We all know about studio musicians, the unsung, mostly forgotten heroes of the recordings we love. But what about the first studio musician?
Going all the way back to the end of the 1880s, when commercial recordings were barely a concept, Edward Issler was hired as the first on staff musician in recording history. In 1888, Edward Issler and his small parlor orchestra made a handful of test records for the Edison Phonograph works, a few that were even given titles. In the next year, 1889, Issler became Edison’s first lab pianist, playing there almost every day for instrumentalists and singers of every kind.
But before all that recording began, Issler’s upbringing was quite typical of the era. Issler was born in 1855 to a Bavarian beerseller and a Prussian housewife. He grew up selling beer in an entirely German-Prussian neighborhood in Newark, New Jersey. Starting in the 1870s, Issler began working as a music teacher, trying to make ends meet in a crowded industry. By the mid-1880s Issler was working regularly in pit orchestras, and it was here that he met all his parlor musicians. By 1886, he had his orchestra together and started writing arrangements that would be used on his recordings later.
From 1889 to 1893, Issler’s name appears on almost every page of the Edison-North American phonograph ledgers. Many of the pages with his name scrawled in pen were in his own han
