes it in the notes, “like a kicking mule he pushes and pulls against the beat, syncopating the lines and adding a blue note here and there.”
The sermon, “Adam and Eve and de Winter Apple,” was given a new clean transfer in 2022 and has been restored as best as modern techniques can for this release. Most of the actual words are up to your interpretation but a real sense of the original performance is finally achieved. This is the earliest example of a sermon format that would continue to be popular on records for decades. To help you try to make out words a possible inspiration for the performance is included in the album notes. The two tracks prove to me how directly stage entertainment was being translated to the new recording medium in its earliest years. Something that in the more formal and competitive settings around New York, could not be as certain.
The Album
Historic albums like this do not fall out of the air, several human lifetimes developing esoteric skills went into the preservation, research and presentation of this record. A blog with a YouTube embed can’t match it, and could never financially produce it. So yes, buying an album like this one does encourage the creation of more of them. But you also get your money’s worth.
One thing you are paying for with any Archeophone release is a right to read and own the album notes. In this case, a 16 page booklet is included which contains the story of Louis Vasnier, about whom surprisingly much is known. The notes also cover the history of the Louisiana Phonograph Company, the provenance of these cylinders, the new insights that having two cylinders instead of one provided researchers, and a number of well chosen illustrations. While no known photograph of Vasnier exists, there are several advertisements from the Louisianna Phonograph Company and related items.
The album jacket contains more attractive illustrations, including a photograph of the Adam and Eve cylinder being transferred. The text inside the fold makes the case for this being the first recording of country music, a topic not given much coverage in the booklet, so it is not duplicative. The disc itself comes in a substantial inner sleeve, with one side containing the transcribed lyrics of “Thompson’s Old Gray Mule” and the other a photo to put the lyrics in perspective. Overall the album art is beautiful, possibly Grammy worthy.
The identification of this cylinder, 133 years after a Black man living in the 7th Ward of New Orleans pulled up in front of a recording horn to sing, is arguably the most important musical find in decades, and would truly be hard to top. Without delay Archeophone found the proper way to celebrate this remarkable discovery and share it with the world. The records have arrived, they are beautiful, and they will be available on the Archeophone website in mid-November.
Louis Vasnier, Genius of the Seventh Ward
Sings Thompson’s Old Gray Mule
for the Louisiana Phonograph Company of New Orleans, 1891
Archeophone SPV-0702-2411
www.archeophone.com
