Acoustic recordings of whistlers aren’t for everyone, but there was one whistler who I would consider many levels better than the others. He had a very unlikely story to get him into recording, but he certainly made an impact. This whistler was named John Yorke AtLee, a regular guy working a desk job in Washington who ended up being one of the most skilled and charming whistlers of the brown wax era.
AtLee was born in 1853, and ended up spending most of his life in Washington DC. He was the youngest of a brood of seven siblings. As a young man he was quite studious, making his way to study at Cornell in New York by 1871. He certainly received a very substantial education, as he graduated high school and went to Cornell. Not many of the recording folks profiled in this column had such a prestigious education as AtLee, most of them didn’t get past high school. Based on what I was able to find, he went to Harvard as well, but when exactly is unclear. In 1878 he married Anne Klock, and soon he got a job working for the engraving department of the US Patent Office in Washington.
This job ended up being how he was discovered by the phonograph crowd. It was in that very year that both Edison, Alexander Graham Bell, and Frank Lambert were experimenting with recording sound waves. Being that AtLee worked at the US Patent Office, he would have seen quite a few inventions and concepts coming through his desk. Who knows what he was able to witness on paper. In these earliest days, Washington was the right place to be for the phonograph in the 1880s.
By the end of the ’80s, experiments and patents of the phonograph had matured enough to make records for the wider public. It was in 1889 that the Columbia phonograph company was founded by supreme court stenographer Edward Easton. Easton was a no-nonsense sort of founder, but knew very little about music and talent. The most logical thing to do after its founding was to find talent locally. Soon finding talent was tasked to a teenaged pianist named Fred Gaisberg.
AtLee was a great contender for this talent search, and his talent was rather unique. Clearly as he had been working his desk job, he had plenty of time to kill, learning to whistle extremely well, better than any of us would like to. A lot of Gaisberg’s travels finding people was well detailed in his fascinating (but sometimes dubious) book The Music Goes Round. The first person he describes is AtLee, it reads thus:
And here let me present John Yorke AtLee, with his pompous announcements that introduced each performance in tones which made the listener visualize a giant. But in reality he was a mere shrimp of a man, about five feet in his socks, that little government clerk with a deep, powerful voice. Of this and his fine flowing moustache he was mighty proud. After his office hours as a wage-slave of the US Government, from nine till four, he would return to his modest home where I would join him. In the parlor stood an old upright piano and a row of three phonographs loaned him by the Columbia phonograph company…I was only sixteen!…What a nuisance we must have been on those long summer nights to our suffering neighbors seeking rest and fresh air on their front porches! From our open window evening after evening that beastly little man, with myself as sole accessory, would keep up this infernal racket till all hours.
AtLee was the first performer Gaisberg ever worked with. He would spend the rest of his life accompanying some of the most famous performers in the acoustic and early electrical era.
AtLee continued to make records regularly with Gaisberg for another year or so, eventually graduating to the studio itself. AtLee worked for Columbia for most of the ’90s, but he did occasionally work for smaller companies. He still worked his job in Washington, but as the phonograph studios moved to New York, he didn’t make as many records.
He certainly made special trips to do so, as by 1897 he was whistling for them at 1155 Broadway in New York. It was these recordings he made in 1897 and 1898 that were truly masterful. The man was in his mid-40s but whistled absurdly well and loud. He had long worked with Gaisberg, but upon returning to Columbia he was greeted with a completely different accompanist, Fred Hylands. Gaisberg was a regular boy trained classically on the piano, but Hylands had grown up with ragtime.
These records by AtLee and Hylands are quite different from the earlier ones. For a guy born in 1853, AtLee understood syncopation and ragtime surprisingly well. The two of them worked incredibly well together. The whistling can be a bit annoying at times, but one must admit that his pitch and rhythm were better than other whistlers of the time. He did also sing some songs, but he was not talented as a singer. It is hilarious to hear AtLee and Hylands perform “The Anvil Chorus” but it is incredibly impressive.
For whatever reason, after 1900, AtLee began to disappear from most record catalogs. He did make some Berliner records in 1899 and 1900 (which was at the time at 18th and Broadway in New York), he also made two sides for Victor in 1900. After that, he never returned to recording.
By this time, there were several other whistlers making names for themselves in the phonograph world. He also had a regular job to tend to. He didn’t end up making too many records overall, but they do stand out compared to others of the era. He continued to work his job until at least the 1910s. Finding any information on him after the 1900s is difficult, but he lived until 1933. In the 1930 census he was living in Philadelphia working as a night clerk in a hospital. While he was nearly 80 at the time, we can assume he was still whistling while on his job. His wife had long since died by this time.
His name is very obscure to most now, but his piercing records still survive to bother but also entertain us to this day like Gaisberg once said.
I would like to give special thanks Brian D. AtLee and family for helping clear up some information about John and their efforts to educate people on his records.
R. S. Baker has appeared at several Ragtime festivals as a pianist and lecturer. Her particular interest lies in the brown wax cylinder era of the recording industry, and in the study of the earliest studio pianists, such as Fred Hylands, Frank P. Banta, and Frederick W. Hager.
