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 w
