JLgarden Quaint oflong ago

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JL garden Quaint oflong ago
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"Tho' the heart be qveary, sad the day 'and long,
Still to us at twaigh t comes love's sweet SOltg-"
Th",e aTe thePha"tom
Ha"d. of a thou,o"d
bnmorlalpiallists; their
glorious ge"ilts prc$.l!YY.
ed /oTeYer, Ih,ollgh II,.
lIIirad~ of IVelte·
MiglJ01l' riJprot!ttdioll.
EMORIES glowing with the
veiled enchantment of by·
M
gone years come to you through
the .'supreme art of the Welte·
!viignon *, the world's greatest
reproducing instrument.
With the Welte.Mignon*, Pade.
rewski, de Pachmann, Hofmannand hundreds of other mastersplay in your own home whenever
you 'wish. True music lovers seek.
iog a Iife·tilne of complete musical
satisfaction, naturally choose the
W elte.Mignon*, - the instrument
supreme. The Welte.Mignon* is
invisible and does not interfere
with manual playing. It is obtain.
able in nearly every good make
of piano. Write for interesting
brochure. Auto Pneumatic Action
Company, 12thAve.,at 51st Street,
New York City.
Hear it-in comparison. There's a nearby dealer
:(ILicCl1!'1cd under the orb:dnnl \Velte-Mignon patents.
The A:l'tIICA BULLETIN
AUTOMATIC MUSICAL INSTRUMENT COLLECTORS' ASSOCIATION
MARCH/APRIL 2001
VOLUME 38, NUMBER 2
Granada 9¥Code1
AN appreciation of the Stieff Granada Grand
brings to the mind the traditions of Spanish
History, of musty iron-clad chests, the Spanish
Main, pieces ot eight and finely tooled old Cordovan leather. It is built to conform to the atmospheric requirements of the swiftly increasing vogue
for Spanish architecture and interior decoration.
Chas. M. Stieff', Inc.
3 I '5 N. Howard St.
Baltimore, Md.
(Send for Color Chan "B" The Development of Pianoforte Composition.)
T HE AMICA B ULLETIN
AUTOMATIC MUSICAL INSTRUMENT COLLECTORS' ASSOCIATION
Published by the Automatic Musical Instrument Collectors’ Association, a non-profit, tax exempt group devoted to the restoration, distribution
and enjoyment of musical instruments using perforated paper music rolls and perforated music books. AMICA was founded in San Francisco, California in 1963.
ROBIN PRATT, PUBLISHER, 630 EAST MONROE ST., SANDUSKY, OH 44870-3708 -- Phone 419-626-1903, e-mail: [email protected]
Visit the AMICA Web page at: http://www.amica.org
Associate Editor: Mr. Larry Givens
Contributing Editor: Mr. Emmett M. Ford
VOLUME 38, Number 2
March/April 2001
Display and Classified Ads
Articles for Publication
Letters to the Publisher
Chapter News
FEATURES
On a Roll —
AMICA BULLETIN
74
Canning Music for the Mechanical Piano —
From the Player Piano Group—
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88
QRS, Manufacturers of Welte-Mignon Licensee Rolls 1933-1945 —
T-100 Welte-Mignon - The Actual Cost of Ownership —
Disk Roll Review —
90
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Ragtime: No Longer A Novelty in Sepia —
Piano Maker Henry Steinway —
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100
UPCOMING PUBLICATION
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People - J. Lawerence Cook Part 1 —
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Front Cover: Ad from 1924
Inside Front: Ad from House & Garden, Sept. 1927
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69
AMICA INTERNATIONAL
INTERNATIONAL OFFICERS
PRESIDENT
Dan C. Brown
N. 4828 Monroe Street
Spokane, WA 99205-5354
509-325-2626
PAST PRESIDENT
Linda Bird
3300 Robinson Pike
Grandview, MO 64030-2275
Phone/Fax 816-767-8246
e-mail: OGM [email protected]
VICE PRESIDENT
Mike Walter
65 Running Brook Dr.,
Lancaster, NY 14086-3314
716-656-9583
SECRETARY
Judith Chisnell
3945 Mission, Box 145, Rosebush, MI 48878-9718
517-433-2992
TREASURER
Wesley Neff
128 Church Hill Drive, Findlay, Ohio 45840
Registered agent for legal matters
419-423-4827
PUBLISHER
Robin Pratt
630 E. Monroe Street, Sandusky, Ohio 44870-3708
419-626-1903
MEMBERSHIP SECRETARY
William Chapman (Bill)
2150 Hastings Court, Santa Rosa, CA 95405-8377
707-570-2258
— COMMITTEES —
AMICA ARCHIVES
Stuart Grigg
20982 Bridge St., Southfield, MI 48034 - Fax: (248) 356-5636
AMICA MEMORIAL FUND
Judy Chisnell
3945 Mission, Box 145, Rosebush, MI 48878-9718 517-433-2992
AUDIO-VISUAL & TECHNICAL
Harold Malakinian
2345 Forest Trail Dr., Troy, MI 48098
CONVENTION COORDINATOR
Frank Nix
6030 Oakdale Ave., Woodland Hills, CA 91367 818-884-6849
HONORARY MEMBERS
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(805) 966-9602 - e-mail: [email protected]
PUBLICATIONS
Robin Pratt
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CHAPTER OFFICERS
BOSTON AREA
Pres. Ken Volk
Vice Pres: Dorothy Bromage
Sec: Ginger Christiansen
Treas: Karl Ellison
Reporter: Don Brown
Board Rep: Sandy Libman
CHICAGO AREA
Pres: Richard VanMetre - (847) 402-5391
Vice Pres: George Wilder
Sec: Curt Clifford
Treas: Joe Pekarek
Reporter: Kathy Stone Septon
Board Rep: Marty Persky
FOUNDING CHAPTER
Pres: Bing Gibbs - (408) 253-1866
Vice Pres: Mark Pope
Sec: Lyle Merithew & Sandy Swirsky
Treas: Richard Reutlinger
Reporter: Tom McWay
Board Rep: Richard Reutlinger
GATEWAY CHAPTER
Pres: Yousuf Wilson (636) 665-5187
Vice Pres: Tom Novak
Sec,/Treas: Jane Novak
Reporter: Mary Wilson
Board Rep: Gary Craig
HEART OF AMERICA
Pres: Ron Bopp - (918) 786-4988
Vice Pres: Tom McAuley
Sec/Treas: Robbie Tubbs
Reporter: Joyce Brite
Board Rep: Ron Connor
LADY LIBERTY
Pres./Reporter: Bill Maguire
(516) 261-6799
Vice Pres: Keith Bigger
Sec: Richard Karlsson
Treas: Walter Kehoe
Board Reps: Marvin & Dianne Polan
MIDWEST (OH, MI, IN, KY)
Pres: Judy Chisnell
Vice Pres: Stuart Grigg
Sec: Judy Wulfekuhl
Treas: Alvin Wulfekuhl
Reporter: Christy Counterman
Board Rep: Liz Barnhart
WEB MASTER
Terry Smythe
55 Rowand Avenue, Winnipeg, MB, Canada R3J 2N6
204-832-3982 — e-mail: [email protected]
http://www.mts.net/~smythe
NORTHERN LIGHTS
Pres: Dave Kemmer
Vice Pres: Jerrilyn Boehland (612) 780-5699
Sec: Jason E. Beyer - (507) 454-3124
Treas: Terry Goepel
Reporters: Paul & Barbara Watkins
Board Rep: Dorothy Olds
PACIFIC CAN-AM
Pres: Kurt Morrison - (253) 952-4725
Vice Pres: Don McLaughlin
Sec: Halie Dodrill
Treas: Bev Spore
Reporter: Carl Kehret
Board Rep: Carl Dodrill
SIERRA NEVADA
Pres: John Motto-Ros - (209) 267-9252
Vice Pres: Sonja Lemon
Sec/Treas: Doug & Vicki Mahr
Reporter: Nadine Motto-Ros
Board Rep: John Motto-Ros
SOWNY (Southern Ontario,
Western New York)
Pres: Anne Lemon - (905) 295-4228
Vice Pres: Mike Hamann
Sec/Mem. Sec: John & Diane Thompson
Treas: Holly Walter
Photographer: Garry Lemon
Reporter: Frank Warbis
Board Rep: Mike Walter
SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
Pres: James Westcott
Sec./Reporter. Shirley Nix
Treas: Ken Hodge
Board Rep: Frank Nix
TEXAS
Pres: Jerry Bacon - (214) 328-9369
Vice Pres: Tony Palmer (817) 261-1334
Sec./Treas: Janet Tonnesen
Board Rep: Dick Merchant
Bulletin Reporter: Bryan Cather
Newsletter Editor: Bryan Cather
SOUTHERN SKIES
Pres: Debra Legg - (727) 734-3353
Vice Pres: Bill Shrive
Sec: Howard Wyman (813) 689-6876
Treas: Dee Kavouras (352) 527-9390
Reporter: Dick & Dixie Leis
Board Rep: Debra Legg
AFFILIATED SOCIETIES AND ORGANIZATIONS
AUSTRALIAN COLLECTORS
OF MECHANICAL MUSICAL
INSTRUMENTS
19 Waipori Street
St. Ives NSW 2075, Australia
INTERNATIONAL PIANO
ARCHIVES AT MARYLAND
Performing Arts Library, Hornbake 3210
University of Maryland
College Park, MD 20742
DUTCH PIANOLA ASSOC.
Nederlandse Pianola Vereniging
Eikendreef 24
5342 HR Oss,
Netherlands
MUSICAL BOX SOCIETY
INTERNATIONAL
P. O. Box 297
Marietta, OH 45750
PIANOLA INSTITUTE
Clair Cavanagh, Secretary
43 Great Percy St., London WC1X 9RA
England
70
NETHERLANDS MECHANICAL
ORGAN SOCIETY - KDV
A. T. Meijer
Wilgenstraat 24
NL-4462 VS Goes, Netherlands
NORTHWEST PLAYER PIANO
ASSOCIATION
Everson Whittle, Secretary
11 Smiths Road, Darcy Lever,
Bolton BL3 2PP, Gt. Manchester, England
Home Phone: 01204 529939
Business Phone: 01772 208003
SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION
Division of Musical History
Washington, D.C. 20560
PLAYER PIANO GROUP
Julian Dyer, Bulletin Editor
5 Richmond Rise, Workingham,
Berkshire RG41 3XH, United Kingdom
Phone: 0118 977 1057
Email: [email protected]
SOCIETY FOR SELF-PLAYING
MUSICAL INSTRUMENTS
Gesellschaft für Selbstspielende
Musikinstrumente (GSM) E.V.
Ralf Smolne
Emmastr. 56
D-45130 Essen, Germany
Phone: **49-201-784927
Fax:. **49-201-7266240
INT. VINTAGE PHONO & MECH.
MUSIC SOCIETY
C.G. Nijsen, Secretaire General
19 Mackaylaan
5631 NM Eindhoven
Netherlands
President’s Message
I’m pleased to announce that we have a new Treasurer, Wesley Neff of Ohio. He’s
recently retired and and has the time and skill to do a great job for AMICA. We owe him
our thanks for stepping forward to help the organization. The transition is in progress and
will soon be completed. Thanks again to Rob DeLand for re-assuming the Treasurer duties
and getting us through a difficult time.
Congratulations to Robin Pratt and all the contributors who made the last Bulletin so
great. It had everything we want: history, tech tips, and great chapter reports. Yes, it was
delayed by some computer problems, but I think it was worth the wait. It reminded me to
request that members take a few minutes and contribute an article. Don’t be deterred by
your not being a polished writer or not having earth-shaking (sorry for that reference, Seattle) information to share. Robin will take your article in any form you can supply it and
work with you. Don’t diminish the importance or appeal of your article, either. Personal stories, reminiscences, or articles about a favorite instrument all contribute to our fund of
knowledge and help make the Bulletin more varied and interesting.
Mike Barnhart is working hard on the development of the IFMMO website which will
coordinate information from instrument collector organizations around the world. In recent
correspondence, he noted that this may appeal to the current generation of electronicallyinterested, but pneumatically-uniformed potential members. In the past several years, we
have often discussed new methods of recruiting members, but our numbers have not
increased. In recent discussions with members of the public, it became painfully obvious to
me that many people know little about pianos, let alone player or reproducing pianos. As a
child, there were two operating original player pianos in my neighborhood and I was lucky
enough to be able to enjoy both regularly. Most people had pianos of some sort. Look around your current neighborhood. I’d bet you
wouldn’t find many pianos and you probably have the only automatic instruments around. This is further evidence that we have to
get our treasures out in front of the public to pique their interest and develop their knowledge.
The Australia convention was a great success, even with super hot temperatures. I look forward to the stories and photos. No
board meeting was held at the convention due to the timing in the year and the number of people who could attend. I am currently
looking into the possibility of a mid-summer board meeting somewhere in the midwest. This will allow face-to-face discussions and
be a good compromise for keeping travel distances to a minimum. Watch for details.
Amicably,
Dan Brown
that I would also like to see a few names on some of the
instruments . . , but there I go THINKING again!
You will see a blatant expose about yours truly in this issue
from the local Sandusky Register. Just so no one gets really
upset at my “free advertising”, I was directed by the members
of the AMICA Board to do this. It gives the members more of
an insight into the Publisher and his roots. Hope you enjoy the
article.
Hi All,
When I say “Boy, do we get LETTERS!”, I thought that
last month would be the resolution of the Chapter report
dilemma. Boy was I wrong. I received a slew of telephone calls
that all pretty much said, “Don’t change the Chapter reports!
That is my favorite part!”
OK OK OK! I am not changing them, but the writers
might. We’ll see what happens. Although I certainly enjoy
seeing the members in these meeting reports, I think
The young man, Colt Foutz, who wrote the article, spent
lots of time with me and was really a pleasure to work with.
Initially we were seemingly at odds with each other. I was
trying to “dumb-down” the answers and he was trying to get me
to “up-grade” them. Turns out I was assuming that he wouldn’t
know much about music. WRONG AGAIN! He graduated
from the Carnegie-Mellon Institute with a degree not only in
Journalism, but also in MUSIC COMPOSITION! Oh well,
can’t win ‘em all.
Hope you enjoy this issue. There is lots of variety in it this
time.
SPRING IS HERE, too!
Robin
71
CALENDAR OF EVENTS
AMICA
Memorial Fund Donations
CHAPTER MEETINGS
Heart of America Chapter
Fall, 2001 - Branson, MO
Please think of AMICA as a place to
remember your friends and family with a donation to the AMICA Memorial Fund.
Christmas, 2001 - Linda and Gerold Koehler
September 1-2, 2001
Pacific CAN-AM Chapter
Band Organ Rally
Convention Center, Ocean Shores, Washington
Contact Norm or Sally Gibson
360-289-7960
[email protected]
Send to:
Judith Chisnell
3945 Mission, Box 145
Rosebush, Michigan 48878-9718
517-433-2992
[email protected]
June 1-2, 2001
Monkey Organ Rally - Kalamazoo, MI (Bob Cantine)
July 19-21, 2001
Monkey Organ Rally - Wabash, IN (Frank Rider)
invites AMICAns to its
June 26-30, 2002
AMICA Convention, Springdale, Arkansas
BAND ORGAN RALLY
2012,1-Sep
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Information: Norm or Sally Gibson, 125 Taholah St. SE,
Ocean Shores, WA 98569-9549
E-mail: [email protected]
Hi,
Just wanted to say thanks for publishing the article
on the hurdy-gurdy. It will come in handy when another
crank organ rally comes around and people keep calling
a crank organ a “hurdy-gurdy.”
Have gotten interested in magic lanterns and have
seen pictures of an itinerant lanternist with a hurdygurdy slung on his back.
Good reference.
Dorothy Bromage
“NEWEST ADDITION TO COLLECTION”
After many years of searching, AMICA Founding Member and first AMICA Bulletin Editor Bill Knorp has added an outstanding Weber Duo-Art to his collection. Bill also owns his family’s original 1926 Fischer Ampico grand in a wonderful Spanish Renaissance case.
72
Letters…
THE HOLLOW SOUND OF KEN BURNS’ “JAZZ”
From the San Francisco Examiner, January, 2001
By Jonathan Yardley
Sent in by Bill Knorp
Yes, there are wonderful sights and sounds in Ken Burns’
“Jazz,” the first three episodes of which were shown last week
on PBS. How could it be otherwise? Jazz - the music, not the
series, though exhausted viewers may feel differently - is a
century old.
Thousands of brilliant performances have been preserved
on recordings; the library of jazz photographs is immense and
provides a visual history as rich as that enjoyed by almost any
other subject; even the archives of jazz film, though scant by
comparison, contain telling glimpses of many of the greatest
jazz performers and composers.
It is from this incredible array of raw materials that the
pleasures of the series derive; it would be churlish to deny the
depth of those pleasures. Beyond that, though, it is precious
hard to find much for which to be grateful in the work of the
series’ presiding genius, Ken Burns; its writer, Geoffrey C.
Ward; or all but a handful of the talking heads enlisted
as ostensibly expert commentators, most notably (or
ignominiously) Gerald Early, Albert Murray and Margo
Jefferson. If to some measure the series succeeds - and to
some measure it does - it is despite, not because of, the efforts
of these people.
Burns has done good work in the past. His film about the
Brooklyn Bridge (1981) is lovely, and the series about the
Civil War (1990), which made his reputation, is undeniably
powerful, if overlong and emotionally manipulative. For this
work he has been praised, and he seems to have come
to believe his press clippings. Not merely is he content to
recycle all the formulas that were once fresh but are
now exhausted, he has assumed a self-aggrandizing,
near-messianic pose.
Thus we have various films (about Congress, the Statue
of Liberty, and so forth) presented as aspects of “Ken Burns’
America,” and now we have Ken Burns’ “Jazz.”
Well, it isn’t Ken Burns’ America and it certainly isn’t
Ken Burns’ jazz. By his own acknowledgment Burns knew
almost nothing about jazz when he began work on the current
series; there is little reason to believe that he knows - in the
deepest sense of the word - much more about it now.
What he has put together is not a documentary about
music but a condemnation and/or celebration of various
attitudes having to do with race, class and America. Indeed,
for much of the time music is entirely peripheral to this series;
the boast that more than 500 pieces of music are featured is
empty, when one considers that most of these appear only as
sound-bite snippets and that many are merely background for
Ward’s banalities and pomposities as intoned by the
oleaginous narrator, Keith David.
Take by way of revealing example Burns’ treatment of
Jelly Roll Morton. Burns gives us Morton as whorehouse
piano player, Morton as braggart, Morton as dandy, Morton as
controversialist; but he gives us almost nothing of Morton as
musician, which is in fact the only real claim - it is a very
large claim that Morton has on our attention.
This is easily explained. Burns is neither an historian nor
a scholar (though he does nothing to discourage others from
depicting him as such) but an entertainer, and he knows that
on television the visual image is what draws people in.
As is happens, my own introduction to jazz, which took
place exactly half a century ago, came through the recordings
of Morton’s Red Hot Peppers. Hearing them set me on a
journey that in many ways has been, outside of private and
familial joys, the happiest and most fulfilling of my life.
I pretend to no expertise beyond that of well-informed
amateurism and would scarcely presume to set myself up as
an expert in contradiction to those hired by Burns, but I
frankly resent it that the music of my lifetime has been
co-opted by an ill-informed amateur who now represents
himself as authoritative and has been accepted as such by
equally ill-informed amateurs in the media.
It is claimed that “Jazz” will be the kiss of life for an art
form that, except during the swing era of the 1930s and early
1940s, has always existed at the margins of American culture,
but it is hard to see how this will happen.
For one thing, “Jazz” is almost entirely focused, as others
have pointed out, on the music of giants long since dead; this
may be good news for record companies that can repackage
their backlists at minimal expense, but it does absolutely
nothing to call attention to most musicians who are still very
much alive and very much at work.
For another, it so obsessively places race at the center of
the tale that it manages to politicize jazz in ways that would
have deeply offended, say, Louis Armstrong and Duke
Ellington, and that surely will offend many potential converts,
whatever their own race may be.
Ken Burns’ “Jazz” isn’t jazz; it’s politics and ideology - at
times one is tempted to say racism - masquerading as history
and sociology. But if jazz interests you and you would like to
learn more about it with film as your instructor, two
videotapes are herewith recommended: “Jazz on a Summer’s
Day,” Bert Stern’s classic chronicle of the 1958 Newport Jazz
Festival, and “A Great Day in Harlem,” Jean Bach’s account
of a famous photograph taken that same year. In a total of
under three hours, these films tell us so much more about jazz
than Ken Burns does at six times the length that comparisons
are meaningless. One thing they tell us is that jazz - the
music, if not always those who make it - is colorblind.
73
Left: Robin Pratt removes
pegs from the Marshall and
Wendell reproducing grand
piano. Pratt is restoring the
1929 piano.
Robin Pratt makes remarkable acts
of piano restoration routine
By Colt Foutz
[email protected]
From Sandusky Register,
February 16, 2001
Robin Pratt has made a career of bringing pianos back
from the dead. Back from the ashes? Now, that was a
challenge.
Sylvia Chappell’s player piano had not produced a single
tolerable note since it was damaged in a house fire nearly 50
years ago. The Marblehead resident had the Weber Duo-Art
grand’s exterior refinished in 1999, but the instrument’s shiny
new exterior couldn’t mask the loss of its key feature - its
voice.
“It would drive you right out of the house with the way it
sounded,” Pratt said. “It was very metallic sounding and the
keys were sticking and their
edges were running into each
other. That piano basically
needed everything from the
ground up.”
For 18 months, Pratt gutted
the 79-year-old instrument in
his Sandusky studio. He
replaced the bellows, strings,
valves, pin block, leather,
tubing, hammers, dampers and
every piece of felt. He refit the
keys, regulated the action,
rebuilt the sound board and had
Sandusky Electric work on the
motor, which he placed inside.
Restoration? More like a
resurrection.
On Feb. 7, Chappell was
treated to the sound of the
restored instrument for the first
74
Bottom: Pratt works at
removing the strings from a
1929 Marshall and Wendell
Ampico reproducing grand
piano belonging to Dr. &
Mrs. Ty Frerking of New
Albany, Ohio. In the
foreground is the piano
action that was removed.
Pratt is in the process of
restoring the piano.
time. Since then, she’s put the piano to work, singing along
with the rolls as it plays.
“I think it’s just the most gorgeous sound when it fills the
house,” she said. “I’m surprised at the amount of work that
went into it, how intricate the work is. He clearly knows what
he’s doing.”
Pratt’s passion for player pianos goes back to his
childhood in Sandusky. After he saw the fun people had
coming to his home to play the piano during parties, he began
taking lessons. His interest in mechanical devices such as
phonographs, cars and clocks combined with his love for
music to make him take notice of the player pianos in the
homes of relatives and teachers.
“When I was taking piano lessons, a player piano was just
fascinating to me because it played itself,” Pratt said. “Every
reproducing piano symphony which no human could possibly
play.
These are some of the many challenges that keep the
52-year-old Pratt plugging away. He divides his time between
restoring nine pianos in various stages of repair currently in
his workshop for customers from all over the country. Work
on a single piano can take anywhere from 100-200 hours, as
long as two years.
A piano roll plays on a restored 1922 6 foot 2 inch Weber Duo-Art
reproducing grand piano belonging to Sylvia Chappell of
Mablehead. The Piano was restored by Pratt.
What makes the long hours worthwhile to Pratt remains
the preservation of antique instruments, he said. “Quite often
with customers, when they see their piano restored and it was
a family piece, they’ll just burst into tears when they hear it
played for the first time,” he said. “I know that there’s such a
love there, and it really makes me feel great because I’ve
given them something they can pass on to their children that
will well outlive me.”
time I went in for a piano lesson, I wanted to play that piano
because it could play better than I could!”
It’s something Beverly Brabb appreciates, too. Pratt has
worked on all five of her pianos at one time or another.
Pratt’s talents were improving. In junior high school he
successfully begged his mother to buy him a player piano, and
spent his time tinkering inside, repair book in hand. He also
logged enough hours working the keyboard part of the
instrument to gain entry into Chicago Conservatory College,
where he studied piano and organ performance.
The Norwalk resident took her Marshall and Wendell
grand to Pratt on the advice of a friend. At the time, the piano
was a wreck. Within three months, Brabb said, it was perfect.
During his time at the Conservatory, Pratt focused his
attention entirely on music, absorbing lessons in arranging and
conducting. After graduating, he turned his attention back to
what makes his favorite instrument tick, learning the ins and
outs of tuning and rebuilding at the former Perkins School of
Piano Technology in Elyria and most recently was asked to be
the local Steinway technician.
His degrees from both sides of the musical world - how
things play and how to play them - enabled him to start his
career as a piano rebuilder, accepting various tuning jobs and
attending conferences to learn the characteristics of different
piano brands while continuing his musical career as a church
choir director and organist. The two disciplines go hand in
hand, Pratt said.
“When I first heard the music come out of that piano that
had been dead, it was such a thrill,” she said. “All of a sudden
when you put that roll in there and hear this great music what fun!”
Brabb has been a player piano enthusiast for 30 years,
traveling to international conventions of AMICA almost every
year and delighting in gatherings where she can hear the
distinctive voices of different instruments. She considers the
sound Pratt gets from the instrument to be the best.
“One strange thing is that he’s never finished - he always
has to tweak that piano and do something to it,” she said.
“But when I hear other people’s pianos I know he’s probably
the top restorer around.”
“It has a lot to do with my playing piano because I’m not
just guessing what it should sound like,” he said. “I know that
player pianos are designed to sound like a person is playing it.
“For me, it’s trying to make the piano sound as close to
the original design concept as possible and not being
presumptuous enough to think I can make it better,” he said.
“Some people basically want to turn every piano into a
Steinway, and you just can’t do that, nor should you try.”
According to Pratt, learning what makes each player
piano unique requires years of involvement with every aspect
of automatic instruments. For his part, Pratt has belonged to
the Automatic Musical Instrument Collector’s Association
since 1967, and is editor and publisher of its bi-monthly
newsletter, The AMICA Bulletin.
Tickle the ivories
Robin Pratt is available for appraisal and restoration of
antique pianos and player pianos.
• Studio: 630 E. Monroe St., Sandusky
• Phone: 419 -626-1903
• E-mail: [email protected]
• For information about player pianos and the Automatic
Musical Instrument Collector’s Association (AMICA), visit
the group’s Web site, www.amica.org
In 40 years, he has collected more than 3,800 piano rolls,
and has worked with transcribers to create several new rolls,
arranging music meant for two hands into a veritable
75
J . LAWRENCE COOK
AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF
THE EARLY YEARS
PART 1
OF
2
1899 -1910
Transcribed from his comments taped in 1972
Edited and annotated by his son
Jean Lawrence Cook M.D.
© 2000 Dr. J. Lawrence Cook.
Reproduced with permission
JACOB LINCOLN COOK MY FATHER
Early years in Athens (McMinn County), Tennessee
The Reverend Jacob Lincoln Cook, my father, was born
in Athens, Tennessee, in May 18701 to George and Amelia
Cook, former slaves 2 of Judge J. B. Cooke. Their former
master was a member of one of the earliest families to
settle in the area of McMinn County in Tennessee.
“This picture used to hang in the foyer of
JLC’s apartment at 409 Edgecombe Avenue in
Manhattan and, according to Dr. J. L. Cook,
dates from the early 1930’s”
Note: Mike Meddings of Staffordshire UK, who produced a
series of Jelly Roll Morton roll transcriptions in the 1970-80’s,
was recently contacted by J. Lawrence Cook’s son Dr. Jean
Lawrence Cook, M.D. (retired). Dr. Cook was impressed by Mike’s
comprehensive website showcasing his father and other music
luminaries (found at http://www.doctorjazz.freeserve.co.uk), and
asked Mike to phone him at his residence in France. After a long
conversation, Dr. Cook told Mike about his eldest niece, Dr. Lisa
Fagg, who also lives in England and that he should contact her also.
After doing so Mike was invited to visit Lisa and her husband Steve,
for a Saturday lunch and get-together.
In the meantime, Mike was offered Dr. Jean Cook’s
reminiscences of his father in document format, transcribed from
tape-recorded comments by his father. Mike was also shown private
family photos never before seen by the public - some of which will
be reproduced in this serial. While some parts of this biography are
quite similar to the ground-breaking JLC biography published in the
1973 AMICA bulletins, the Billings’ only had the audio tapes to
write the transcription - with incorrect phonetic spellings and
geographical assumptions. Dr. Cook has embellished these early
transcriptions with corrections, facts and references to back up this
article. Dr. Cook happily gives his permission for AMICA to print
this work.
Lisa and Steve Fagg will be attending the Player Piano
Group annual dinner May 5th 2001 in Leatherhead, England. Mike
Meddings has offered to be their host at this function. I too, will be
in attendance and will be in a position to report back on the event to
AMICA this summer. - Karl Ellison
76
By the time Jacob Lincoln was eight years old both of his
parents were deceased, but he had the good fortune to be
“taken in” by two former slaves, “Aunt Huldy” and “Uncle
Nelse” Gettys. 3 They were caring foster parents and they
believed strongly that education was the key to success for
that first generation of freedmen to which my father belonged.
Jake, as my father was called, became a bright and
industrious student, so when he completed his secondary
school education the Gettys were able to bring him to the
attention of a white physician, Dr. Parkinson.4 He was able to
secure a scholarship for my father at Fisk University in
Nashville, Tennessee. My father had a good singing voice,
which enabled him to become a member of the famous Fisk
Jubilee Singers.
After a short time at Fisk, just how long I do not know,
my father entered Knoxville College in Knoxville, Tennessee.5
He worked to pay his expenses, and was also aided by
donations from individuals back in his home town of Athens.
In 1888 he received his bachelor’s degree from Knoxville
College and entered Allegheny Theological Seminary in
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania to prepare for the Presbyterian
ministry.6 On 9 April 1890 he was licensed as a minister by the
Allegheny Presbytery, and with this credential returned to
Athens to establish a United Presbyterian mission. Fresh out
of seminary, he began holding services in an old dance hall.7
The School My Father Founded in Athens
In addition to starting his missionary congregation, my
father, with a handful of dedicated co-workers (Miss Henrietta
Mason, Miss Mary Byars, Miss Fannie Jackson, Mr. James
Cleage and Professor Pitts),8 organized a small school, the
Academy of Athens. It was located on a site called Depot Hill
and was funded by the Presbyterian Church. Only one year
after its founding, my father’s school had moved from its
original three-room building to another twice as large.8 Most
black schools in Tennessee at that time were of the
one-teacher, one-room variety, making my father’s school an
exception. Eventually the Academy of Athens became
recognized as one of the best schools for Blacks in the South.
My father headed the Academy of Athens until 1900
when he was appointed President of Henderson Institute in
North Carolina.9 The Academy was destroyed by fire in 1925,
twenty-two years after my father’s death, and the Presbyterian
Board of Missions decided not to rebuild it. Classes continued
to be held in the United Presbyterian Church, where the
Reverend C. H. Wilson was then pastor, and principal of the
school. The need for a proper school to replace the burned
down Academy was clear, and one was built with funds from
McMinn County, the City of Athens, and the Rosenwald Fund
(a national foundation for the support of Negro education).
The new public school, which opened 10 December 1926, had
six classrooms, an auditorium, five teachers in addition to the
principal and 150 pupils enrolled in nine grades. Its original
name, Athens Training School, was quickly changed to the J.
L. Cook School in memory of my father’s work as an educator
in Athens, and it eventually became the J. L. Cook High
School. It flourished until it closed during the desegregation
of southern schools in the mid- 1960’s.10
My Father Expands His Career as
Pastor and Educator
In 1892 the congregation which my father began
gathering in 1889 (while still a seminarian) was organized as
the First United Presbyterian Church (USA) of Athens and
began to worship in its newly constructed building on North
Jackson Street, across from the Tennessee Wesleyan campus.11
On 31 March 1893, Reverend Jacob Lincoln Cook, who had
been a “stated supply” minister (a minister appointed and
supported by the regional Presbytery), was ordained by the
Tennessee Presbytery and became the “called” pastor of his
Athens church. He also continued to head the Academy of
Athens until 1900, when he became the first colored president
of Henderson Normal and Industrial Institute, in Henderson,
North Carolina.
My Mother, Zella Cornelia Lawrence
The family background of Zella Cornelia Lawrence
(Cook), my mother, was very different from her husband’s.
Zella’s father, Job, was the son of John Lawrence, a plantation
“Zella and her sisters - Zella
is on the far right.”
owner in Tennessee, by his
slave Miranda. 12 Born in
1852, Miranda’s son became
Job
Lawrence
after
Emancipation. In 1876 he
graduated from Maryville
College in Maryville, Tennessee. He then went to
Howard University to prepare for the ministry, and in
1879 was ordained by the
Presbytery of Kingston,
Tennessee. Reverend Job
Lawrence’s early ministry mainly involved establishing
churches along the foothills and in the valleys of the
Great Smoky Mountains. Later, from 1896 to 1910,
he pastored Mt. Tabor Presbyterian Church in Columbia,
Tennessee.
Job Lawrence married Missouri Ann Wallace in 1876. My
mother, Zella Cornelia, born in 1880, was one of their nine
children. Missouri Ann was “white” by nature and “colored”
by nurture. But that is another story. (See appendix).
My Father’s Marriages and His Children
The Rev. Jacob Lincoln Cook was married three times
and fathered four children. After his first wife, by whom he
had a daughter, died, he married my mother. I was an infant,
her only child, when she too died and left my father once
more a widower. The two boys born of my father’s third
marriage died in infancy. I was not quite four years old when
my father, a widower for a third time, died on 6 July 1903.
First Marriage
My father’s first wife was named Pocahontas Gibson. The
memory has been handed down in our family that she was a
descendant of her namesake, the Indian Princess Pocahontas
who is believed to have helped save the life of the English
adventurer John Smith.
My half-sister, Amelia Beatrice Cook (Prillerman), my
father’s only child from his marriage to Pocahontas Gibson,
was born 24 March 1894
and died 3 March 1970.
She is survived (1972)
by her husband Delbert
Prillenman, five sons,
one daughter, many grandchildren and two greatgrandchildren.
Second Marriage
After the death of
Pocahontas, the Rev. Jacob
Lincoln Cook married my
mother, Zella Cornelia
Lawrence, then only
eighteen years old. But
Zella was a bright young
“Baby J. L. Cook”
77
woman and had completed her secondary education. She was
studying voice in Boston when my father met her. They were
married in 1898, five years after my father’s ordination.
My mother was born 22 February 1880 and died of
typhoid fever on 27 September 1900. I was her only child,
born 14 July 1899, so I was little more than a year old at the
time of her death. I have no recollection of her, and as
mementos just a picture or two and a silver butterknife
inscribed “Zella” on the handle.
was married (to a Mr. Perry) and living in Whitville, Virginia.
Aunt Gertie was able to arrange for Amelia to go live with her
half-Aunt Rachel Perry and her husband in Whitville. Rachel
Perry was a crafty woman, and in the absence of a will she
was able to acquire most of my father’s property and personal
belongings.
First Amelia and I were orphaned, then we were
separated, not to see each other again for 15 years when I was
19 and she was 24. We missed growing up together, but we
did keep in touch by mail.
COLUMBIA, TENNESSEE 1903-1907
My parents lived in Athens, Tennessee, from the time of
their marriage until the summer of 1900 when my father
became the Principal of Henderson Normal and Industrial
Institute in Henderson, North Carolina.
My father’s work required him to travel frequently
between Athens and other cities, in and out of the state,
lecturing as a Christian educator or fund-raising for the Athens
Academy. My very young mother traveled too, between
13
Athens and Columbia, Tennessee, where her parents lived.
Still, she found time, in addition to caring for me and Amelia,
to give piano lessons and sing with a group called the Choral
Glee Club of Athens.
Third Marriage
My mother’s death occurred only a few months after the
family moved to Henderson, North Carolina. My father was
left with two children to be cared for, so after a proper interval
he was married a third time, to a young woman Amelia and I
came to love and whom we called “Mama Anna.” This
marriage produced two boys, both of whom died in infancy.
Death visited my father twice more, taking Mama Anna
first, then him. She died on 9 February 190314 and he died on 5
July the same year.15 More than once my father was advised to
make a will. To this advice he would respond, “I’m not
getting ready to die, I’m getting ready to live.” Therefore,
when he died at the early age of thirty-three he left no will.
Amelia and I are Separated
My mother’s elder sister Gertrude (Aunt Gertie) was a
young teacher at my father’s school in North Carolina when
he died. Aunt Gertie assumed the responsibility of finding
someone to care for her brother-in-law’s two children. She
arranged for me to live with her parents, my maternal
grandparents, in Columbia, Tennessee.
Pocahontas Gibson, Amelia’s mother and my father’s first
wife, was the daughter of Phoebe, a former slave and her
husband Harrison Gibson. When she married Gibson, Phoebe
already had a daughter named Rachel, fathered by her master
when she was still a slave. In 1903 Rachel, Amelia’s half-aunt,
78
The manse, in which the Lawrence family lived, and Mt.
Tabor Presbyterian Church, which my grandfather pastored,
were small wooden structures next to each other. They have
now been replaced by brick buildings on the same site.
When I joined them the Lawrence family, in Columbia,
Tennessee consisted of Grandma (Missouri Ann Wallace
Lawrence). Grandpa (Job Childs Lawrence), and six of their
nine children. Zella Cornelia (my mother) had died, Leonora
(“Aunt Nona”) was living in Chattanooga, Tennessee, and
Gertrude Miranda (“Aunt Gertie,” age 21) was teaching at the
Henderson Institute in North Carolina. The six at home were
Lamar Westcott (age 19), Grace Amelia (age 16), Herman
Holsey (age 14), Charles Radford (age 11), Harriet Geraldine
(“Geral,” age 5) and Lucille Wallace (age 1).
Grandma was an excellent cook, and I liked everything
she prepared (including chitterlings), except okra, and
cornbread (unless it was made with pork crackling). I
especially liked Grandma’s pies (she actually put small pieces
of meat in her mincemeat pies). Lemon custard was my
favorite. I can remember being ill in bed when I was 7 years
old, and Grandma promising that on my next birthday she
would bake a lemon pie especially for me.
I lived in Columbia, Tennessee, with my grandparents
from the time I was 4 until Grandma died, two days before my
eighth birthday in 1907. During those four years I always
looked forward to Sunday, a special day centered on the
church. I remember that Grandma used to cook dinner on
Saturday and warm it on Sunday, so she would not have to do
a weekday task on the Lord’s Day.
First thing after Sunday breakfast, Geral and I went
through the comic sheets in the Nashville Banner. At 10
o’clock we went next door to Sunday School (Lucille was
only 1 year old when I went to Columbia to live) at Mt. Tabor,
and at 11 o’clock to the worship service that Grandpa led.
When I became old enough, I went across the street in the
afternoon to a service in the Episcopal Church. I enjoyed the
pageantry of the Episcopal service, and the fact that at
Christmas they gave children fancier presents than Mt. Tabor
could afford.
Grandma’s Reed Organ
Grandma played the organ for the Sunday School and at
the 11 o’clock church service. She also baked the bread and
made the blackberry wine that we used for Communion
Service. Only she knew where she stored the wine.
The church’s old reed organ was often out of commission,
the most frequent problem being with the straps on the pedals.
They would often break, usually one at a time, fortunately. I
always sat near the organ, and if a pedal broke down and
Grandma couldn’t continue the music with just one pedal, I
would crawl beside her foot and pump the loose pedal like
mad by hand. I felt important. If the second strap broke the
music stopped for that service.
Preaching to the Empty Room
Like all children I thought about what I’d like to be when
I grew up and imagined myself in uniform as a fireman
driving a horse-drawn engine, or a policeman. Eventually I
outgrew these careers and began to think about following in
my father’s footsteps as a minister. Of course I had a live-in
role model in Grandpa. At an early age I would take a Bible,
prop it in a chair as if it were on a pulpit and read a verse or
two, then preach a little sermon to an empty room in our
house.
After I learned to play a tune which we called “Coonjine
Baby” on the black keys of the piano, I became more attracted
to music, and this attraction became strengthened when
Grandma taught me to play “Jesus Lover Of My Soul.”
We had a rule in our house that on Sunday no popular
music could be played, so I made up a tune of my own called
“Today is Sunday, this is a Sunday Song.” The title was to
protect me from being called away from the piano for playing
worldly music. I had no melody or harmony and fumbled over
the keys, but I do think I had the beat.
School in Columbia, Tennessee
Grandma had already begun teaching me to read when
at age five I entered what was called the “primer” grade,
equivalent I believe to today’s kindergarten. I had great
affection for Mrs. Phoebe Armstrong, my very first teacher, a
lady we will return to later on in this story.
Reverse Discrimination
One day a sign appeared in the window of an empty store
inviting everyone to a showing of the first movie to come to
Columbia, “The Great Fire.” The showings were free, there
were no seats and the standing audience was not segregated.
Later, a second free movie called “The Great Train Robbery”
was shown in a vacant building near a store, which had a
window display of player pianos. Until then, the only
self-playing piano I had ever seen operated using a
cumbersome device called a Pianola. The Pianola was a
playing mechanism, which had to be pushed up to the piano
so that its felt-covered “fingers” could strike the keys.
My third movie was “The Crucifixion.” This time there
was a charge for admission, there were chairs, and the
audience was segregated. Grandpa, being a minister, received
complementary tickets as did other ministers, black and white,
for himself, Grandma, Geral, Lucille and me. The Whites sat
in front of the big sheet, which was used as a screen. The
Negroes sat back of the screen, which of course made it
necessary not only for us to view the action in reverse, but
also to read the titles backwards.
Grandma’s Death, 12 July 1907
Not long before my eighth birthday, the one for which she
was going to bake me a lemon pie, Grandma became very ill.
Her two eldest daughters, Leonora and Gertrude, came to help
take care of their mother. During the early hours of July 12,
two days before my birthday, they came through the house
and quietly awakened us all saying, “Mama is dead, do you
want to see her?” We all went to Grandma’s room where she
lay with her eyes open. My beloved grandmother was buried
on my eighth birthday.
Grandpa was now left with no one to take care of me
and his two youngest daughters. Aunt Nona, who lived in
Chattanooga, agreed to take on the responsibility. All three of
us went to Chattanooga to live with her and her husband, and
their only child, Lavetta Mae. My aunt Harriet
Geraldine(Geral) was 9 years old, I was 8 and my aunt Lucille
was 5.
CHATTANOOGA
We arrived in Chattanooga one afternoon, a few weeks
after Grandma’s funeral. Aunt Nona and her husband, Hugh
Keith, met us and drove us to a wooded area on the outskirts
called Rosstown. Their house was quite isolated in the woods,
it had no number and it was on a path, not a street. Their mail
was delivered to the house of a family named Thornton, which
was on the postman’s route.
The Keith house was on a slope and overlooked a brook
whose water was not suitable for drinking. Their drinking
water was gotten from a place called Indian Spring, so named
because a community of Indians lived nearby.
On the way from the Chattanooga railroad station to the
house, Hugh Keith14 began an abusive argument with Aunt
Nona, something I had never seen in my family before. I must
have reacted to it in a way that displeased Hugh Keith,
because when we arrived at the house he jerked me out of the
carriage and beat me. I had never been beaten before. Then he
ordered me to take a bucket and fetch drinking water from
Indian Spring. Along the mile and a half to the spring I passed
only one other dwelling. It was night, and I was a frightened
child, alone in the dark in a strange place.
Hugh Keith was not only a wife-beater, but at times he
would even draw his gun and threaten to use it. I can vividly
remember Aunt Nona begging him not to shoot. Looking
back, I think he may have threatened her just to hear her
pleading.
If Geral, Lucille or I made Hugh Keith cross, he would
use a cedar limb to give us a beating and he really seemed to
enjoy hurting us. His daughter Lavetta would get lighter
beatings, with a peach tree limb. Among ourselves we children called him “the meanest man in the world.”
We made our own entertainment at home. Aunt Nona
played the guitar for us and she enjoyed singing ballads and
hymns. Hugh sang too, mostly Tennessee country music. The
best times of all were had when Aunt Gertie visited and sang
beautifully for us, accompanying herself on the piano.
Hugh Keith had a horse-drawn hack, which he used to
transport patrons from the Chattanooga railroad station to
their destinations. He always had his bottle of whiskey and his
gun with him.
79
First School Vacation in Chattanooga,
Herding Cows
During the summer after my first school year in
Chattanooga, I was expected to take a job. Out in Rosstown
there was really only one job available to colored kids my age,
and that was herding cows. Every morning, except Sunday
morning, it was the herder’s job to go to the home of the
people who owned the cows and drive the animals to a grazing pasture. The herder brought the cows back home in the
afternoon, in time to be milked before the owners sat down to
dinner.
The first two cows I herded belonged in fact to Hugh
Keith’s parents. The standard pay for herding was 25 cents a
week per cow, paid every two weeks. After my first two
weeks of herding I went to collect my pay, which should have
been $1.00, but Hugh Keith’s parents would only pay me 35
cents. When Aunt Nona complained on my behalf, her husband’s response was in character. He forced me to herd his
parents’ cows thereafter for nothing.
Fortunately I got three more cows to herd which belonged
to a white family living just across the road from Hugh’s
parents.
The cows grazed peacefully, and we barefoot herders
roamed about, watched them, and kept an eye out for snakes
and other hazards to bare feet, like thorns. When it came time
to go home, each herder guided a lead cow, one which the
other animals would follow.
We herders only had a problem when the cows held what
we called a “prayer meeting.” Sometimes a butcher would
come into the woods to slaughter a steer. If a cow smelled the
fresh blood, she would give a loud mooing signal, calling all
the cows within hearing to follow her to the killing site. Once
there, they would mill around, mooing mournfully. We herders
just had to wait until the “prayer meeting’’ was over before we
could lead our cows back home.
My earnings were turned over to my aunt, so I did not
profit personally from my herding job. I was quite happy to
give the money to Aunt Nona, who really needed it, and even
happier when she gave me a nickel or two for myself. I
wonder how much of my little earnings Hugh Keith took
away from her?
Life in Chattanooga
Grandpa, back in Columbia, did his very best to provide
for his daughters and grandson in Chattanooga. He would
send a money order when he could, and when Spring and Fall
arrived, he did not fail to send Aunt Nona money to buy us
clothes. Grandpa was not aware that Hugh Keith appropriated
most of it for himself.
When Grandpa shared in a slaughtering he would send us
a big box of salted-down meat. Hugh Keith would divide most
of it among his friends; nevertheless it was a great help to
Aunt Nona. Since Hugh Keith pocketed most of the money
Grandpa sent, Aunt Nona could rarely afford to shop for our
clothes in the regular stores. Instead, she would go into
Chattanooga and find a rummage sale. I remember clearly that
once she bought me a pair of blue knickerbockers for five
cents. I used to tell the story of the five-cents knickers to my
80
own children, who I believe suspected I was making it up for
their enjoyment.
We went barefoot all summer, except on Sunday.
However, when the weather turned cold, we all needed shoes
and Aunt Nona never had enough money to buy them for
cash. Fortunately there was an itinerant vendor who made his
rounds in poor neighborhoods, both white and black, from
whom Aunt Nona could buy shoes and pay for them in small
weekly installments.
My Uncle Lamar had a good job, one which required him
to pass for white, in a Pittsburgh clothing store. Once in a
while he sent us a box of “irregular” garments. Although
Hugh Keith would appropriate some of the clothes and sell
them, we always were excited when a box arrived from
Pittsburgh.
I Experience Racism
My favorite playmate in Chattanooga was white, and it
was from him that I learned about slavery. He used to visit my
house to play, and I visited his, which was across the road
from Hugh Keith’s parents. Three of the cows that I herded
(the three for which I was paid) belonged to his family. One
day when he was at my house, he told me that his parents did
not want me to come play with him any more, saying: “We
used to have his kind of people as slaves. We are better than
they are...but he can still come to the back door to collect his
money for the cows.” Our friendship managed somehow to
survive this restriction.
Our Sunday Routine
Every week Geral, Lucille, Lavetta and I would take our
Saturday night bath in a zinc washtub, and on Sunday
morning would put on our best clothes to wear to Sunday
School and church. We walked a long way from Rosstown to
a place appropriately named Churchville, occasionally
accompanied by Aunt Nona. Hugh Keith never joined us.
Before we left for Sunday School, Aunt Nona gave each
of us two pennies. One was for the collection plate at Sunday
School, and one was for church. If we were given only one
penny. We knew we were expected to come home after
Sunday School and not stay for church.
A Fiery Christmas in Chattanooga
At Christmas-time, our church had a large decorated tree
on which the Sunday School teachers would hang gifts for the
children. Each child’s gifts were in a labeled bag or stocking,
and it was thrilling to march up to the tree when your name
was called and have Santa Claus hand it to you. We would be
given a thoughtfully selected, inexpensive toy, fruit, nuts and
candy.
The church did not have electricity, so the Christmas tree
was lighted with candles. One year, while Santa Claus was
busy getting things organized, the tree caught fire. Although
he used the pails of water and sand, which were on hand for
just such an emergency, Santa Claus could not put out the
flames. Worse yet, his beard caught on fire. The nearest fire
department with its horse-drawn equipment was far away, but
neighbors came to the rescue with more pails of water. The
Sunday School teachers, mainly ladies, evacuated the
children, and the fire was put out before there was any real
damage to the church building. We children then went back in
and some of us cried when we saw the burned remains of our
pretty Christmas tree and our presents. The teachers assured
us that we would have another tree, and another party with
presents very soon. They kept their word.
COLUMBIA AGAIN Summer 1910, We Get
Away From Hugh Keith
I have written enough about Hugh Keith for it not to be
surprising that a time came when Geral, Lucille and I wanted
nothing more than to get away from him. Geral, then 13
and the oldest, wrote a letter to Grandpa describing our
unhappiness and took it down to the Thorntons’ house (where
our mail was delivered). I still remember the address. 216
Watkins Street. Mrs. Thornton gave Geral a 2-cent stamp.
Perhaps Mrs. Thornton sensed the importance of the letter this
young girl was so anxious to send to her grandfather when she
assured Geral it would be mailed. When Grandpa received
Geral’s letter he wasted no time having us put on a train back
to Columbia.
The day before we left Chattanooga the little frog I had
raised from a tadpole died. I buried him in a strawberry box
and made a tiny tombstone. It was even harder to tear myself
from that little grave than it was to leave my kind Aunt Nona
and her daughter Lavetta.
Mrs. Alexander’s House in Columbia
Things had changed for Grandpa during our three years
away from Columbia. He had been replaced as pastor of Mt.
Tabor Presbyterian Church, and consequently no longer lived
in the manse. He had been retired by the Presbytery with only
a small pension and had taken a room in a large two-family
house owned by Mrs. Alexander, an aged widow. A family
named Peppers rented half of the house, and both Grandpa
and the widow Alexander lived in the other half. Grandpa
arranged with Mrs. Alexander for the three of us to live with
him. Geraldine and Lucille slept in the finished part of the
large attic, which was provided with a coal-burning stove. I
slept in the unfinished part, without heat, and with the earthy
aroma of root vegetables stored there in the cool.
Mr. Peppers was a cook for a white school, the Columbia
Military Academy. We were always glad when we saw him
returning home in the evening with a bundle under his arm.
This meant he was bringing leftovers from the Academy
kitchen, good things to eat which he always shared with our
family.
Mrs. Alexander had peach trees, apple trees, a cherry tree
and a mulberry tree on her property. We planted corn, beans,
turnip greens, white potatoes, sweet potatoes, and tomatoes,
so we never wanted for fruit or vegetables.
At one end of her property there was a floor-less cabin, a
sad reminder of the days of slavery, which Mrs. Alexander
rented to an old woman for seventy-five cents a month.
Mrs. Alexander’s house was just outside the Columbia
city limits, in a place called Happy Hollow. Our houses were
not numbered, and we picked up our regular mail at the post
office general delivery window. Since all the local residents
knew one another, important messages like telegrams and
special delivery letters, which were brought by the letter
carrier, always reached the proper destination, even without
house numbers.
Two Women Who Change Grandpa’s Life,
Phoebe Armstrong and Mary Williams
Mrs. Williams was a widow, and she had two daughters.
They lived in a corner house, not very far from the heart of
town in Columbia. I recall it as a large, frame house supported
on pillars, with a restaurant, run by Mrs. Williams, on the
ground floor.
Mrs. Williams’s restaurant business thrived and she was
able to buy more property next door to the largest Negro
church in Columbia. She built a new frame building on the
property and moved her restaurant out of her home and into it.
The older of Mrs. Williams’s two daughters was named
Mary. A rumor started that Grandpa, now a 55-year-old
widower, was overly friendly with her. I do not doubt that
Grandpa was attracted to Mary, but it would have been totally
out of character for him to have what nowadays we would call
“an affair.”
Mrs. Phoebe Armstrong, who had been my very first
schoolteacher, turned out to be a gossipmonger. I do not know
what her motives were, but she was the disseminator of the
scandalous gossip about Grandpa and Mary Williams that
culminated in his departure from the pulpit at Mt. Tabor and
his retirement from the active ministry.
Grandpa’s Ups and Downs in Business
Heaven only knows how they managed it, but Grandpa
and a Mr. Simmons, inspired perhaps by Mrs. Williams’s
success, got together enough capital to open a small caférestaurant together. They served good, simple meals and had a
soda fountain, as well as a counter with candies, stationery
and notions. Their rented location on Main Street was in the
Colored Oddfellows Building, which marked the division of
the city into white and colored areas.
The Simmons and Lawrence Restaurant was in a
neighborhood nicknamed “Mink Slide.” I am told that dealers
in “moonshine” liquor used to do business there, and that
when they heard revenuers were about they would slide down
a pole “like a mink or a fireman” to make a getaway. A
colorful but not too credible story.
One of my most vivid memories of Grandpa’s café
concerns the night that Booker T. Washington came to
Columbia to give a lecture at the (whites only) Opera House.
A banquet was held for him in our restaurant. After the
banquet Washington gave a talk to a colored audience in the
Oddfellows Hall before going to the Opera House to address a
white audience. I learned years later how skillful a lecturer
Booker T. Washington was, so I am sure he was able to arouse
support from both audiences for his school in Tuskegee,
Alabama. My uncles Herman and Charles both graduated
from Tuskegee Institute.
Uncle Herman studied masonry at Tuskegee Institute, but
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he could not find work in his trade when he returned to
Columbia and he had to take a job driving a grocery wagon.
One day he announced to Grandpa that he was leaving home
to try his luck in Chicago. An even greater blow than Uncle
Herman’s leaving home came when Mr. Simmons, Grandpa’s
business partner in the restaurant, also decided to travel north.
Grandpa could not make a go of the restaurant alone, and
eventually it closed.
Uncle Herman got a job in Chicago, not as a mason but in
the post office. He is retired from that service now (1972) and
lives in Pasadena, California.
Grandpa’s Jobs
After his restaurant went out of business, Grandpa held
several jobs at once. He cleaned offices at the Phoenix
National Bank, took care of a lawyer’s vegetable garden on a
sharecropping basis, and worked in a local canning factory. In
the summer he prepared tomatoes for canning, and in the fall
it was sweet potatoes. At the end of the work day I picked up
Grandpa at the cannery, riding on our horse Harry, and we
would return home riding double on Harry. After dinner it was
my chore to go and clean the offices for Grandpa.
The “Colored” County Fair
The white people had a county fair in Columbia every
year, and when it ended some of the concessions and
decorations remained for the “colored” fair, which followed. I
recall that one of the attractions for us was a couple of
automobiles in which we could take a ride around the
racetrack for ten cents.
Train Wreck Sales
Train wrecks, which fortunately damaged freight much
more often than they hurt people, were not infrequent in our
part of the state. Mr. Wolf, proprietor of Wolf s Bargain Store,
had a “train wreck sale” every year, featuring wreck-damaged
goods at very low prices to attract customers into his store.
Some years he did not have enough wreck-damaged goods, so
Mr. Wolf would damage some of his stock himself, to produce
“train wreck” sale items. Some of us youngsters earned
money distributing his handbills for the sale, but he usually
gave us more handbills than there were people in Columbia
and we had to dispose of the extras discretely.
Chain Gangs
The sight of chain gangs working was a familiar one. The
gangs were segregated, white and black, and they mainly
worked on the roads, breaking and tailoring rocks. The
prisoners rode in a truck to their worksites, and the familiar
heavy iron ball was attached after they arrived.
My Cousin is Killed, A Victim of Racism
Serious racial conflict did not occur often in Chattanooga
or Columbia. But there was one serious race riot in Columbia
during which a first cousin of mine, along with two other
black youths, was apprehended and put in jail. All three were
in the same cell, unarmed and locked up, when a cop came by
82
and shot them dead, in cold blood, like animals trapped in a
cage. This cousin was my Aunt Grace’s first child.
‘Possum and Sweet Potatoes
One opossum in the chicken house could kill three of our
birds during the night. Sometimes we could tell when an
opossum was prowling or killing, because the chickens made
enough noise to awaken us. When this happened. Grandpa
would get out his hunting rifle, and the visiting predator
would usually become a delicious dinner of ‘possum and
sweet potatoes.
A Puzzling Letter from Miss Mary to Grandpa
Eventually even we children became aware that Grandpa
was courting Miss Mary, and we resented it because of our
strong attachment to Grandma’s memory. Maybe others in the
family resented it as well. I just could not imagine Grandpa
being married to someone other than Grandma!
One day one of us children came across a letter to
Grandpa from Miss Mary. I do not know how it happened to
come into our hands, but it did, and we read it with Mrs.
Alexander. It began: “My dear husband...” We didn’t know
how to understand that salutation.
About My Name
I grew up as J. Lawrence Cook. My grandparents
explained to me that my father wanted me to be named Jacob
Lincoln Cook, Jr., but that my mother did not much care for
the names Jacob or Lincoln. My father suggested that as a
compromise I just be given the initials “J. L.” temporarily.
Papa always signed his own name “J. L. Cook” unless he was
required to write it out in full, so I suspect he thought that
some time in the future I would replace my “J. L.” with his
names. After my parents died, some family members called
me “Lawrence,” and others called me “Jake.” I was told that
my mother had a liking for “Jean”, the French equivalent of
“John”, but that she hesitated to give her son a name that was
considered feminine in her society.
I have always signed my name “J. Lawrence Cook”, but
when I registered for the draft during World War I had to
provide a first name. Well, then and there I decided that since
my mother liked “Jean”, that would be my official name in the
Draft Board’s records. My Uncle Herman, who is still living
(1972), is the only person who calls me “Jake”.
Photo Credits: Dr. Jean L. Cook, Prof. Alan Wallace
FOOTNOTES:
[Acronyms used in this series]
TCHS - Tennessee County History Series
UPD58 - United Presbyterian Directory 1958
EUJLC - Eulogy for Jacob Lincoln Cook
WWPM - Who’s Who in Presbyterian Missions
HFUPC - History of First United Presbyterian Church, Athens, TN
HJLCS - History of J. L. Cook High School, Athens, TN
BIGSLL - Balm in Gilead by Sara Lawrence Lightfoot
HHLORIG - Herman H. Lawrence, “Origins of the Lawrence
Family”
PCUSADH - Presbyterian Church USA Department of History
1. Date obtained from United States Census 1900
2. After the Occupation of Tennessee by the Federal armies in 1862,
Andrew Johnson was appointed military governor by President
Lincoln, and he was confirmed on 3 March 1862. On 22
September 1862 (after the Confederacy’s crushing defeat at
Antietam, Maryland) a preliminary proclamation declared that all
slaves in any part of the Confederacy in rebellion against the
United States on 1 January 1863, should be forever free. This
proclamation did not apply to the four Border States (Delaware,
Maryland, Kentucky and Missouri) or to those parts of the
Confederacy under the control of the Federal armies. On 1
January 1863 Lincoln issued a second proclamation that
confirmed the first and announced that the former slaves would be
received into the armed forces of the United States. As President,
Lincoln could issue no declaration of freedom; as commander-in
chief of the armies and navies of the United States he could issue
directives only as to the territory within his lines; but the
Emancipation Proclamation applied only to territory outside of his
lines. Therefore it did not apply to George and Amelia Cook.
On 22 February 1865 (before Lee’s surrender on 9 April
1865) slaves were freed by an amendment to the state
constitution, ratified on that date by a vote of the people. It was
then that the bondage of George and Amelia ended. Since their
only child was not born until 5 years later, they may have been
married after 22 February 1865 as free persons.
On 25 February 1865 Negroes were given suffrage, a
privilege they were actually not permitted to exercise.
On 24 July 1866 Tennessee became the first Confederate
state to be readmitted to the Union, after ratifying the constitution
of the United States with amendments, declaring the ordinance of
Secession void.
3. EUJLC states: “Rev. J. L. Cook’s mother died when he was only
eight years old.” Note that no mention is made of his father.
TCHS states (p.87): “Cook’s parents had been slaves of one
of the earliest settlers, Judge J. B. Cooke, but died when Jake was
a young child.”
In TCHS we find “…Uncle Nelse (sic) and Aunt Huldy
Gettys who had been slaves for the Getty family.”
In EUJC we read that “…an old gentleman by the name of
Uncle Nelson (sic) Gettys…took him into his home and cared for
him”
There is a story I remember my father telling when I was a
child about his “grandfather” who bought himself and his wife out
of slavery. The following story appears in TCHS: “When James
Gettys fell on hard times he was forced to sell Nelse (sic). He was
purchased by the Reverend Edwin Attlee who did not believe in
slavery, but was a friend of Gettys. Attlee immediately arranged a
job going through the area buying poultry and eggs so that Nelse
could buy his freedom ...” We also read in TCHS that “...although
the Civil War came before the debt was paid in frill, Nelse stayed
with Atlee until it was paid in full. He later, with his wife, was
responsible for taking in and raising the orphan boy, IL L. (Jake)
Cook.”
4. In the 1880 Census of the City of Athens, McMinn County,
Tennessee, a John Parkinson is enumerated. He was a white male
physician, age 38. His wife was named Fanny and there were two
children, Annie and James. In the 1900 Census of Athens, John
Parkinson is again enumerated; a white, widower, physician with
a daughter named Annie. One wonders what happened to the son.
5. Presbyterian colleges established for the education of freedmen in
Tennessee included Knoxville College at Knoxville, Bethel
College at McKenzie, King College at Bristol and Maryville
College at Maryville.
PCUSADH provides this information: “The United
Presbyterian Church North America’s work with freedmen began
full-force immediately after the Civil War. In 1865 the
Committees on Education and Freedmen Missions called on the
General Assembly to establish more schools for freedmen,
particularly with the intent of training African-Americans to teach
and proselytize themselves. This led to the establishment of
Knoxville College, their flagship school. The teachers produced
by Knoxville were utilized in the establishment of other mission
schools in the South. In September of 1889, Athens Academy was
begun with two teachers, Henrietta Mason and Mary Byars, both
graduates of the Knoxville program.”
UPD58 gives the following educational and career summary
for Jacob Lincoln Cook; “Knoxville College 1888; Allegheny
Seminary; licensed by Allegheny Presbytery, 9 April 1890;
ordained by Tennessee Presbytery 31 March 1893; principal
Academy and pastor Athens, Tennessee 1893-1900; stated supply
and president Normal and Industrial Institute, Henderson NC,
1900-1903; died 6 July 1903.”
6. PCUSADH informs: “Allegheny Theological Seminary of the
United Presbyterian Church was originally established by the
Associate Reformed Presbyterian Church. In 1824 a committee
was appointed to plan for the establishment of a seminary.
Pittsburgh was designated as the location and the Rev. Dr. Joseph
Kerr was selected as the first professor. The first students only
attended four months a year while the rest of their studies were
conducted under their presbyteries. When, in 1831, the Rev. Dr.
John Pressley was selected as the new professor, the school was
moved to Allegheny City. In 1843 the faculty was increased to the
size of three and the school’s first buildings were constructed in
1851.
The Associate and Associate Reformed Presbyterian
Churches reunited in 1859 to form the United Presbyterian
Church of North America (UPCNA) and thus control of the
seminary passed to the new church body. The seminary continued
to prosper until the turn of the century when state-supported
schools and private institutions began to put pressure on
denominational institutions. The minutes of the General
Assembly from 1900 to 1912 show that enrollment steadily
declined and leaders in the denomination grew increasingly
concerned. In 1912 or 1913 the seminary changed its name to
Pittsburgh Theological Seminary. In 1930 Pittsburgh and Xenia
Theological Seminaries were joined and named, quite creatively,
the Pittsburgh-Xenia Theological Seminary. This joint institution
would continue until the UPCNA and Presbyterian Church USA
merged in 1958, and Pittsburgh-Xenia Seminary was joined with
Western Theological Seminary to create Pittsburgh Theological
Seminary.”
7. EUJLC states “…He established the U. P. Mission in Athens in
1889. The old dance hall where the U. P. Church now stands was
used for a place of worship. ...”
8. Names from EUJC. Also from EUJLC “…he succeeded in getting
a three-room school building on the site now occupied by J. L.
Cook High School ... soon after, a new site was purchased, the old
Henderson place on which was an old building of about six
rooms. A little later on a new and more modern building of two
83
stories was erected. ...”
HFUPC records “...The Athens Academy, a United
Presbyterian Mission School for black students was erected on a
lot on the corner of North Jackson and Green Street, where now
stands the home of the family of the late Rev. C. H. Wilson. ...”
Rev. C. H. Wilson served 50 years as pastor of the First United
Presbyterian Church (USA), Athens, TN.
PCUSADH informs that “... in September of 1889, Athens
Academy was begun with two teachers, Henrietta Mason and
Mary Byars, both graduates of the Knoxville College program. In
its first year enrollment reached 132 and average attendance was
65. In 1896 the enrollment at Athens was 199 students, with 156
students typically attending. Soon after the school was founded,
the Rev. J. L. Cook took a leading role in the establishment of a
Sabbath School. It was expected that he would return upon the
completion of his seminary studies and help organize a church.
The second year, enrollment reached 141, with an average atten
dance of 106 in its first month. They hired an additional teacher
and added an additional room to their facilities. Cook then
assumed full-time mission work, visiting house to house. They
also moved their Sabbath School to a larger building and its size
quickly reached 75 students. By 1891 Cook was teaching two or
three classes a day, overseeing the operations of the school and
trying to organize a congregation.”
HFUPC: “The First United Presbyterian Church of Athens,
Tennessee was organized in 1889 in an old dance hall building on
the corner of North White Street and an alley, now known as Roy
Street. The present church building and manse were erected in
1892 on this property under the ministry of J. L. Cook, a native of
Athens. The manse was torn down in 1983.
The Reverend J. L. Cook, a forceful and eloquent speaker,
attracted many of the young people from the other churches, and
many of them joined, forming the first congregation. Nearby
Grant University (now Tennessee Wesleyan College) was very
friendly toward the Rev. Cook and his work; therefore his efforts
were rewarded rapidly. Rev. John Arter served as pastor of the
First United Presbyterian Church and as principal of the Athens
Academy from 1900 through 1905. The Rev. D. F. White served
from 1905 through 1908, and in 1908 the Rev. John Brice came to
the church as pastor and principal. At the same time, Rev. C. H.
Wilson came to Athens as the Rev. Brice’s assistant. In 1911,
when the Rev. Brice was called to a church in Indianapolis, the
Rev. Wilson became pastor of the church and principal of the
Athens Academy.
The Athens Academy burned in 1925, and classes were held
in the Presbyterian Church until the city and county took
responsibility for the education of the black community and built
a school for black students. Shortly after, the school was named J.
L. Cook School. Professor Nash, who was a teacher at the
Academy and an elder of the First United Presbyterian Church,
became the first principal of the J. L. Cook School. In 1953, when
Mr. Nash retired, Professor E. Harper Johnson, a member and
elder of the First United Presbyterian Church became the second
principal of J. L. Cook School until it closed in 1966”.
PCUSADH: “…Soon after the school (Athens Academy)
was founded, J. L. Cook took a leading role in the establishment
of a Sabbath School. It was expected that he would return upon
the completion of his seminary studies and help organize a
church. The General Assembly noted that this was the first
attempt by an ordained ‘colored’ man to organize a UPCNA
church.”
9. WWPM lists only two positions held with the Mission Board:
Principal, Bristol School, Athens, TN 1893-1900; President,
Normal and Industrial School, Henderson, NC 1900-1903. There
is no mention of Bristol School in any other documents.
84
Henderson, NC is in northeast NC, near the Virginia border.
10.HJLCHS: “... The City of Athens, and McMinn County met in a
joint meeting to discuss plans for building a school for Blacks.
After the building was completed, it was voted upon unanimously
to name the school after Rev. J. L. Cook. J. L. Cook School
opened December 10, 1926 under the principalship of Professor
W. E. Nash who was assistant principal of the Athens Academy.
Under his leadership the school advanced from 9th grade to a full
four year accredited high school. Within three years the
enrollment increased from 150 to 350 students. He made
education possible for children throughout the Southeast by
providing boarding facilities for boys and girls in two dormitories.
He instituted the first bus program in the county. The Cook
School’s Athletic Program was recognized throughout the state.
The school Glee Club and Band were started under his leadership.
The faculty members were of high caliber and instilled in their
students the right quality of education. The Elementary
Department was operated by the city and the High School
Department was operated by the county. The W. E. Nash
Scholarship was established to help worthwhile students attend
college. The first building consisted of ten rooms and an
auditorium. Professor W. E. Nash retired in 1953, after serving as
principal for 27 years. ...”
11.“Across from the Tennessee Wesleyan Campus” is from TCHS.
In 1999 the address of the First United Presbyterian Church of
Athens, TN is listed (Internet) as 321 N. Jackson Street, Athens,
TN 37303-3617. EUJC contains the statement “...Uncle Nelson
Gettys, who owned the property on which the church and
parsonage now stands (sic)…”
12.BIGSLL (p. 121) Quotes Charles Lawrence II - “Apparently it
was common knowledge that Job was the son of a master named
Wallace.... When Wallace, my great-grandfather, lost everything
he had in gambling, He sold my grandfather Job and his mother to
his brother. He gave Job a silver dollar, and earned his undying
enmity.” BIGSLL continues: “The jaw of Charles II tightens as he
speaks these bitter words. After the Civil War, Job found a job
working as a houseboy for a man named Lawrence who was a
paint entrepreneur. The Lawrence family ‘was very good to him,’
and he decided to take their name as his own.”
However, in HHLORIG we find: “A slave, Miranda, bore a
boy child for her master, John Lawrence, on a plantation in
Tennessee. Job Childs Lawrence was his name according to the
Family Bible. The date of his birth, November 21, 1852.”
13.The report of the Henderson Institute to the Board of Freedmen’s
Missions for the year 1903 noted the death of Anna B. Cook, wife
of the Rev. J. L. Cook on 9 February 1903, “leaving a babe only a
few hours old.” Jacob Lincoln Cook is enumerated in the 1900
census, and on 1 June of that year he lived in Athens, Tennessee,
in a house he owned mortgage-free, with a family consisting of
wife Zella and children Amelia and Lawrence. The census notes
that J. L. Cook was born in May 1870, and that Zella had been
married for two years. J. Lawrence Cook’s tape states (with a tone
of uncertainty) that Zella was buried (and presumably died) in
Henderson, North Carolina. If she died in Henderson she must
have moved there with her husband some time during the four
month period between 1 June 1900 and her death on 27
September1900.
14.PCUSADH notes that the report of the Henderson Institute to the
Board of Freedmen’s Missions for the year 1903 and the General
Assembly minutes of 1903, both noted the death of Anna B.
Cook, wife of The Rev. J. L. Cook.
The General Assembly minutes of 1903 report: “We are
called upon to record the death of Mrs. Anna B. Cook...which
occurred 9 February 1903, leaving a babe only a few hours old.
Mrs. Cook was principal of the Training School Department. We
bear willing, cheerful, testimony to her noble Christian life and to
the faithfulness and unusual ability and skill with which she man
aged the department. She was one of our most efficient and
valued teachers and missionaries. Her place will be hard to fill.
Her husband, the Rev. Jacob L. Cook, has suffered a very serious
breakdown of his physical health. This was occasioned by the
great sorrow that came upon him and by overwork as the
principal of the Institute and pastor of the congregation. He has
been laid aside from all work for several weeks.”
PCUSADH also notes that “In 1904 the Board of Freed
men’s missions reported: ‘It is with profound sorrow that we
record the death of the Rev. J. L. Cook, which occurred at
Henderson, North Carolina, on the 5th day of July, 1903. Brother
Cook was graduated at Knoxville College, June, 1888; studied
theology in Allegheny Seminary; was licensed by the Allegheny
Presbytery 9th April, 1890; ordained by the Presbytery of
Tennessee 31st March 1893. He was principal of the Academy
and pastor of the congregation in Athens, Tennessee 12 April
1893-25 June 1900; stated supply and Principal of the Henderson
Normal Institute, Henderson, North Carolina, 1 August 1900-5
July 1903. The work of the Church among the freedmen has
suffered in his death a severe loss. He was most devoted to the
work, self-denying and consecrated; he labored beyond his power
that he might make known the riches of God’s grace to his own
people. He received his reward early. Many will mourn his early
departure.”
15.In the 1900 Census of the City of Athens, McMinn County,
Tennessee a Phillip Keith is enumerated. He was black, married,
age 44 (born May 1856) and his profession was “drayman.” His
wife, Hattie, was born in 1867. He had a son born in February
1882 (age 18), an unmarried drayman whose first name was
Hugh. If this is the Hugh Keith who later married “Aunt Nona”
and went to live in Chattanooga, he would have been 28 years old
at the time JLC went to live with his family there. Phillip Keith
also had a daughter, Sarah age 16, and another son, Clyde age 4.
Other Keith families are found in this census, one with a member
named Keith, whose age does not make him a candidate for
Leonora Lawrence’s husband.
APENDIX:
Missouri Ann Wallace
The following is from J. Lawrence Cook’s verbatim
(unedited) autobiography:
“My maternal grandmother was white. Her father, whom I shall
call Mr. X, the lawyer, decided to go into politics. When he first
started campaigning he learned that his sweetheart was pregnant.
When the baby was born, they decided that this situation would
create a scandal which might ruin his chances for a political career.
So they gave the baby to an Indian-type Negro woman slave whose
name was Wallace. In growing up, this child became psychologically
a Negro. She was named Missouri Ann Wallace. Mr. X married the
same sweetheart shortly after he began to achieve success with his
political efforts. I do not know if they had other children, but I do
know that they did have one daughter who also lived in Columbia,
Tennessee who exchanged visits with my grandmother. He
succeeded in reaching some of the highest elective offices obtainable
in the State.”
“When Missouri Ann grew into young womanhood she married
the Reverend Jacob Childs Lawrence on 21 December 1876. The X’s
became wealthy and in their declining years after retirement from
office, they, perhaps prompted by the feeling of guilt, drove up to the
modest Lawrence home in a fine carriage and invited Missouri Ann
to come and live with them in the luxury of their world. She declined
and I’ve been told that her answer went something like this: “I was
raised as a Negro and that’s what I am. They love me and I love
them. I’ve married a Negro and my husband and I love each other
dearly. We shall raise a family and we shall all live together as
Negroes.”
“The X’s left in great disappointment, but they offered Missouri
a large sum of money which she accepted. I suppose she reasoned
that this money would be very helpful in moving from Grandpa’s
church assignment in Maryville to Columbia. In his new assignment
to Mt. Tabor Presbyterian Church.”
The following is transcribed from Herman Holsey Lawrence’s
oral history of the Lawrence family:
“After school one day I went into a drugstore and was shown to
the store owners Will and John Lawrence, Jr., half brothers of Job, as
one of Job’s boys…(blank)…she was born September 2, 1859,
Missouri Ann. After World War 2, I learned that Missouri Ann was
an illegitimate child and that her father was a member of the famous
Taylor family of Tennessee. Robert Love Taylor, a Democrat, Alfred
Taylor, a Republican. Each was Governor of Tennessee in their
respective periods. Their election campaign(s) were known as “the
War of the Roses”, a highlight in Tennessee political history. White
Rose was Bob, Red Rose was Al. From infancy Missouri Ann lived
in the house of the second President of Maryville College, where she
lived until she was about 7 years of age and old enough to go to
school. A daughter of the college president resented the illegitimate
child, and an Indian woman, Caroline Wallace, was hired to raise this
girl. She lived in the Wallace household until she married. Caroline,
the Indian woman, lived in the Lawrence household until she died.
We children knew her as our grandmother.
“Lamar Lawrence, fourth child of Missouri Ann and Reverend
Job Lawrence, remembers that when he was about 4 years old a
carriage driven by a coachman who sat up high above the carriage
occupants arrived at our home in Knoxville, Tennessee. The carriage
contained two (women governesses?) who asked Lamar his name.
‘The one told him to call his mother. This he did. As his mother was
not near the door she did not hear him ... them talking to the boy.
Mother came to the door and was asked if she was Missouri Ann.
She replied ‘Yes ...Why do you ask?’ She was told ‘Your father has
sent for you to come to live with him in the State House in Nashville.
However, you must disown your husband and children, as none of
them will be accepted by your father.’ The women then displayed
huge sums of money. “This will pay up all obligations you may
have.” Missouri Ann’s reply was ‘When I needed a father, he was not
near me. Now I have a good, honorable husband and a family of
lovely children. I do not need my father’s help. This you may tell
him ...Good day.’ They departed and no more was ever heard from
her father.
“Missouri Ann’s mother was a Caucasian woman. We think she
was a daughter of the second President of Maryville College and
bore Missouri Ann out of wedlock, with Governor Robert Love
Taylor as father.”
“When we lived in Columbia, Tennessee, mother Missouri Ann
used to visit, upon invitation, and have tea with, Mrs. J. P. Street, a
daughter of the second President of Maryville College. Mother used
to tell of how she and Mrs. Street played on the hearth in the home of
Mrs. Street’s father, second President of Maryville College. As very
small children....Charles...as very small children.”
“Also, I remember when one of Mrs. Street’s little grandsons
was born, her little granddaughters insisted that Charles, my younger
85
brother, and I come in to see their baby brother. This we did as we
had gone with our little wagon and buckets to collect the swill from
the Streets’ kitchen to feed our hogs.”
“Missouri Ann Wallace Lawrence, a devoted wife and mother,
died July 12, 1907, leaving her husband and eight surviving children
to mourn her ...(unintelligible)... Reverend Job Childs Lawrence
continued to serve his Father God and humanity until July 11, 1919.”
1911
• 14 July, JLC’s twelfth birthday.
• JLC goes to Snow Hill instead of CPS.
• JLC enters Seventh Grade at Snow Hill.
1912
• 14 July, JLC’s thirteenth birthday.
• JLC enters Eighth Grade at Snow Hill.
1913
• 14 July, JLC’s fourteenth birthday.
• JLC enters Ninth Grade at Snow Hill.
1914
• 14 July, JLC’s fifteenth birthday.
• JLC enters Haines Institute in Tenth Grade.
1915
• 14 July, JLC’s sixteenth birthday.
• JLC enters Eleventh Grade at Haines Institute.
• JLC returns to Columbia for summer vacation.
1916
• 14 July, JLC’s seventeenth birthday.
• JLC goes to work for the summer in South Egremont,
Massachusetts.
• JLC enters Twelfth Grade at Haines Institute.
1917
•
•
•
•
1918
• 14 July, JLC’s nineteenth birthday.
• JLC meets Edith Louise Bascomb on returning to
Haines in the Fall for his second “Junior College” year
J. Lawrence Cook’s unedited tapes record:
“As a final gesture in their effort to ease their consciences, the
X’s (i.e. the Taylors) saw that grandma Wallace was buried in a
‘white’ cemetery in Maryville, Tennessee.” This statement, however
remains to be confirmed (Editor).
The following is from “Balm in Gilead” by Sara Lawrence Lightfoot
(great-granddaughter of Missouri Ann Wallace):
Page 121 - Quoting Charles Lawrence II: “The legend is that
there were two brothers who were leading politicians in Tennessee;
one of them was Missouri Ann’s father.... The president of Maryville
College had a daughter, and she had an illegitimate child out of an
affair with the promising young politician. The child was Missouri
Ann. The president’s family was deeply embarrassed by their
daughter’s promiscuous behavior and the child it produced, and the
politician worried that the public humiliation might compromise his
career. The baby was secretly given away to Grandmother Wallace
[no relation to Job’s father and master], a kindly old slave lady who
raised Missouri Ann as her own.”
“From birth, this white girl was raised ‘colored’ and was
therefore honored and pleased to marry Job, the handsome,
industrious ‘coed’ [so-called because he was a black student in
Maryville College, which ‘co-educated’ black and white students]
who proposed to her. Many years later, when Job and Missouri Ann
already had several children, a fancy horse-drawn carriage drew up
to their front door. ‘The carriage belonged to the governor, who
wanted his daughter, Missouri Ann, to come and live with him.’ The
young politician, who had fathered the illegitimate child, had realized
his ambition to become governor of Tennessee. When he descended
the steps of the gilded carriage and offered his daughter the chance to
‘come home,’ Missouri Ann looked at him in horror and her children
grew quiet and still as stones. She hid her bitterness behind a simple
response. She was home. She knew of no other home. These people
were her family. ‘She said she was happily married and she would
not go.’ Missouri Ann walked into her house with her back to the
governor’s carriage as it drove away.”
6 April, United States enters World War I.
14 July, JLC’s eighteenth birthday.
JLC works in Chicago and registers for the draft.
JLC attempts to enter SATC (Student Army Training
Corps) at Fisk University without success.
• JLC enters first “Junior College” year at Haines
Institute.
The following is from TCHS:
“The Taylor story is one of the most famous in Tennessee
history. Robert Love Taylor (note above that Herman Holsey
Lawrence names Robert as the father of Missouri Ann) and Alfred A.
Taylor became governors of the state. Bob was a Democrat and Alf a
Republican. Since they were ‘roses from the same garden,’ their
campaign came to be known, with reference to the old feud between
the houses of York and Lancaster, as ‘The War of the Roses.’ The
men’s humor, skilled oratory, and musical ability turned out
campaign crowds numbering in the tens of thousands. Bob’s
campaign song was ‘Dixie’ and Alf’s ‘Yankee Doodle.’ Bob won by
a narrow majority, eventually served three terms, and went on to be a
senator and a representative. Alf then served one term as governor
and three as congressman. Before their deaths, they toured the nation
appearing before large audiences as ‘Yankee Doodle and Dixie’.”
86
“That’s Athens, Tennessee!”
C
anning Music for the Mechanical Piano
BY L. E. CROZIER
FROM THE POPULAR MECHANICS, MARCH 1911
SENT IN BY GARY LACHER
mechanical piano, must have as thorough a knowledge of
harmony and composition as the original composer, if he is to
give anything like a just interpretation of the latter to his
audience. He must also thoroughly understand the needs of
his instrument, for he is its soul. Preferably, also, he must be
master of several other instruments, for often he does his
arranging not from the piano-forte, but from the orchestral
score. The work offers to a competent musician with a
mechanical turn the same opportunity as the editorial
department of a musical publishing house.
Musician Arranging Music from the Orchestral Score,
Using an Arranging Machine
The music roll used in mechanical pianos is a familiar
object to most persons, but its manufacture involves far more
than a simple translation of a music score into perforations in
a piece of paper, as on first thought might appear to be all that
is required. Except in the case of certain classics, the music of
which is full enough without any doctoring, a piece to be
played on a mechanical piano must be edited and
elaborated by an expert, for otherwise it would sound pitifully
thin and tinny when played by an unthinking and unfeeling
piece of mechanism.
Seated at an arranging machine with a keyboard like a
piano, the musician applies by a touch of his foot to a treadle,
the power of an electric motor. This sets in motion a drum at
the back which revolves with clicks like a stock ticker, but
carries an 8-in. paper in place of the ribbon.
He plays the music just as he would on an ordinary piano,
only more slowly, choosing his notes, and inserting others as
he goes. If he wishes to record a half-note, for instance, he
presses his finger on the key and counts eight clicks. There is
no other sound, but on the paper appears a vertical row of
eight perforations.
This narrow “master,” as the paper roll is called, is then
run over the tracker-board of a machine which also responds
with punches instead of notes. It perforates two rolls, one a
heavy paper, used for reproduction, and the other a thin test
roll. The latter is tried on the piano and corrected by the
musician.
There are many varieties of mechanical piano players. In
a typical kind there is a tracker-board containing longitudinal
slots under each of which is a pneumatic tube leading to and
From this the heavy master, too thick for the
controlling the action of a lever or “finger” which terminates
tracker-board
of the piano, is corrected by hand. Its extra
in a leather-covered hammer for operating one of the keys of
perforations
are
pasted over, and missing ones inserted with a
the piano. The music roll contains perforations corresponding
mallet
and
punch.
It is then run through a machine which
to the notes to be played, and when one of these perforations
changes
the
round
perforations
of the master to slits where
comes opposite one of the slots
necessary,
at
the
same
time
reproducing
the corrected master
or holes in the tracker-board, a
upon
ten
other
strips
of
paper.
Each
of
these
strips unwinds
free passage is made for a draft
from
its
own
large
roll,
and
rewinds,
its
perforations
complete,
of air which operates the finger,
and thus the note is played.
The air draft is created by the
action of the performer’s feet
on a pair of bellows, or by an
electric motor. The note is held
until the perforation is passed,
the length of time depending on The Machine Which
the size and shape of the hole. Changes the Punches
The Machine Which Changes
the 88-Note to the
65-Note Master
It can be readily seen that
the man to whom is entrusted
the editing of the music for the
of the Master Roll to
Slits, at the Same
Time Punching and
Winding Up Ten
Other Rolls
87
The Marking Table, Where
Expression Lines and Printed
Directions are Put on
The Machine Which Uses the
Narrow master of the Arranging
machine to Produce a Wide
Heavy master for Reproduction,
and a Thin Test Roll
upon the familiar black spool which is inserted in the piano.
There is also a machine which changes the 88-note master
which has previously been edited by hand by the musician, to
a 65-note master. This is then reproduced by a machine which
perforates and rewinds ten rolls at once.
All the rolls then go to the marking table where they are
spread out two at a time and the dotted expression lines put on
by a semi-automatic marking machine. Words in regard to
expression are printed by hand by means of rubber stamps.
The guide for this marking is a perforated roll,
marked by hand by the musician. The rolls are
then rewound by means of a hand reel, and
carried to the inspection tables, where they are checked over
for blemishes. They are then spooled, labeled, tested and
boxed, and stored on shelves (called “bins”) to await
shipment.
Perforated music is not a special invention for the
mechanical piano, however. It has for many years been used
by the humble hand-organ, and the early patents are all held
by Italians. By recent legislation the composer whose music
is adopted for the mechanical piano is entitled to royalty.
From Player Piano Group
BULLETIN 157, DECEMBER 2000
EARLY WEBER PIANOLA
Reg Richings has provided photographs of this very early
American Weber Themodist Pianola. This is one of the very
earliest internal players, perhaps from 1905 or 1906, and it
provides an interesting challenge - where are the controls?
The key slip is fixed, and the photo shows all you see on
opening the usual parts.
The hint is the two small catches on the underside of the
fall. When these are lifted, the rear of the fall is revealed to be
a thin flap that drops down and sits on top of the keys, revealing the controls. It turns out that this is simply a 65-note
Pianola pushup works installed above the keys of this huge
piano!
This instrument is an interesting stage in the evolution of
the familiar form of the player piano. An alternative means of
installing these large 65-note stacks was to fit them underneath the keybed. These early instruments are very interesting
and worthwhile restoration prospects. The 65-note scale puts
off many potential owners. In this case, the instrument has
88
been fitted with an 88-note tracker bar at some point in its history. The musical loss of playing 88-note rolls on a 65-note
instrument is surprisingly low.
Julian Dyer
From Player Piano Group
BULLETIN 155, JULY 2000
THE PIANOLYZER
MESSRS. BECHWAY AND STEINETEIN Beg to call the attention of the public to the most astonishing invention of the age.
wire, so that I could start it whenever I wished. It works
admirably!
THE PIANOLYZER will supersede, and, if necessary,
annihilate, every other piano-player, human or inhuman.
75, Armony Avenue, N.
The Pianolyzer plays Bach, Handel, Beethoven,
Mendelssohn, Wagner, Moszkowski, Elgar and Tschiakowski
ALL AT ONCE!
thereby effecting considerable economy in time.
therefore specially adapted for busy men.
It is
People who don’t like music will find the invention a
great boon, as they will be able to get it all over at once.
A Child can start it,
But NOTHING will STOP it
till it has run down.
A pint of petrol will keep it going all night.
The Pianolyzer can be made to go THREE WEEKS
without stopping by a patent device which will be appreciated
by persons about to go to the seaside. It will keep burglars out
while the family is away from home, and will also give the
owners the pleasant assurance that they will not be forgotten
by their neighbours during their absence.
The Pianolyzer can be fitted with double-barrelled gramophone, so as to sing a large number of vocal duets, as well as
solos, to its own accompaniment. Will also give recitations
and make political speeches, etc. Never till now has it been
possible to possess a machine that will play, sing, talk and
recite without stopping, and without the necessity of any
attention being paid to it.
The Pianolyzer may be obtained fitted with patent Alarum
Attachment, so as to start at any desired hour in the morning.
It will effectually wake the household, and render it impossible for them to go to sleep again.
Please send man at once to rectify Pianolyzer. The last
three nights it has started of its own accord a half-past one and
played for two hours in spite of all my efforts to stop it. Last
evening before going to bed I moved it away from the piano,
but at 1:30 it walked across the room to the keyboard and
started off as before. Cannot stand it any longer.
A HEAD MASTER writes: Gentlemen, I have used your
Pianolyzer with excellent results. A boy who had repeatedly
failed in his Latin Grammar was strapped to a form, face
downwards, and pianolyzed for ten minutes. He has been a
different boy ever since.
A FARMER writes: Being shorthanded during the hay-harvest, I had your 3 horsepower Pianolyzer brought into the
field and set to work. It acted splendidly and made hay of
everything.
PATERFAMILIAS writes: I cannot find words to express
my gratitude to you for your admirable invention. Having
four boys home for the holidays, and being at my wits’ end to
know what to do with them, I hit on the idea of buying two of
your Pianolyzers. These were taken into the harness-room,
and, as I quite expected, the boys set the two machines to fight
each other. I have now no difficulty in finding suitable
amusement for them on wet afternoons.
N.B. - Every Pianolyzer is fitted with three-speed gear,
powerful Bowden brake, steam-gauge, and reversing-lever
(enabling compositions to be played backwards, thus doubling
the repertoire at a stroke). Tested up to 500 lbs. Pressure.
A Handsome Pair of Ear-Blinkers, together with 1/2 lb.
of Sterilised Wadding, given away with every Pianolyzer.
The Pianolyzer may be put to no end of different uses, as
the following testimonials will show.
PADEREWSKI writes: Gentlemen, The Pianolyzer
made my hair stand on end!
BUSONI writes: . . . An astonishing invention. It actually played through the whole of BEETHOVEN’s “Eroica”
symphony in seven and a half minutes; and though I put the
brake on hard it was impossible to check its speed. It has certainly established a record that will take a lot of beating.
The following letters speak for themselves:
71, Armony Avenue, N.
Gentlemen - The Pianolyzer you supplied has given me
great enjoyment. I bought it as a present for a friend of mine
at No. 75, and had it connected with my house by a concealed
Don’t please don’t, miss this chance!!
(August 1, 1906, From Punch Magazine. Contributed by
Kevin McElhone)
89
Q
RS, Manufacturers of Welte-Mignon
Licensee Rolls 1933-1945
QRS has long been associated with the manufacture of 88
note rolls and Recordo rolls but most people don’t realize that
QRS was also involved with Welte-Mignon Licensee rolls.
The earliest Licensee rolls were produced by M. Welte &
Sons, Inc. and are commonly referred to as Poughkeepsie rolls
since the city of manufacture appears on the label. The
DeLuxe Reproducing Roll Corporation began around 1920 to
produce their own Welte-Mignon Licensee rolls. The DeLuxe
rolls were produced both from previous M. Welte & Sons
masters and DeLuxe’s own new recordings. This continued
throughout the 1920’s. By 1930 the market was in
serious trouble. Auto
Pneumatic Action
Co., the owner and
producer of DeLuxe
Reproducing rolls and
We l t e - M i g n o n
Licensee
player
actions, was all but
closed. The recording
division was shut
down and production of new Licensee rolls was contracted out
to Aeolian. These late rolls were all popular dance rolls with
no additional classical recordings produced for Licensee.
Aeolian continued issuing Licensee popular rolls until the last
bulletin of May 1932. Aeolian also overstamped the DeLuxe
Reproducing Roll Corp. label with black ink to obscure the
information. Then the production of new titles ceased.
In October 1932, an agreement was reached with Max
Kortlander and a contract signed whereby QRS would be the
consignor of Welte-Mignon Licensee rolls. A large portion of
the existing stock of rolls was transported to QRS for resale
with QRS receiving a portion of sales price under the
contract. QRS also agreed to terms for producing new rolls
and including information in monthly bulletins. However, no
new titles were produced by QRS. The April 1939 bulletin in
the author’s collection and reproduced here illustrates how the
bulletins bore the information that QRS manufactured WelteMignon Licensee rolls. Inside the bulletin there is no further
mention of Licensee rolls. It appears that customers who
wanted Licensee rolls would contact QRS directly for
additional information. Thanks to Mark Zahm who made this
bulletin available.
Bob Berkman, the unofficial archivist of QRS, kindly
assisted in this research by scouring the QRS archives and
examining the many bulletins within their collection. It was
determined that the earliest QRS bulletin in their collection
bearing the Welte-Mignon Licensee is June 1933. Since the
contract with Max Kortlander was signed in October 1932, it
would most likely have already been too late for inclusion in
any Christmas 1932 literature. Spring 1933 would almost
certainly have been the soonest it would have been possible
90
BY MARK REINHART
and June 1933 seems to be right on schedule.
The last bulletin to bear any reference to Welte-Mignon
Licensee rolls was the October-November 1945 QRS bulletin.
Virtually every bulletin from 1933 to 1945 was labeled
“Manufacturers of Welte-Mignon Licensee rolls.” QRS was
in business for a longer period than any previous single maker
of Licensee rolls to that date. Ken Caswell relays the story
that Max Kortlander told him that the Welte masters were
burned in the 1940’s when they were perceived to have no
commercial value.
In 1937, Janssen Piano Co. offered a small player piano
at the National Association of Music Merchants annual
convention. The price list noted that for an additional $250 a
Welte-Mignon action was installed. Apparently the sales were
nil. I have yet to learn of a single example of this late WelteMignon player. What a difference it would have made if there
had been reasonable sales to stimulate the further production
of Licensee rolls by QRS.
At the time that QRS was contracted to become the
consignor of Welte-Licensee rolls, there was still a very large
quantity of existing Licensee stock. It is unknown how many
Licensee rolls were recut by QRS.* No new titles were ever
produced. The examples included in the pictures here are
C-2556 Thais in which the QRS end tab and Tempo stamp are
clearly visible and the test roll. The test roll also illustrates
that QRS produced their own word stencil for instructions.
The stencils used by the previous manufacturers are
completely different.
Aram and Rose Giragosian bought Welte-Mignon
Licensee rolls from QRS in the early 1950’s. There were
many times when Rose would drive from their home in
Arlington, Virginia to the Bronx in New York to pick up
another large quantity of Welte-Licensee rolls. The rolls they
bought were used, purple seal, Poughkeepsie and DeLuxe
rolls. Herman Kortlander, the brother of Max, seems to have
been in charge of the sales of other non-88 note rolls. It is
unknown from where these rolls originated. During one of the
visits to New York, Aram was given sheets of uncut blank
labels for Welte-Mignon Licensee rolls. One of the sheets is
shown here. Among the hundreds of Licensee rolls owned by
the Giragosians, only a handful were from the QRS period
with the tempo stamp and end tab. The two rolls illustrated
here are from Rose and Aram Giragosian.
* Editor’s Note: For more detail, see Chapter 35 in part V of
The Historical Overview in Charles Davis Smith and Richard James
Howe’s “The Welte-Mignon: It’s Music and Musicians,” published
in 1994 by the Vestal Press for AMICA.
91
T
-100 Welte-Mignon - The Actual Cost of Ownership
BY MARK REINHART
How often have we speculated what a particular piano might cost in today’s dollars? When a period price list is seen, a rough
approximation of cost in modern times may be considered - - but what is the actual cost? Many have written that, when new, the
T-100 Welte-Mignon red-paper pianos were very expensive and consequently were only available to the most wealthy patrons, but
how expensive in terms of today’s (ca. 2000) dollar? There are published pictures of the Welte-Mignon in home settings that are very
extravagant; perhaps they’re indicative of the degree of wealth necessary to enjoy one of these incredible instruments when they were
new.
Dick Howe wrote a comprehensive article for the Winter, 1991 MBSI Bulletin for converting original prices into current US
dollars. I spoke to Dick recently and he supplied me with the multipliers to determine the conversion of earlier US prices to the year
2000. As the Welte-Mignon approaches the centennial of its invention, let’s examine what a buyer in the USA could have paid when
the piano and rolls were new and what that would represent in terms of today’s dollar.
The earliest listing of the “Mignon” I have found is from a 1907 program. The only model listed was the Welte-Mignon in a
cabinet piano, the first model offered in the USA. The cost in 1907 was $1,500. Using the Hourly Wage Index, that same piano
would cost $117,331 in the year 2000! This is certainly not a purchase for your average consumer.
The buyer of this fine piano also needed music rolls to play. The earliest US catalog I have seen is the 1908 List of Music for
Welte-Mignon. This catalog, a year later than the program, gives a close approximation of the cost of T-100 red Welte rolls for our
1907 buyer. The following list cites performances by some of the most celebrated pianists of the day. Included on the list are a few
works requiring more than one roll to complete the opus. The highest price of any roll in the 1908 catalog was $15 and the lowest
$2. I have converted the 1908 prices to equivalent 2000 prices using the Hourly Wage Index.
1908
2000
US $
US $
Adelaide Beethoven-Liszt
$12.00
$922.00
#361
Fantasie C major, Op. 17 part 1 R. Schumann
$14.00
$1157.00
#362
$8.50
$703.00
#372
Sonata Waldstein Beethoven pt. 1
$8.50
$703.00
#373
Sonata Waldstein Beethoven pt.2
$15.00
$1240.00
Busoni
#443
Carreño
Paderewski
#1246
Sonata Moonlight mvmts. 1 & 2 Beethoven
$14.00
$1157.00
#1247
Sonata Moonlight mvmt. 3 Beethoven
$10.50
$868.00
$15.00
$1240.00
$2.00
$165.00
Emil von Sauer
#876
Don Juan Fantasie Liszt
#881
Etude Op. 25, No. 9 Staccato Chopin
The last US catalog for T-100 red-paper Welte-Mignon rolls was published in 1920 by the Welte-Mignon Corporation.
Comparing again the prices for the same music rolls, we see both a decline in the retail prices from 1908 and a concurrent decline in
the value of the dollar. The dollar decline can be attributed, at least partially, to the effects of inflation and the economic fallout from
World War I.
92
This decline in the value of the dollar cannot be ignored and is evident when one compares the two closest 1908 and 1920 dollar
values to their 2000 counterparts. (The 1920 dollar value comes from the next price list below.)
1908
2000
US $
US $
$8.50
$703.00
1920
US $
$7.75
$217.00
In terms of 1920 dollars, the example’s 75¢ shortfall from the 1908 amount of $8.50 equals approximately $21. So the actual
decline in value of the 1920 from the 1908 dollar could more clearly be expressed as follows:
1908
2000
$8.50
$703.00
1920
$8.50
$238.00
The decline in roll prices can be attributed to increased productivity which results from more efficient production. This is
especially true when prices drop during a period of inflation.
The prices below would appear to be veritable bargains, but are still far above what the average consumer could afford when
viewed in terms of 2000 dollars. The highest price for any roll in the 1920 catalog is $7.75.
1920
2000
US $
US $
$5.75
$161.00
#361 Fantasie C major, Op. 17 part 1 R. Schumann
$6.00
$168.00
#362 Fantasie C major, Op. 17 part 2 R. Schumann
$5.00
$140.00
#372 Sonata Waldstein Beethoven pt. 1
$5.50
$154.00
#373 Sonata Waldstein Beethoven pt.2
$7.75
$217.00
#1246 Sonata Moonlight mvmts. 1 & 2 Beethoven
$7.75
$217.00
#1247 Sonata Moonlight mvmt. 3 Beethoven
$6.75
$189.00
#876 Don Juan Fantasie Liszt
$7.75
$217.00
#881 Etude Op. 25, No. 9 Staccato Chopin
$3.00
$84.00
Busoni
#443 Adelaide Beethoven-Liszt
Carreño
Paderewski
Emil von Sauer
As can be seen from the lists that follow, the US dollar remained relatively stable from 1920 to 1927 as opposed to the period
from 1908 to 1920.
Not long after 1920, production of T-100 red-paper Welte-Mignon rolls was discontinued by the Welte-Mignon Corp. in the US.
The focus changed to sales of organ rolls and the new Purple Seal Welte-Mignon rolls for use on their new Welte-Mignon “Original”
piano which was scaled to play Welte-Mignon Licensee rolls as well. If the buyer of that 1907 Welte-Mignon wanted new music,
rolls were available from Europe. How, then, do those prices compare to today’s? The German catalog, which was comprehensive to
October 1925, priced our list of rolls as follows:
93
1925
1925
2000
D-Mark
US$
US$
24DM
$5.71
$160.00
#361
24 DM
$5.71
$160.00
#362
22 DM
$5.24
$147.00
#372
22 DM
$5.24
$147.00
#373
24 DM
$5.71
$160.00
Busoni
#443
Carreño
Paderewski
#1246
24 DM
$5.71
$160.00
#1247
24 DM
$5.71
$160.00
Emil von Sauer
#876
24 DM
$5.71
$160.00
#881
12 DM
$2.86
$80.00
It’s interesting to note that if a German catalog had been issued earlier (say 1921-22), it almost certainly would have reflected the
calamitous decline in the value of the Mark. The inflationary spiral in Germany during the early 1920s was of a far, far greater
magnitude than that which occurred with the value of the dollar between 1908 and 1920. In 1921, a T-100 roll could easily have cost
2.4 million Marks!
Even later, the 1927 catalog published in England continued to offer the buyer of the 1907 Welte-Mignon piano a source for
music. How, then, do these prices compare to today’s?
1927
1927
2000
GB-Sterling
US$
US$
24 shillings
$5.83
$155.00
#361
24 shillings
$5.83
$155.00
#362
22 shillings
$5.35
$142.00
#372
22 shillings
$5.35
$142.00
#373
24 shillings
$5.83
$155.00
Busoni
#443
Carreño
Paderewski
#1246
24 shillings
$5.83
$155.00
#1247
24 shillings
$5.83
$155.00
Emil von Sauer
#876
24 shillings
$5.83
$155.00
#881
12 shillings
$2.92
$77.50
Clearly, the 1907 buyers of the Welte-Mignon were well-heeled indeed. While the cost of music rolls declined significantly from
1908, even the 1927 prices were anything but cheap. The introduction of the Welte-Mignon Licensee into the US marketplace in
1916 enabled more accessibility to the Welte-Mignon library at a much lower cost. Shortly after 1920, DeLuxe Licensee rolls were
priced no higher than $2. Nevertheless, the Licensee roll was still a product most people could not afford. T-100 Welte-Mignon
pianos and their music really were within the reach of only the most wealthy buyers.
94
FEBRUARY 1918
Liat 0...
Price Price
Liat Oar
Price Price
__7'-
.10.20
8988 Blue Bird
Grant
.71.30
23G DroWl1 Waters (Wa.ila.Da.) •..•..•. Ailau
.&0 .20
lI8IiO I OaDnot 8iDg the Old 8oDgB .•••• Claribel
.&0.20
8988 WUd, Wild, Womllll, !'he (Are K&k1Dg a
Wild IIa.n of lie)
Piantadosi
.'16 .30
Wl A. Life on the Ocean Wave
.10 .20
8'" Work, For the If'JBht fa Coming.•.. Mason
.'16 .30
2SI5S Wha.t fa Home Without a Mother..Winner.
.&0 .20
89tl I Don't Want to Get Well
Jentes
.'16 .30
39'1t The AmericaD Hymn
.'16 .30
81M12 Oa.mon1lage •.••••• Gilbert and Friedland
.71 .30
fi80 BrabaDCOJl118, La (Belgium) .. Campenhout
.'16 .30
3224. Marseillaile, '!'he •••••••••.••••. De Lisle
.76 .30
8998 Liberty Bell (It's 'fim.e to Jlinr Again)
................................ Mohr
.'11 .30
8295 Battle Hymn of the Republic............
.'16 .30
8994 Chin-Chin ChiDa.man
Hanley
.75 .30
343t lfatioDaJ. Hymn (PortugaJ) Dom Pedro IV
.76 .30
8995 Someone:mae May Be '1'here While I'm
Gone
Berlin
.76 .30
3981 We'll Xnock the Heligo Into Heligo Out
of B:eligoland
Morse
.75 .30
899 Dixie Volunteen, The
Leilie and Ruby
.'16 .30
Graveyard IDueB, The.Woods and Caldwell
Sway Me. I'ox-'l'rot
Hudson
Mavia ••••.•••••••••••••••••••. Craxton
What a J'riend We Have in lens
.
.............................Converse
.76 .30
.'16 .30
.76 .30
2348 Oood-Dight Ladies
"
"
8988
88U
3986
8888
8881
Russell
Keller
~~.~~~~.~~~~~~
.76 .30
.76 .30
(668 Oamp Outer.
March and Two-Step .•..
...........................Schroeder 1.00 .40
4657 Oaterpillar Oreep. Pox-Trot
Johnson 1.00 .40
Panella 1.00 .40
4858 Spirit of '78 Ma.rch, The
4659
':Neath the Ji'lag. March....•.... Hudson 1.00 .40
4860 A.ra.besque, Op. 18, :No.8
Schaaf 1.00 .40
I 7006 so~~.~.~~.~~~.~~~:.~:::
1.75 .70
We will prepay carrying charies on all orders amounting to $2.00 or more.
~I
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I
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IF
QUALITY, PRICE
and SERVICE
INTEREST YOU,
SEND YOUR ORDERS
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Submitted by Jerryl Neher
44
THE
MUSICAL OBSERVER
rlllnll'llllll_...........~lUlRiIlIOUll/lUlfWlllllll&ll_IIt8I1l1\1llIllll.lIMIlftI\lIl
..l!RIlill'lM1ilt~IWII1lI\III\llIlllIlIl~ItI~1Jl.DQI11
I Disc-Roll
Review
I
By DORON K. ANTRIM
I
i
11l1r.D:I'la'J1UUllll'llllt!ljl~I;I:I:Il':I::Im_I.lII:tl!r.llll:W:"IlAJIla.~IUiftlllIlimllll'iJ:OiI,ra:laU:1Il01l(ll111rlRtlJmwllml"Ill1;&:lMI~:l:llIt~I'~IJlIDflljl~l~lIltlUlijl"I~IJIII11.\Jlllllm~ua~III':'lllItlUlllllllJ~
I
0'
TItE MUSICAL OBSERVER iJ devoted to a rcyJew of Toprescntaliv~
cO'l'1~idered to be tbo n_on desJrablo from th6 recent outP\Jt or the foremo.st
phonog'r:aph .nd reproducing pl:a.110 companlc3. It i. beUeTed that tlle deputment win prove
Thi. departm"nt
record. whtcb arc
docidedl,. useful to man,. subllcrlbcn:, off'CTlng tllc:m pnctic;JJ and .a1aablc aid, and !lavh)~ them
considerabJe time la thr !IcJmlO11 of desirable new records fOT their collcction.. The 4'l.eltc-r.nolt"
i, at the scrvico of re.aders having questiOona to .!Ilk: reprdine recorda and the ut.in. who
JIiNflCI-:'
P."IUt-:REWS1<.I
Three Stars in the Firmament of Musical
Composition
ISCHA ELMAN gave a conceli at
Walk. Walla, Wnshington, recently,
which was included in his Pacific coast
itincrary. It happened that his concert coincided with a convention of the Oregon
Fruit Growers' Association and naturally
the all<litorium was filled with tbese jovial,
prosperons pilgrims.
After the concert they crowded around
the Russian virt uoso, each one tryiug to pay
homage in his own individual wa.y. One of
them, the owner of a very largc apple ('1'ebard, hut little versed in 11l\lS1calliteratllre,
recognized one .picce on the entire progralll
which he knew tboroug-hly und enjoyed jllst
as much.
This was the ever poplliar
Ilmnorcsqllc hy DVllrak, which Elman had
becu compelled to pby as an encore much
aga.inst his will. Bnt tht, fmit grower, thillk·
ing to please Mr. Elman, said:
"You know, Mr. EllI,an, I have YOllr n'r·
unl 01 the 'I 11111101"I'sll"e' 011 my phonograph
and I play it vcry often. I Jnu,t say til:lt Ill'
night yon played i( Illl the fiddle jllsl like il is
IlI1 the record:'
History docs not rcnJrlI Elman's rejoinder.
This incident started mc to thinking" lIf
several pit:ces, snch as JllltnorcsljlCll, which
have enjoyed an ill\lllt'llse popularity; and
how thc reproducing" instruments and othcr
contributing fnctors l>;LV~ helped to put
thcm over in such a large way. It is safc tIl
say that most pcopl(, [rom Maint' to Cali·
fornia who are at all ("onver"ilnt with n1Llsi,'al affairs art~ familiar with Jlu"'""':Sqll'" II
is rather inten;stiog tu speculate now and
lhen upon things that have. gainednotoridy
and why, although it is often quite impossible
tu apply any logiral system of reasoning'.
For mstance, why should (;OI1l:iSIll gain such
tremendolls favur at this particular timc
when the simple principle back of it has bccn
known for years?
But to return La IflmLOrcsq1ll1. Elman's
re.cord of it was an important ClIlltribulion
to this number's popularity. Among the
early records tha t Elman. made for the
phonograph, it was S(lOll in the limelight and
no doubt the
pieec makes a
grea tel' appeal
on the violin
than as a piano number as
originally
,'"' ·r'~
..•: \
WI' itt e n. It
~~ .~, ~~
was part of
a
collection
' ; ','
.~
of Hml1ioresken for piano,
one of which
leaped in t 0
fame and the
o the r 5 remained in
Tnscli" SEID£L
com]> a mtive
M
,
~f: >~~,:
96
., .
JI:\... kc
obscurity althuugh sume of the others are just
as deserving.
This n\lmber was in all probability written in New York, although sources of information arc IInreliable on this point. At any
ratc, the opus number 101 is aftcr that of the
"New World Symphony, Op. 95." It is related that in lhe Bummer of ]893, Dvorak,
who was in this country at that timc, appeased his homesickness in a measure and
gratified his longing to bear his native
tonguc 1>y spendillg the summer in Spillville. Iowa, a small community O'f Bohenlians. I-lere, as thc outcome of his enthusiastic study or the folk music of the Amerit1\n negro, he wrote the symphony - From
thc Ncw World-and several string quartet.>:
Then he returneu to New York and no doubt
wrote Ihe Hltmoresqlte. Some claim that
it was not intended as a humorous or whill1,i"al composition but partakcs of a mor!'
serious lIatur~. /\nother view is that it was
a 1ake-IIIT on Amcrican ragtime. 1..>"orak was
rather impressed with the popular type of
music coming into vog-lle at that timc called
ragtime and sought to give his impression
of it. At nny rate, it strnck home with the
gn'al hulk of the peoplc. An arch pi'lu:l1wy
com hilled with the plaintive note of il.~ middle section has constituted a form\11a that
has heen taken in largc doses since it came
illto heing. It is to he had on thc records
in almost evcry coneeivahle combiuation of
instrnlllents and nrrallgelllent~.
With l'adc,-ewski'5 Mitllllrl, another hene!lincr, the fame of the composer no dO\1bt
hell't'd it along its rose-strewn palh, not
Ihal it lackt'd intrinsic merit to begin with.
Fnr mrrit is absol\1tely neces5ary. llnt thcre
:Ire a numher of pieces that have this and
yet fail to get across nevertheless.
A rather amm;ing story is told of this
"iere hy a German professor. Wc append it
herewith hut do not warrant its authenticity. "When Pnc1e.rewski was professor at
Warsaw Conservatoire, he was a frerplenl
visitor at my house and onc evening- I remarked that no living composer could hc
compared with Mozart. Paderewski's only
reply was a shrtlg of the shoulders, but the
next clay he came back, and sitting- down at
the piano said: '1 would like to play you a
little piece of Mozart's whi('h perhap~ yon
(10 not know.'
He then played the Mi".url.
I was enchanted with it and cried: 'Now
you will yourself acknowledge that nohLHly
of onr time could fllrnish us with a COIIII"\sition like that!' 'Well: answrred Parlerewski.
this JvJ;lluct is mine.' "
Aside from the glamonr lent this pil'Ct' hy
the name of the composer, simpJirily.
courtly grace, and an ele!("ance and rrl"lIIr'ment of treatmcnt have served to make its
friends legion. It is vcry simple harmonically being basel! mainly on the tonic amI
dominant seventh chords. Then it recalls a
them.
.
..
....
,;.
.~
.
.....-,
'
'-~J;."-"·Y,···
.~~.
't"
tt
~.
•
S.tR<;f·;J R/l.CIUfANINOJo'Jl
picture of long ago \\Ihel1 stately mil1\lcts
were danced, and all of \IS like to revert to
the things of the past at timcs. Probably
it pictures a scene in the days of Louis XV,
amid the glitter and gayety of the court
ballroom, where the sparkle of lighls and
jewels is matched by the scintillation of wit
and repartee, while gallant cavaliers lead
their fair partners through the mazes of the
dance.
The number has been IllOSt snceessful in
its original form for piano, although it has
submitted to divers treatments in arran~I:
ments for violin, band, orcheslra anrl many
other illS! "lIllen!.>; in groups and in solu.
The reproducing- pianos have tlone consid<Table in spreading the favor of this sl!lel'tiOll and it is an admirahl~ number for this
purpose.
One other sho\lld be included in this galaxy of star compositions. It is the fa mons
/''''}II<1(' jll C sila.r!, MiII,or by I{achmaninoff.
How Hachmaninoff hates this piere, jnst a'
J ';ldcrclVski hall's the Mi·m,cl principally !>et·,ltlSC of being required to play it to shl'ed~
and tatters. The writer was present at a
war benefit several years ago in which a
number of prominent artists contriblllcri
their servic.es. Mr. R;\chmallinofT was re(JIICS1cd to play 1he Pre/ndc which he finally
consented to do but only after considerahle
persnasion and pressurc had he~n applied.
Mr. Hachmaninoff has jllst calise {or
grievance a~ainst tbis child of his brain.
although it is the one piccc that helped t'Stablish his namc as a composer and his fanw
in this country more than any ollH'r. Jk
wrote it during- the early part of his career
as it heal's his opus 3. Jt was Ilrst puhlishcrl
in 1\ nssia and had no intern.1tional copyright. Conse(jllently every publisher in this
country and in others for that matter has publishcd it and has heel1 reaping ~rcat rewards
ever since, of which Rachmaninoff rec('ivcd
not a single kopeck. Th~ piece wonld havl"
made a fortnne for the ("(lll1p(>scr had it hecn
copyrig-htcd in1"crna!ional1y. Further than
this, M1". HaclllnanlllofJ fel,ls that ht, has
sin c e donl'
t h i n g- s tha t
a re so mneh
more worthy.
hilt thr Plli,lie still hangs
(.n to this first
I" f fort with
tan t a I i 'l.i n g persistency.
The heroic
eharncter 0 f
the nnmhrr
i lYl pre s 5 es
hoth t h (\ S I'
with cnltivnted
mtlsical tastes
1.'·:OL'lILO (;OIl<)WSKY
.:
-/'~
-'
45
THE MUSICAL OBSERVER
as well as thosc wilhout. It discloses its Slavonic origin and is vital and half~barbaric in its
make-np. It is sometimes called the .. Bells of
Moscow" and Iras a historic signifJe-.l1Ice as the
story goes.
Moscow resounding to the tread of Napolcon's victorions troops is suddenly ablaze in
every part, the torch applied hy the hanus of the
f,crcely sullen inhabitants. 0!apolcon's dream
of shelter for four hundred thousand trooJls
in the heart of a frozen desert is thus hanished
and victory is turned into defeat. WI;ile t1~e
ponderous deep-throateo hoom of thc [\.remhn
hell, sounding {lut the alarm is heard in fate-
ful triumph above the fierce exultation of the
lhunes. The number stirs something of the
elcmcntal in all of us.
This Prrlude is one of the war-horses of the
player-pianos and it is best snited for piano,
although many different arrangements have
been made of it ano it has even succumbed tu
jazz treatmcnt. So it is that one thing or another, or a combination of circumstances may
contribute to the popularity of a composition,
and that the reproducing instruments give it a
final impetus cannot he denier!. Uut given a
cerlain intrinsic merit to 'begin with, the fate of
a lIlusical number is in the lap of the gods.
r"""""·"""··~~"~o~:"':~·"~:~~~~:
the titles givcs the iUl!)feSsiol1 that an attempt has
been made to exhume Illost of the music popular at
the time of King Tut-ankh-Amtn. Here are a few
of the titles at random: S,,,,gs of Otller Days,
Just a" Old Love Song, Tile Old Rugg"d CrO.fS,
Come Back to Eri", Silver Threads A"WlII( Ihe Gold,
etc. This last lIamcd song, uy the way. is said to
hold the altitude record for salcs of any song that
was ever published in this country. Few pianos
scallcred ahout the laud did nol hold a copy of this
famous song, when it was in ils hey-dey. and stilI do,
no doubt. But it has r'l.thcr outlived its usefuhll~sS
and has not the stuff of which immortality is nlade.
There is one record, Iowa Corn. Song, that should
appeal to all who hail {roln Iowa, "Whcrl~ the t.dl
corn grows" as it is proba:bJy the song of that state.
It is sung by the Criterion Male ~Jl1artcL. 'fht:n,
IV e"ri"g Ihc Day, by Walter Sc,ullan and Elizabeth
Spencer, has its points. The day referred to is thc
,wedding d"y and the song goes into blissfnl details,
about such delig-hts as kindliug the firc, gettillg tht.:
eats, mornings in May, etc" with Cupid cver hover·
iug ill tlw backgrn1Jllri. Oh! it's a great lif(', to judge
IJ)' this sOllg.
~
t
__ _
_ """ ,,, ,, ,
I
" "".."...i
AMPICO: Sergei Rachmaninoff plays his own
Liu.tCS a tranSCl'iptHJIl 01 the SOJlg.
J
Tlu~rc
IS rumallt:c
and poctic appeal ill this fragile l1Ull1lJc~. 111. It
R.1.chmallinoff shows his L1istiuctivc gift 01 cvok mg
a nlOOd. It has tilallu:rlls and tendrils of m.elody, a::.
delicate as the scent of lilac blossom:;.
Eastwood Lane is all American composer who says
things iu an individual way. His ,/1 Gringu Fango
has a swing ahout it quite In·acing. The tallgo t'lIjoyed quite a vugue i.lS a Lall-ruom dance several
years ;lgO and is still dOlle by professional c1anClTS
and others. it is Olle: of the IIatlonal dances U I
Spain and full of SCllSlIVllS grace autl l'roll~llIlC(,:d
rhythm. "Gringo" is a rough ami ready term .glVCIl tv
all American by Ml'XICUU:-i.
The llH1~1l' is silley alld
<.Ioes nut seek to overcrowd the melodic with the
~xotic. Mr. Laue hit1l!:icl i Vlay::; it.
SI.-villa) SuiLc Espagnoh.:, 1\0. J by AHJClli/, pailiis
a vivid, colorful pictun:: uf that CiIY.4!l g;l)dy amI
pleasure disdo!:iiJlg' Iwth scrilJu~ 'lllU Irl\'ulul1~ mood
Albeni1.,' a Spanish composcr, kno\\':"l wt.'!1 huw tu
apply his color:>, and iL seem:> thUl all)' cOlllposer. uf
lJote call write wiLh more authurity <I lid Lnh.: fccltllg
about his nativc land than of iort::igll lallds, thuugh ,1
nuticeable numher of i\mc.:rican (;UIIIIJoscr.$ ::.ceUl to
seck rar afield for their thematic material instead of
finding it at home. The nUllIller llrl..·"ll..·llts a (;0:;1111,)poJitan scene of many 1I100<.1s, has t1l1..· n'al tang 01 a
Spanish s~ttillg' and is ably played by !vlaurice
Dumesnil.
*
* *
COLUMBIA: What the world needs most at
the prcsent time is a belief-something' III which OIU,,:'S
faith can be firmly and securely ~U1chorcd. Fro111 the
earliest time this belief bas nsually taken some form
of religion. Religion is prouably unuerguing a change
at present along with other chaotic world changes.
There arc many questions ueing raised ill orthodox
circles and scicnce is showing a tendency to clash with
some of 1he old doctrines. But therc is still the S:lI11l'
necessity o( having a belief ncvcrthekss.
Geoffrey O'Hara, all American composer, has
written a song, The Lit,",ug C;odl which hc calls "a
man's idea of religion." Men are Jess emotionaJ than
women and thcy have it tendency to reasOIl things
out to a greater extcnt, so Mr. O'Hara has struck
home ill bis song. He draws two parallels; that of
making the heart a temple and revealing no God, and
of making the heart a stable, as for the lowly Nazarene, and sheltering the living God. There is substance to the song and the harmonization has UCClI
worked out ill a colorful and individual way. Charles
Hackett sings it wiJ h fine enunciation alld ardor.
It is of no particular creed.
Toscha Seidel, who has been abroad for some time,
retunled the first part of the year and is heard this
month phonographicaIJy in KrcisJer's Scho", Ro.\·mori... l1lis is one of Kreisler's delectahle bits of
whicb he knows so well how to write, and Mr.
Seide! delivers it with ahandon and airy grace.
William A. Kennedy breaks into the phonogr"ph
!lame with Uttle Town i" tile .4uJrI C",,,,ty Down.
This is a good opening wedge for Mr. Kenncdy. ~Je
is a tenor and has an Irish hrogllc that does 1Iot
sound simulated. How about it, Mr. Kennedy, art"
yoll from Ireland or just dever in t"lking the
('lIIguage?
EDISON: One would nced to be rather highly
l'xhilarated to work up any dcgn'l' of t"nthusi;Uilll
Clver this mon.th's group of records. A glatlce at
* * *
DUO-ART: BcdllOvcn .wrote Rondo a CulJJ"icciu,
Op. 129 (augcr uver the loss of a penny, vcnted
in a caprice) ill IH22, live years befure he died, allll
gives liS a glimpsc of Beethovl'1l thc mall. The paradux: of Bcethovcn as Sir GcorJ.!,c c;rov~ railed it, is
~:lp:!rCll't ill this work.
FrDJlI accounts of the lifc
of ":ecthoven, as a man, he was teslY, irresponsible
of vcrVl'r::.c (,'llar;,u.:ter; ill fact, his rclatioll with his
fellow mcn, Wi1S far from h.arJllollious. But his music
rcvealed pcrfect ::.elf mastery and constructive puwer
of the highest ordcL Thc mall was harassecl by the
petty annoyances of daily life but Sl'l'Clle ill hi:; art.
Thjs paradox is illustrated in ·thl: caprice. The
master lost a penny. (Jue rail imagillc lli~ upsetting
chairs and Hying into a rille frenzy ill hunting his
Jo~t groschen, then realizing the inconsistency of making such a fuss ovcr so small a matter, and acrordillg-Iy venting his anger ill the Caprice. It shows the
master's perfect cOlltrol of form and design :ltlfl his
alJility to portray cmotioll. What would the lIlodcrJl~
have madc of such an incident! Josef Iluflltanll
plays it with intelligenre.
Handel's J.llrgo was writ.ten originally as 11J(' 0PCIIing aria of 1hl· opera, "Xerxes," which fla!" since disu1Jpeared from thc stage. "My PlalH: Trce" waS the
titlc and ill it Xerxes gives thanks for thc sheltering
shade of " garden tree. Bnt it is most widely
known in its instrumental form, and has a dignity
:md religions fervor tha( have c<l1"ricd it very far.
Guiomar N O\racs pJays the Parsons arrangclllcllt with
hrcadth of trcatmclIt and with the mclody note well
to tbe fore.
BRUNSWICK: Chopin had a babit of playing
songs for his friends as a lh1.stimc and quitt'. frequentJy Ilcglcch..' d to put them on paper. He Jlever considered his song lIluse very seriously. However, "Sevcnteen Polish Songs," composed hy him bt:twcen 1824
and 1844 werc collected and plIhlished afler his death.
Moc;t of thesc are flot particularly noteworthy and
cven scem almost rudimentary com,pared tu such
mnstcrs of song as Schubert, Franz, Brahms. and
Tschaikowsky. But two of them, at least, "The
Maiden's Wish" and liMy loy," Liszt found to he
veritable gClIls and proclain](~d them to the world as
such 'by providing them with appropri;ltc piano arrangemeTlts. The first of these is better known
th;m the second, bnt jf less brilliant than the former,
tht. p::lraphrase of "My Joy" sinKS thc simple but soulfill l1I<'1ody of the sOllg without cxlranC0l.1S cmhl'1I i.shmcllt, is 110t inferior in musical heallty. Leopold Godow!'ky plays A1')1 Jo,\' in a record this lIlonth
that is clear-cut ami well dclineated.
CaU:;U1"'II(I, Op. 35 (Tsdlaikowsky), played by
Bronislaw H uut'rman is d~serving of mention. There
is a good Jirm tone throughout whose quality has
heen duplica.ted all the record.
Allen McQuhae, who hails from the land where
the shamrocks grow, wonders Will She Come from
Iltr Jiaslt in a song from "The Music Box Revue."
He does !lot conIine his inquiry to the east alone.
uut asks the fOUf corners of the compass--east, north.
south and w(,'!'l. Itl the linal vcrse when he arrive:;
itt the various loralitics just referred to, an interlude
is illterposcd of 1ll1l~jC characteristic of that section,
Mr. M<:Quhae Ims an excellent tenor voice am! sings
as though hc re.tlly wcre wondering as to the cxacl
location of his lad)" love. Mayhe he is?
VI eTO R:
* * *
Til' S"ow Maiden, an opera of which
Rimsky~K(,Irsakoff
wrote the music, is based on an
old folk-lore lcgend. The Snow-Maiden, daughter
of old Willll'r ami Fairy Spring, has a sojourn on
ear·th where many adventures befall her. She is
cthereally heautiful hut discourages all the young
swains who fall in love with her on account of her
heart of ice. Howcver, her mother intervenes with
.tbe aid of the flowe,.s, and tbe Snow Maioen falls in
love only to dissolve as a snoW flake at the lirst
human kiss of her lover. Lucrezia Bori sings in
French I Kn01" the SanK of " Lark which occnrs
at the first of the opera. It is a wistful little number
to which a wood wind arcompanhncllt lends distil1c~
tion and it is sung with rare artistry.
rm in Love frol11 llApple Hlossoms," is done by
Fritz and t-I ugo Kreisler. The former wrote "Apple
BJossoms," a light opera, ami in this number presides
at the piano, whiic Hugo plays th(,~ cello. Frilz is
quite an accomplish('d piaJJist, as a matter of fact, and
the two Kreislers make an idl'al comhination. The
lay is tunellli and is otherwise a highly appropriatc
sprinbrtimc Iluwucr.
The SCllt iment of all of liS, 110 doubt, coincides' with
that of the sOllg I Lovc " I.;tl/e Coltog, hy Geoffrey
O'liara, althuugh wc may 1I0t all have the ready cash
lle(,'essary to materialize our dream of owning on~.
Ncverthekss, the song paints a picturc we like to
sec ill 0111' imagination ::Illd Lamlwrt Murphy, tenor,
sings it ill a way that revl"<.t1s all of its beguilements.
Myth No.5
All the people from the Ozarks wear
belts with their names on the back to
identify them.
Fact: The AMICA Convention
Committee regrets that with changes
in waist sizes they will be unable to
make the belts for this convention.
We are forced to use name tags this
year.
Springdale, Arkansas 2002
Myth No. 8
People from the Ozarks know that a
real good red wine must breath from
a wide-mouthed glass to acquire a
full bodied flavor. That is why
Cabernet Sauvignion is always
served in a mason jar.
Myth No. 22
Ozarkians think opossum is a major
food group.
WILLIAM SIMMONS
BARITONE
TEACHER OF SINGING
Studio, ]27 W. 75th St.
Telephone Schuyler S30Z
97
R
agtime: No Longer a Novelty In Sepia
BY DAVID WONDRICH
FROM ARTS & LEISURE NEW YORK TIMES, JANUARY 21, 2001
SENT IN BY DIANNE POLAN
Ephemeralist (http://myweb.wwa.com/weese), as Mr. Ware,
33, said in an e-mail interview, aims to “provide a dense sense
of the whole era, not simply a dissected examination of the
music apart from it.” The problem, as he sees it, is that “the
definition of ragtime has been whittled down to something
that is only one small aspect of what it actually was to the
people who lived through it.”
In the brief period of its existence, The Ephemeralist has
already gone a long way toward upsetting that view. Besides
publishing newly rediscovered sheet music and articles
on obscure ragtime composers and the like, it has pictures.
Pictures of forgotten banjo-pickers, of small-town brass
bands, of amateur pianists, of black people dancing and playing music - and white people made up as black people. In
fact, there are dozens of minstrels - white, black, male,
female, young, old - photographed, sketched and, of course,
caricatured. All were a part of ragtime; as Mr. Ware
comments, “the more I learn about it, the more fascinated and
horrified I become.”
A sheet music cover from 1900
R
agtime is a whole world of music that has grown
strange to us. Sure, everyone knows Scott Joplin and
the cheerful strains of “The Entertainer” from the movie “The
Sting” - at least, everyone who remembers the 1970’s, when
the music enjoyed its strongest revival (there was another
around 1950). But the popular image of ragtime today is
largely that of a jaunty, sweetly tinkling piano soundtrack to a
sepia-tinted world of shirtwaists and bowler hats.
That view may be changing, however. A new magazine
devoted to the music and a spate of new reissues of ragtime
as it was recorded in its day - roughly 1890 to 1920 - are
demonstrating that there was far more to it than it has been
given credit for, and that in some ways the “real” ragtime is as
up to date as Eminem and Britney Spears.
Chris Ware, the cartoonist whose heartbreaking and
beautiful graphic novel “Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid
on Earth” (Pantheon) was published last year to much
acclaim, is also the publisher of the Ragtime Ephemeralist, a
fascinating, dryly amusing periodical (if you can call two
issues in three years periodical) devoted to ragtime. The
98
You cannot read The Ephemeralist without beginning to
understand just how intimately ragtime is bound up with the
perennial issue in American music, race. Rather than being
the genteel, refined African-American classical music we
think we know, ragtime jumps out of the pages of The
Ephemeralist as a sometimes morally compromised, often
vulgar, always vital form of American popular music, perhaps
closer in its articulation to rock and hip-hop than the jazz that
was its immediate descendant. At any rate, ragtime was not
above titillating the white middle class with big-beat
evocations of the (often greatly exaggerated) realities of
ghetto life.
The recordings confirm this with music’s characteristic
vividness, over and over again. There were lots of them.
Among all the operetta and parlor ballads, harmony quartets
and brass band marches - the Victorian music - that the newly
established record industry was pumping out around the turn
of the century, there were thousands of ragtime records. The
music was delivered by singers, both solo
and in groups of all sizes. And by banjoists,
mandolin, trios, brass bands, dance
orchestras, stunt drummers, accordion
virtuosos, novelty saxophonists, piccolo
aces - everything, amusingly enough, but
solo pianists. The men who ran the industry
left the piano music to the player piano.
Even if they hadn’t, it’s still doubtful
we would have any records by ragtime
“professors,” as Scott Joplin and his peers
The bandleader Arthur Pryor
in an undated photograph
The comedy team of Bert Williams
(left) and George Walker in 1895
were known: those same
men drew the color line
with determination and
persistence,
letting
achingly few black
artists through. That act
of prejudice still leaves a
daunting variety of
music, most of which has
never been reissued.
That’s starting to change.
Unlike the previous
ragtime revivals, which
were largely based on
the song sheet and piano
roll (both, it should be
pointed out, easily edited
to preserve modern
sensibilities), the current revival brings with it a relative
profusion of old recordings. Although Bertelsman and Sony,
heirs to the ragtime era’s Victor and Columbia, have each
dipped their toes into this ocean of wax, and a few of the
established reissue labels have put out a CD or two, the real
action is with tiny, home PC-based operations.
All you have to do is burn some highlights of your
collection of 78’s or cylinders onto CD, spit some labels out
of your printer and you’re in the record business. Put up a
Web site, and you’ve got international advertising and distribution. (Or, if you’re not commercially inclined, just post
everything on Napster; there’s a surprising amount of ragtime
to be found there, lurking among the Christina Aguileras and
Creeds of this world.)
The total of what is available is still relatively
manageable, a matter of a few hundred songs. While not
enough to present a comprehensive picture of the music most of these albums are exploratory anthologies, and hence
somewhat spotty - there is nonetheless enough to get a pretty
good idea of what America’s first mass-marketed, recorded
popular music was like.
Some of it is pretty innocuous. Take a record like the
banjoist Vess L. Ossman’s 1907 “Florida Rag,” available on
Archeophone records’s excellent “Real Ragtime: Disc
Recordings From Its Heyday” (www.archeophone.com).
Once you acclimatize yourself to the primitive recording
technology - the best recordings of the time had a frequency
response of about 168 to 2,000 cycles; a good LP from the
1950’s offers 20 to 20,000 - the ancient grooves reveal a
suppleness and swing that, critical orthodoxy has it, only
entered American music with jazz, some 10 years later. A
confident ripple from Charles Prince on the piano, and
Ossman launches himself into the song, picking tricky little
cross rhythms, playing call-and-response between the bass
and treble, generally ripping things up. There’s not a trace of
stateliness or stiffness.
There are even a few muffed notes, just to signify the
humanity of the music (you won’t find that on a piano roll).
Or take Arthur Pryor’s “King of Rags,” also from 1907
(from the same CD). Nimbly executing a herky-jerky riff bent
up by trombone smears, Pryor’s band makes a convincing
case for ragtime as brass-band music. Pryor, who hailed from
St. Joseph, Mo., in the heart of the ragtime belt, had been the
trombone soloist and ragtime specialist in John Philip Sousa’s
band until he struck out on his own in 1903. With his
own band, he indulged his specialty with frequency and
enthusiasm.
In 1901, Vess Ossman cut a version of Arthur Pryor’s
most famous composition (also on the Archeophone disc).
The song, a cakewalk - a kind of raggy dance - is as catchy
and clever as you could want, the performance gloriously
loose and funky. It’s the then customary announcement at the
beginning of the record that pushes us into deep water:
“Arthur Pryor’s ‘Coon Band contest,’ played by Vess L.
Ossman, the Banjo King.” What to do with a song with a
racial epithet in its title? The standard practice has been to
ignore it. But this is one of the most popular rags of the whole
era - it’s the “real” ragtime. One solution is to edit: “Popular
Band and Instrumental,” a recent release from
www.tinfoil.com, includes an amazing version of the song by
Maurice Levi and his band, hiding under the title “A Band
Contest,” and shorn of its announcement. But that strategy,
too, is falsifying the past.
I think the only useful approach, albeit painful, is the one
advocated by Mr. Ware, “We’re a maturing nation that I think
can look at its past, however embarrassing and horrifying, and
face up to it.” One does not necessarily have to share his
confidence in our maturity to see that full disclosure is
necessary here. Modern American music springs from the
ragtime era, and it’s time we exposed its gnarled roots to the
sun.
Ragtime was black music and universally acknowledged
as such at the time. America had listened to black, or
black-influenced, music before: “Dixie” was born on the
minstrel stage. But ragtime was the first such music to inform
an era. Like rock, it had infinite varieties: it was a beat, it
was a rhythm, a complete way of approaching music, a social
movement that encompassed the best and the worst in
American culture. For the first time, blacks were, culturally
speaking, in the driver’s seat, and white America had to
acknowledge that fact.
That didn’t mean whites had to be polite about it. Or
respectful. On the most basic level, this attitude means that
ragtime songs - “coon
songs” or “coon shouts,”
as they were known
at the time - are rife
with casually deployed
racial epithets and every
other ugly stereotype
(purloined
poultry,
brandished razors) in the
national closet. This is as
much a part of the real
ragtime as is the poised,
formal piano composition, but until now, as Mr.
Ware points out, it is a
side of ragtime that has
been for understandable
The singer May Irvin in an
undated photograph
continue Ragtime on next page . . .
99
Ragtime continued . . .
reasons “all but ignored.” Yet “ignoring something only
grants it more power.”
When these songs are dragged up from our collective
basement and into the light, they certainly possess the power
to shock - it’s like the scene in Thomas McGuane’s novel
“The Sporting Club,” when the members of a hunting and
fishing club break open a time capsule, only to find a group
photograph of their grandparents naked and engaged in
unspeakable pursuits. But once the shock wears off, you can
begin to categorize the songs. Many, like Collins and Harlan’s
“Bake Dat Chicken Pie,” available on Napster
(www.napster.com) - are crude and horrible. Most, however,
are actually funny, if unintentionally.
Take the “Bully Song,” recorded in 1907 by the ScottishCanadian May Irwin (also on Napster). When she sings, in
her clear, polite soprano voice, the words “I’m a Tennessee
Nigger,” it’s impossible not to laugh at the ridiculousness of it
all. She’s Vanilla Ice in a whalebone corset. (The tradition of
inept white imitation of black culture is a venerable one.) And
yet the song itself is infernally catchy, with strong beats and
lots of vintage gangster slang (it helps that the song was
swiped from Mama Lou, the house singer at the Castle Club, a
black St. Louis brothel of high repute).
And then there are a precious few that manage to
transcend their genre. Sophie Tucker’s first version of her
signature song, “Some of These Days,” from 1911, is a
magnificent, heartfelt moan without appreciable racial content
beyond the informal diction (look for the 4,065KB version on
Napster). Of course, the greater sensitivity of the song can be
attributed to the fact that Shelton Brooks, its composer, was
black. In fact, blacks wrote many of the songs the white
ragtime singers recorded; writing such songs gave blacks an
entry into Tin Pan Alley and the possibility of establishing
careers of such solidity that they would no longer have to
produce such material. Some succeeded, at least to a degree.
Chief among them was Bert Williams, today perhaps the
least honored genius in American music. With his partner,
P
George W. Walker, he was the reigning black singer of the
ragtime age. More than that, he went on to become America’s
first black superstar, integrating Broadway along the way and
creating the first significant body of records by a black artist
in America. Jelly Roll Morton and Duke Ellington wrote
tributes to him. Yet there has never been a comprehensive
reissue of the 80-odd discs and cylinders he cut: he sang coon
songs, you see.
For the first time, however, most of his oeuvre is widely
available for inspection: much can be found on Napster, more
can be gathered from Web sites like www.besmark.com and
www.homestead.com/vaudeville archive.
The excellent Jazz Oracle label plans to release its often
delayed two-CD set in the spring. His drawling, elastic voice
as he half-talks, half-sings his way through his trademark
joke’s-on-me tales of woe is not only harbinger of a century of
blues and jazz singing but also a wry commentary on the
absurdity of a culture that can look upon his virtuoso clown
act and not see that it is an act.
“Nobody,” Williams’s first big hit, is no ordinary coon
song. Over a Pryoresque moaning trombone, he lets the
words out one or two at a time; they assemble into a
lugubrious tale of loserdom with a raggy kick in the chorus:
“I-I-I-I ain’t never done nothin’ to nobody/I-I-I-I ain’t never
got nothin’ from nobody, no time:/O-o-o-oh, until I get somethin’ from somebody, sometime,/I-I-I-I’ll never do nothin’ for
nobody no time.” The joke might be on him, but the threat is
directed at us.
It’s an irony of history that the white coon shouter Arthur
Collins was the first to cut Williams’s song, in 1905 - the song
would ultimately put him and most of his kind out of the coon
business. It’s not that white folks gave up on imitation
blackness once they got a taste of the “real” thing - as the
phenomenal success of Elvis Presley and Eminem prove. But
they at least learned to demand that it be executed with some
subtlety and humanity, some fundamental sympathy for the
imitated. It’s not the cork on your face, but the quality of your
act. That, too, is a legacy of ragtime.
BY KATHRYN LINDERMAN
INVESTOR’S BUSINESS DAILY
SENT IN BY JOHN MOTTO-ROS
iano Maker Henry Steinway
His Determination Helped Set The Worldwide Standard
For His Instrument
For Henry Engelhard Steinway, determination was the
key to survival.
Heinrich Engelhard Steinweg (1797-1871) was born in
the small mountain community of Wolfshagen, Germany. His
father was a forester.
The youngest of 12 children, Heinrich lost his mother and
all but four siblings in 1806 during the Napoleonic Wars. In
100
1812 lightning struck a small hut where Heinrich, his three
remaining brothers and their father were taking shelter from a
storm. Only 15-year-old Heinrich survived.
Penniless, the young Steinweg supported himself by
doing odd jobs. In 1815, he joined the German army, in
which he served until he was 22.
During peaceful years, Steinweg used his time in the
army to learn woodworking and cabinetmaking. He built
mandolins, dulcimers and zithers. He discovered he loved
working with his hands and especially making musical
instruments.
Honorably discharged from the army, Steinweg decided it
was time to pour himself into his work. He found a job at an
organ-building firm in Goslar, Germany. But Steinweg was
too impatient to work the seven- or eight-year apprenticeship
normally required. With only a year’s training, he moved to
Seesen, Germany, in 1820 and set up shop as a cabinetmaker
and pipe organ repairman.
In his brief time at the organ-building firm, Steinweg had
found an instrument that fascinated him, the piano. Steinweg
decided to learn more about the popular instrument and how
to build it.
He studied every aspect of the instrument. He
experimented tirelessly with different woods, looking for just
the right tone. He worked long hours perfecting the cut of the
keyboard and the regulating of the action and stringing.
He tested his theories and put them to work. His trials
paid off. He developed a piano stronger than its predecessors
by introducing a cast-iron frame that made it possible to put
greater tension on the strings. This structure resulted in a
heartier piano - a bigger sound, a more dynamic range,
increased brilliance.
In 1825, Steinweg married Julianne Theimer, presenting a
double-strung (bichord) square piano as a wedding present to
her. According to Fra magazine, Steinweg “played the organ
for his own wedding with his wife-to-be pumping the bellows;
then they descended from the loft, and the ceremony was
performed.”
His piano was tremendously successful, and Steinweg
spent more and more time in his workshop. He put his six
sons to work as soon as they were old enough to hold a
tuning fork. Steinweg knew it was important to teach his
instrument construction process to the youngsters to preserve
his methods.
Steinweg completed his first grand piano in 1836 in his
kitchen. It was an immediate success. He took a gold medal
at the 1839 Brunswick State Fair for a grand piano and two
square ones. The Duke of Brunswick purchased the grand
piano for 300 marks.
Steinweg soared into full production. With the help of his
sons, he was able to produce as many as 10 instruments a year
in his small workshop.
However, political trends in Germany in 1830 upset the
economy and caused a severe recession. The piano business
lagged. Steinweg stuck with his craft, but the situation looked
bleak. Finally, after the failed German Revolution in 1848,
Steinweg began looking for new opportunities.
At age 53, he uprooted his family and business from their
homeland to move to the U.S. The Steinweg family arrived in
New York City on June 29, 1850.
His tenement in New York was far less gracious than his
garden home back in Seesen, but Steinweg resolved to meet
any obstacles he faced.
He provided for his
family by living on a
modest budget. He found
work in a piano factory.
His sons worked in
cabinetry shops in town.
They made pianos at home
after hours and sold them
on the side.
All of Steinweg’s
children eventually worked
in the family business.
Despite the hardships
of becoming accustomed to
a new country, Steinweg
NEW APPROACHES:
was determined to succeed.
Steinway’s innovations
Because of discrimination included a cast-iron frame and an
upright model that earned 11
against Germans in New
patents
York, he realized that if he
wanted to be a success
there, he would have to integrate. At the age of 54, he
Americanized his name and became Henry Engelhard
Steinway.
He kept innovating, too. On March 5, 1853, he
established his Manhattan business as Steinway & Sons.
Steinway’s company prospered. By 1860 his business became
so great that the concern moved to another location. In 1862
at the London Exposition, Steinway won a medal with a
cross-strung grand.
In 1864, Steinway announced the grand opening of his
new factory. To entice curious onlookers to become
customers, he made the showroom as attractive as possible.
Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper reported on the open
house celebrating the new salesroom. It “is so beautiful
architecturally, that it is an ornament to the city, which can
now boast of having the finest pianoforte store, probably, in
the world.”
But more family sorrow was to befall Steinway. Son
Henry Jr. died of tuberculosis, and son Charles died of typhoid
fever, both in March 1865. Steinway’s grief was compounded
by labor unrest at the factory, which culminated in a strike in
May.
The 68-year-old Steinway was left to manage the factory
and showrooms with his two youngest and least experienced
sons. Again he refused to give up. He garnered family
support by persuading another son, Christian Friedrich
Theodor Steinweg, who had remained in Germany, to come to
New York. Giving in to his father’s convincing entreaties,
C.F. Steinweg moved to New York in 1865 and changed his
name.
With this additional support and the fresh direction that
Christian brought, Steinway focused on increasing his
business. He kept coming up with improvements, too. Aware
that customers’ homes weren’t always large, he designed a
piano to fit in smaller spaces. The company’s first upright
piano was built in 1862, and upright models became highly
popular. Steinway received 11 patents for his innovations for
101
Maximillan Schern
Nelson Eddy & Jeannette MacDonald,
in a scene from the MGM film of Noel Coward’s “Bittersweet”
102
Karl Ellison gave a treasurer’s report, and has had a good
response to his dues notice.
News
From
The Chapters
BOSTON AREA CHAPTER
Allan Jayne brought two Mr. Christmas musical boxes.
Both had automated characters that moved with the music.
Ken Goldman brought an animated musical watch crafted by
Henry Capt.
We had members attend that we haven’t seen for a while,
so there was much to talk about. We have offers for future
meetings at locations that we haven’t been to for a long time,
and we have added some new members too.
Joe Lavacchia and Ed Patt check out the theater.
Reporter: Don Brown
President: Ken Volk
The Boston Area November mid-winter meeting gathered
at the home of one of our newest members in Lexington.
They are Beni and Matt Jaro. The turnout was enhanced by
the list of interesting things to see and hear. We heard that
there is a 1920 band organ, restored by Mike Kitner, just
before he died. There were also a nickelodeon, a small pump
organ, and a newly restored player grand. There is also a
theater, complete with two 35mm projectors, two 16mm
projectors, and even a video projector! All this was true, and
more too. The home is new, and the theater is on the 3rd
floor. The musical instruments are playing in a room off the
front door on the first floor. Our members were able to talk
and snack finger goodies in nearby living and dining areas,
while the music played. Rooms upstairs contained hundreds
of CD records, piano rolls and band organ rolls. The theater
had 200+ movie reels, so entertainment possibilities were
many. Matt Jaro had roots near Knotts Berry Farm in
California, and the working nickelodeons inspired him to one
day own one. The MBSI group expanded his interest in other
instruments and films too. Beni was from Baltimore. She
said that there were a pair of orioles here in her backyard in
Lexington, but none in Baltimore.
President Ken Volk opened our business meeting with
some news about the possible player piano restoration or
replacement for the Charles River Museum. A suitable “plain
vanilla” player has not been located, and no contact from the
museum folks about our offer yet. We are looking for a
Simplex or Standard player in a piano worthy of the museum.
Our April 29th meeting will be at Charlie Jackson’s Piano
Barn in Hopkinton. There are many vintage pianos in the bar,
and we should have a good group attending the meeting.
The twin 35mm projector booth in the theater.
The music room with CDs, records, LPs and more.
103
Computers, piano rolls and band organ rolls.
Matt Jaro and his 1920
band organ.
Matt’s Pump Organ
Joe Lavacchia, Ed Everett, Ed Patt, and
Charlie Randazzo
Ampico Player grand with vacuum gages showing bass and treble
pressure levels.
Lois Brown, Norman Daly, Matt Jaro, Ken Volk, Ed Everett by
horse, and Ken Goldman.
104
Myth No. 41
Ozarkians believe a discussion on hog-calling
techniques is interesting and appropriate dinner party
conversation.
GATEWAY CHAPTER
President: Yousuf Wilson
Gateway chapter’s last meeting in 2000 was held at the
home of Jane and Tom Novak in Chesterfield, Missouri.
Ten members were in attendance.
Tom and Jane have a Stuber 20 note Street Organ that
they take to various organ rallies. Tom is also in the process
of building a street organ, which plays the Wurlitzer 125 rolls.
Another hobby of Tom’s is the carving of carousel horses.
The following new officers were elected at this meeting:
President: Yousuf Wilson
Vice-President: Tom Novak
Secretary/Treasurer: Jane Novak
Board Rep: Gary Craig
It was decided to have our annual street organ rally at the
St. Louis City Museum in October. As a chapter project,
Yousuf offered to oversee the building of a chapter Street
Organ along the lines of John Smith’s organ. The chapter
agreed and also decided to try their hand at arranging and cutting rolls for the organ.
Possible meetings and activities for 2001 were discussed.
Our annual “Rob-your-neighbor” gift exchange was conducted, after which refreshments were served.
HEART OF AMERICA CHAPTER
Reporter: Robbie Tubbs
President: Ron Bopp - 918-786-4988
President Ron Bopp called the December 3 meeting to
order and thanked Sandy and Mike Schoeppner for hosting
the Holiday Meeting. He also thanked Linda and Galen
Bird for having an open house. We welcomed new members,
Kay and Jim Fletcher, from Overland Park, Kansas.
The minutes were read and approved from the last meeting, as was the Treasurer’s report. Ron Connor reported that
plans were being finalized for the International Convention in
Australia in February.
Blaine Thomas has invited the chapter back to Manhattan for the Spring 2001 meeting. It was later decided that the
meeting would be held April 28/29, 2001.
Elections were held for Heart of America officers. Ron
Bopp was elected president, Tom McAuley Vice President,
Robbie Tubbs Treasurer/Secretary, and Ron Connor was
elected Board Representative. Kay Bode agreed to serve as
Reporter. There were no Floridians present, so no recounts
were necessary.
We were given the sad news of the passing of Ramsi Tick
and Harvey Roehl. It was agreed that we should send $50 for
each person to the AMICA International Memorial Fund.
The chapter ordered more enameled pins. We will mail
pins to members of good standing who have not yet received
theirs.
The meeting was adjourned and we look forward to our
meeting in April at the Thomas’.
Left to right: Bob Bullock, Mary Wilson, Gary Craig, Dorothy
Crowley, Tom Novak, Jane Novak, Cynthia Craig, Bob Crowley,
Yousuf Wilson, Dan Hoadley
Myth No. 77
Molasses is considered an Ozark household staple. Not
only is it used in the kitch but makes a great fly strip
refurbisher, denture adhesive and caulking compound.
105
Myth No. 65
People from the Ozarks think the only need for more
than one spoon is for musical purposes.
LADY LIBERTY CHAPTER
Reporter: Bill Maguire
President: Bill Maguire - 516-261-6799
Here are the dates for the first few meetings for this year.
On Sunday, April 1, we will be visiting Ray and Jane
Scheffy in Allentown, Pennsylvania.
Saturday, June 2 will be at the Edison National Lab in
West Orange, New Jersey. The Lab just underwent a multimillion dollar, 2-year renovation. The second and third floors
will be open to the public for the first time, ever. Our meeting
that day will be at John Ellems of Cranford.
Sunday, August 19, we look forward to a meeting at Aldo
and Leasa Mancusi’s, in Brooklyn, New York. Aldo has a
great Edison collection, as well as his fabulous Caruso
Museum, which, he tells me, rivals the one in Milan, Italy.
A meeting notice has been mailed out. Check the mailing
label to confirm that our records show your membership is
paid up for year 2001. Also please be sure your national
membership is current. If you think our records are in error,
please contact our Secretary, Richard Karlsson, 718-2731763, [email protected]
PACIFIC CAN-AM CHAPTER
Reporter: Kurt Morrison
President: Kurt Morrison
The holiday Chapter Meeting was held at the Kenmore,
WA, home of Wes and Bev Spore on December 9, 2000.
Bev must have spent months turning their beautiful home into
a winter wonderland of snowmen, Christmas trees and twinkling lights. Wes demonstrated his recently MIDIfied pipe
organ as well as his new pressure Orchestrelle. The instruments preformed flawlessly and beautiful music filled the
house all day.
Chapter President Mark Smithberg, presiding over the
last meeting of his term, announced the slate of new officers
for 2001: Kurt Morrison, President; Don McLaughlin, Vice
President; Bev Spore, Treasurer; and graciously continuing
on as Secretary, Halie Dodrill.
Treasurer Ward Folsom reported that we currently have
62 individual members and 39 households represented.
Carl Dodrill gave a report on the AMICA Convention
2003. He reported that the committee is now seriously considering Portland, OR, as the site for the Convention.
Visit the
AMICA Web page
at:
http://www.amica.org
106
Norm Gibson gave a report on the plans for the Organ
Rally in Ocean Shores, WA. He asked for volunteers to help
staff an exhibit where the general public would have a chance
to pump an upright player piano.
The “white elephant” gift exchange followed. Chocolate
seemed to be the gift of choice and many gifts changed hands.
Joe Launderville took the prize for getting to open the most
gifts. He had a knack for finding the good ones.
The gift exchange worked up everyone’s appetites and
the potluck dinner that followed left no one hungry.
The next meeting will be on March 31, 2001, at the home
of Norm and Sally Gibson in Ocean Shores, WA.
The ever vigilant and gratefully retired chapter treasurer Ward
Folsom collects the dues while our host Wes Spore adjusts the
holiday decorations
Mark Smithberg and
Bob Wilson watch as
Wes Spore puts the
Aeolian Orchestrelle
through a workout
Norm Gibson, Jack Becvar, Ward Folsom, Phil Dayson enjoy coffee
and a chat in the kitchen
Our hosts for the holiday gathering, Bev & Wes Spore
Leigh Champlin, Aileen
& Ted Miholovich, and
Sally Gibson admire
Aileen’s gift from the
exchange
Fran Willyard, Ina Spady, Don McLaughlin, Ted Miholovich, &
Maury Willyard enjoying the potluck and conversation
107
TEXAS CHAPTER
Reporter: Bryan Cather
President: Jerry Bacon
May, 2000 Chapter Meeting: Good Food, Good Music
What a great meeting!! Those of us (and there were
many) who attended the May 2000 Texas Chapter meeting
hosted by Joe Uher had an absolutely fantastic time. We met
for lunch at Roma’s Italian Restaurant in Decatur, just north
of Fort Worth. The food was superb, and the service genial.
Liquid refreshment was supplied from a well-stocked cooler,
due to the “BYOB” policy at Roma’s, and musical
refreshment was supplied (much to the delight of AMICA
members and other patrons as well) by Joe’s monkey organ.
After filling up on Lasagna, Fettuccini and other Italian
gastronomic delights, we caravanned the few miles to the
lovely home of our hosts, Joe and Barbara Uher. There we
were treated to the magical sounds of Joe’s scratch-built band
organ. We were all amazed by its complexity and perfection
in construction. Upon seeing the “UHER” name across the
front, someone commented, “I guess if you build it yourself,
you have the right to put your own name on it!” It truly was
magnificent.
Also present was Joe’s beautiful Hamilton player piano,
which was kept busy pouring forth melodies when the band
organ was silent. Scattered throughout the house were several
beautiful and unique musical boxes as well. And I would be
remiss in my duties if I neglected to mention the delightful
finger foods that were available to our ever-hungry chapter
members. Thanks again to the Uher’s for a tremendous
meeting!
Joe Uher (with his sidekick) and his monkey organ were a hit with
Texas Chapter members and restaurant patrons at our May meeting.
108
The whole gang at our May meeting in front of Roma’s
“If you build it, they will come.” Joe Uher built this band organ,
and the Texas Chapter came . . . to see it. It was magnificent.
August, 2000 Meeting
Jerry Bacon Hosts Fabulous Meeting . . . Again!!
Jerry Bacon did it again. Once again, the president of
the Texas Chapter hosted a great meeting. We all converged
on Jerry’s house on August 27, 2000, and really did have a
great time. Jerry’s collection includes both a Seeburg “A” roll
nickelodeon, and a similar machine built by western Electric.
We found that the machines are remarkably similar, not by
accident, but because Seeburg and Western Electric were both
owned by none other than Mr. J.P. Seeburg, himself!
Apparently J.P. Seeburg felt there wasn’t enough competition
to keep his Seeburg company “on the cutting edge”, so he
secretly formed Western Electric to insure that Seeburg had
the competition he felt it needed! Its almost as if Bill Gates
had secretly created Apple computer to insure that Microsoft
would have some competition! But Jerry’s collection didn’t
stop there. In addition to the coin pianos, Jerry had a
beautifully restored Gulbransen upright player piano. I say
“had”, because, since the meeting, yours truly has come to
possess this marvelous instrument. Why would anyone want
to get rid of such an instrument? Why, to make room for a
Photoplayer, of course! As I write this, Jerry is eagerly
awaiting the arrival of just such an instrument, which he has
recently purchased. He promises, too, that once it is
fully ensconced in his home, Jerry will once again have us
over. And you’d better believe that that meeting will be
well-attended! These instruments are quite rare, and the
chance to see and hear one is reason enough to come . . . not
to mention the chance to see all your friends in the chapter!
As is usual at Jerry’s house, everyone had a great time.
Thanks for having us, Jerry, and keep us posted about the
photoplayer!
Seeburg was playing an absolutely delightful Christmas roll,
and Tony provided such an ample supply of nickels that the
machine got a real workout. In addition to the pianos, we
were entranced by the sounds of two Regina musical boxes,
including a Bowfront changer that was incredibly beautiful.
Topped off by three outstanding Wurlitzer jukeboxes, Tony’s
collection insured chapter members had plenty to look at - and
listen to!
But just in case you thought our last meeting of the year
was all fun and games, I should mention that we did have a
business meeting. All the officers have agreed to serve
another term, so it looks like we are once again insured of
capable and energetic leadership for the chapter. We have
several meetings “in the works” for 2001, and, as always, you
will be able to read about them beforehand in our Chapter
Newsletter, The Old Piano Roll News, and afterward, in the
AMICA Bulletin.
Jerry Bacon makes a point at our August meeting in his home,
while Haden Vandiver’s attention is drawn elsewhere.
Helen and Jerome Hill at the Palmers.
Mike Barisonek and Haden Vandiver enjoy Jerry Bacon’s
Seeburg at our August meeting.
Texas Chapter Christmas Party a Festive Success
The Texas chapter held its last meeting of 2000 on
Saturday, December 2, at the home of Tony and Myriam
Palmer, in Arlington. After socializing for quite a while, and
delighting in Tony’s outstanding collection, we all sat down to
dinner. Tony and Myriam provided what has to have been
some of the finest baked ham I’ve ever eaten, and everyone
else brought a dish of their own to contribute to the meal. As
usual at potluck dinners, there was more than enough food,
and I must say there are some fabulous cooks at the Texas
Chapter. I could have made a meal of Jerry Bacon’s deviled
eggs alone, but, had I done so, I would have missed many
other fabulous dishes.
L to R: Jerry Bacon, Joe Morris, James Kelsey, Bryan Cather.
But food was not the only reason to come to this great
meeting. Tony’s collection of instruments is outstanding,
including a Knabe Ampico grand, a Steinway Duo-Art
upright, and a great Seeburg KT Special nickelodeon. The
109
rolls they have perforated available to us on a collection of
diskettes, and Chapter members took great delight in perusing
the list and playing their favorite titles.
L to R: Barbara Uher, Joe Uher, Myriam Palmer
We did have a very productive business meeting, where a
goal was presented to chapter members of having six
meetings this year. It is significant to note that just a few
years ago we were struggling to have three meetings a year;
now we are looking at six and it doesn’t seem unlikely that we
will do just that…maybe more! One of the meeting places we
are considering is Houston, where we have not had a meeting
in about fifteen years. These truly are exciting times for the
Texas Chapter! Our thanks to Richard and Janet Tonnesen for
hosting a fabulous meeting. Thanks also to the many
multitudes of Texas Chapter members, who came, especially
Bill Hoot and Glynn Childers, for whom this was their first
meeting as Chapter members, as well as Rich Clayton and
his sister from Austin, and James Quashnock from Wichita
Falls, who all drove a considerable distance to attend.
Bumper Crop at First Meeting of 2001
The Texas Chapter of AMICA’s first meeting of 2001 was
on Saturday, February 10, 2001, at the home of Richard &
Janet Tonnesen. And what a meeting it was!! I arrived late,
having a standing appointment the time the meeting was
scheduled to start, and found Richard & Janet’s home literally
brim-full of AMICAns. While I don’t have the final figures in
front of me, I would speculate we had close to thirty people in
attendance, which is far more than any meeting I have
attended in my ten years as a chapter member. This
remarkable turnout is heartening, especially as I remember
those days, not so long ago, when a turnout of five or six
members was about average, and ten or twelve constituted a
“goodly crowd”.
Richard & Janet Tonnesen are, as many will already
know, the people behind Custom Music Rolls, the firm which
does the perforating for many of the “specialty” roll labels
responsible for many of the fine recuts currently available.
Were it not for Richard & Janet being able to offer their fine
service at remarkably affordable prices, many of us might not
have as many high-quality recut rolls in our collections as we
now do.
Richard Tonnesen demonstrated his computer driven perforator
Of course, for many of those in attendance, the highlight
of the meeting was getting to see the computer-driven roll
reader and perforator Richard designed and built, on which so
many of the rolls in our collections were perforated. Their
setup is quite honestly remarkable, and Richard’s skill and
expertise in designing and building it is a testament to his
mechanical genius. It goes without saying, as well, that
Janet’s combination of personal goodwill and uncanny ability
to find time to do the massive amount of work that goes into
keeping our hobby supplied with quality recuts has also
helped make Custom Music Rolls the unparalleled success it
has become.
For those of us in the Texas Chapter lucky enough for the
perforator to be “old hat”, there was another, equally enticing
attraction. Richard & Janet had acquired the Yamaha
Disklavier that had belonged to the late Richard Barnes, and it
was hooked up to a laptop computer running Chapter Member
Richard Brandle’s program “Windplay”. This program
allows one to play roll image files on one’s computer, or, in
this case, on an electronic player (or even, as we learned, on
the Broadmore “Poweroll” system). Richard had many of the
110
Standing room only at the Tonnesen’s
T
HEY SHALL BE
REMEMBERED
Frankie Carle:
Big Band Leader Had Hit Songs With His Daughter
Frankie Carle, a big-band leader in the 1940s and ‘50s
who created the popular standard “Sunrise Serenade,” died
Wednesday in Mesa, Arizona. He was 97.
A pianist known for his light, buoyant touch and
romantic, danceable melodies, Carle also was a composer
with several hits to his credit, including “Carle Boogie,”
“Lover’s Lullaby,” “Sunrise in Napoli” and “Dream Lullaby.”
His “Oh, What It Seemed To Be” was made popular by Frank
Sinatra. “Sunrise Serenade,” however, was Carle’s bestknowncomposition, rising to No. 1 in the nation in 1938 and
selling more than a million copies. Carle also had several hits
with his daughter, singer Marjorie Hughes, including “A Little
On the Lonely Side,” “Rumors Are Flying” and “It’s all Over
Now.”
Born Francis Nunzio Carlone in Providence, R.I., Carle
was the son of a factory worker who could not afford a piano.
So Carle practiced on a dummy keyboard devised by his
uncle, pianist Nicholas Colangelo, until he found a
broken-down instrument in a dance hall. He performed as a
piano soloist when he was 7 and had his first band ten years
later. He went on to play alongside such greats as drummer
Gene Krupa and trombonists Jack Jenney and Jack Teagarden.
In 1939, he joined Horace Heidt and His Musical
Knights, performing with singer Gordon MacRae, future
bandleader Alvino Rey and singer Art Carney. He eventually
rose to co-bandleader and music director before forming his
own band in 1944 with his daughter as the featured vocalist.
He disbanded the group in the 1950s but continued to record
piano pieces and play with an all-girl rhythm quartet called
Frankie Carle and His Girl Friends.
Joking that he was out to “get some of the money they’re
giving to rock ‘n’ rollers,” he went on tour for the last time in
1983, appearing with the Russ Morgan orchestra and singers
Roberta Sherwood and the De Castro sisters as the Big Band
Cavalcade. The last stop was in Milbank, S.D., on the day
before his 80th birthday. A former resident of Westlake
village, he moved to Arizona about 20 years ago. In addition
to his daughter, he is survived by two grandchildren, a greatgranddaughter and companion Betty Scott.
Funeral services were held at Holy Cross Church in
Mesa, Arizona. Donations may be made to the Arizona
Humane Society.
Dear Amica Bulletin,
Earlier I sent you the obituary notice about pianist
Frankie Carle which was in the Ragtime Newsgroups in
Yahoo, to which I subscribe. With his passing, that ends the
three people whose recordings (and radio performances)
influenced my entry into music roll arranging, starting in ‘52.
(The only other person was Howard Lutter and I don’t know
how well he could play, but his Welte Licensee rolls were the
zenith of mathematical arranging, for me.)
All three pianists who influenced me were Latins: Carle
(Italian), Wally Rose (Portuguese), and Jack Fina (Italian).
Carle’s recordings of “Entertainer’s Rag” by Jay Robert and
“Crazy Bones Rag” were highly influential; I “tuned out” the
tacked-on “rhythm” which was often added to piano solos in
the past (and wasn’t needed for good pianists). Wally’s music
you already know about . . . and Jack Fina - who played at the
Claremont Hotel in Oakland and on records with Freddy
Martin’s Orchestra - was the basis for my bumble boogie roll
(which includes “The Flight of the Bumble Bee” for
comparison’s sake).
Good Latin pianists don’t play in “note clusters” of
dynamics, as cocktail lounge musicians often do. This gives a
sparkle and effervescence to the performance, where every
finger has an individual “touch”. Of course, a Pianola never
really achieves INDIVIDUAL NOTE DYNAMICS, but my
graduated perforations certainly convey the illusion . . . and
one’s manual interpretation or the “reproducing” score (if it
exists) can take the rendition from there.
I have some Mercury 45s of titles like “The Old Piano
Roll Blues” with a pseudonym pianist called “Feb September”
and his “Bay Rum Boys” (for a vocal quartette). The piano
playing is very good. If it isn’t Frankie Carle under a fake
name - as was often the case in those days - then it could be
Frank Froeba (Carle).
Doug Henderson
Dear Robin,
Just a note to enclose the obituary for a Grand Rapids
area AMICA member, Joe Gula. He was at the Leedy
AMICA meeting last fall, and I had seen him at the local
library about two days before his death. At the time I last saw
him we joked and he talked about rolls.
I visited the church visitation and his family had picked a
roll from his collection to place at the casket - a recent QRS of
“Pump that Player Piano” which was appropriate for his
general enthusiasm of the instrument.
Bill Burkhardt
Joseph Charles Gula
Joseph Charles Gula, aged 70, died Thursday, February 8,
2001 peacefully in his sleep. He was preceded in death by his
parents, Joseph and Mary (Panyrek) Gula. He will be greatly
missed by his sister, Dorothy (Harry) Stark; and brother, Louis
(Arlene) Gula; his aunt, Donna Panyrek; and many favorite
nieces and nephews, cousins and other extended family. He
will be missed by many people who knew and loved him. He
was retired from Grandville Printing Company, but continued
to work there part time. Joe spent much of his spare time and
energy helping people by doing volunteer work including
serving at God’s Kitchen and a member of the Pastoral Council at Holy Name Church. Visitation was at the Holy Name of
Jesus Church, 1630 Godfrey SW, in Grand Rapids, where the
vigil Service was held. Mass of Christian Burial was
celebrated at the church, Fr. Donald Weber celebrant. Burial
was at Sts. Cyril and Methodius Cemetery in Gun Lake.
Memorial contributions may be given to the charity of choice.
111
both of Florida.
Stan Freeman
Sent in by Dianne Polan
Los Angeles - Pianist,
composer, raconteur, pungent
wit. The name was Oscar
Levant.
Or was it? The acerbic
Levant, known for radio’s
“Information, Please,” his wry
books, concerts and motion
pictures, died in 1972.
But he was resurrected
memorably in the late 1980s
and early ‘90s by the equally
multitalented - some critics
thought more talented - Stan Freeman in his one-man show,
“At Wit’s End.” Freeman, the lauded Levant impersonator,
concert pianist, composer of two Broadway shows, conductor
for Marlene Dietrich and contributor to the television variety
shows of Mary Tyler Moore and Carol Burnett, died January
13 in his Los Angeles home. He was 80.
When Freeman took the stage as Levant at Los Angeles’
Coronet Theater in 1989, Los Angeles Times drama critic Dan
Sullivan wrote: “Stan Freeman, of the baggy eyes and the
strong piano technique, is just the man to portray him.
Freeman isn’t the grouch that Levant was, but he understands
the disappointment that lies under so much of Levant’s wit.”
Freeman’s act, which he personally called “The Oscar
Show,” was a collaboration with Levant’s widow, June, writer
Joel Kimmel and producer Ron Lachman. It played for
several years in such venues as Royce Hall at the University
of California, Los Angeles; Michael’s Pub in New York;
Charles Playhouse in Boston; and Halsted Theatre Centre in
Chicago.
Nervous about the acting requirements of “At Wit’s End,”
Freeman told the Los Angeles Times in 1993 that the program
nevertheless had become “the most fulfilling thing I’ve ever
attempted.” Freeman met the real Levant while playing piano
with Paul Whiteman’s Army band during a war-bonds tour in
World War II.
“Oscar was one of the celebrities with us. He played
“Rhapsody in Blue” every night,” Freeman said in 1992.
More balanced in temperament than Levant, Freeman may
have shared the better-known entertainer’s frustration over
scattered talents.
Although he performed with symphony orchestras in New
York and other cities, Freeman said he often regretted
diverting his talents into so many entertainment fields instead
of focusing solely on piano concerts.
Born in Waterbury, Connecticut, Freeman studied
classical piano and composing at the Hart School of Music in
Hartford, Connecticut. After serving in the Army during the
war, he joined Tex Beneke’s jazz band in 1946. He made his
classical piano debut at Carnegie Hall in 1947.
Through the late 1940s and the ‘50s, Freeman performed
nightclub shows. He also played piano and joked on radio
shows and on early TV variety shows.
Freeman is survived by two brothers, Marvin and Fred,
112
Carl Doll
By Zachary R. Dowdy
Sent in by Dianne Polan
Carl Doll, a retired BOCES teacher and counselor whose
family pioneered the manufacture of player pianos, died Saturday after a brief illness. He was
just shy of his 81st birthday.
Doll was born in upstate Round
Top, where his parents had a country
home and farm. While their primary
residence was in the Bronx, the family spent summers and weekends at
Round Top for many years, family
members said yesterday.
Doll was a World War II veteran
who served as a staff sergeant with
the Third Army in Europe. After the
war, he attended New York University, where he met his future wife, Diane Cinquini. The couple, who married on December 28, 1946, recently celebrated
their 54th wedding anniversary.
Doll was a third-generation descendant of Jacob Doll and
Sons, who were pioneers in the manufacture of player pianos.
The family firm, which was in business from 1871 to the
mid-1930s, was “. . . one of the leading factors in the piano
industry in the United States,” according to “Men Who Have
Made Piano History,” a book about the industry.
Many of the Doll pianos are still in existence today,
including one in the Smithsonian Institution.
Doll made a career change from pianos to education in
1970, when he decided to work in Nassau and Suffolk
Counties BOCES. He worked in that capacity for 17 years
before retiring from Western Suffolk BOCES in Dix Hills.
He was an avid reader, loved to travel with his wife and
friends and adored the environment, spending much of his
time enjoying the natural resources of New York and beyond.
His sense of humor was legendary, as was his ability to
tell the truth.
“If you asked his advice he would tell the truth in the
most compassionate and loving way, even if the answer
wasn’t the one you wanted to hear,” said his daughter-in-law
Toni Doll. His wife has been getting cards and calls relating
stories of how he touched many lives and made a real difference on many occasions.
Doll is survived by his wife, Diane, two sons, Henry of
Port Jefferson and Paul of Silver Spring, Maryland; and a
daughter, Lisa Doll Bruno of Bethpage.
Also surviving are daughters-in-law Toni Doll of Port Jefferson and Jill Doll of Silver Spring, Maryland, and son-inlaw Daniel Bruno of Bethpage. He is also survived by four
grandchildren. Viewing and a memorial service took place at
Dalton’s Funeral Home in Hicksville.
Paderewski Says:
UThe only objection I have to the "Mignon" is founded
exclusively on its name. as the latter is not in keeping either
with its powerful effect or its enormous importance."
And Arthur Nikisch, the world-famous conductor, states
regarding the marvelous work of this creation of genius that"The reproduction of any composition played for this device
by an artist is in all respects so amazingly true to the original
both as to merely technical perfection and in regard to the
musically poetical element that it really creates the delusion of
having the artist personally before us and of listening to his
own playing."
To you who listen to the musical fascinations of the great
Paderewski we extend an invitation to visit our warerooms
on Monday, Wednesday or Friday afternoons of the week beginning Nov. 11, 1907, after 2:00 o'clock. In the quiet of our
recital chamber you may close your eyes and listen again to
the actual playing of Paderewski exactly as he plays on the
platform in the orchestra concerts.
The Welte-Mignon is the most marvelous and in~enious
musical instrument the world has known. It is a plano of
beautiful tone quality and power enclosed in a cabinet which
also contains a wonderful reproducing device by means of
which the piano playing of Paderewski, D'Albert, Carreno,
Hambourg, Nikisch, Grieg, Strauss. Hofman, De Pachmann,
and seventy other world-famous musicians is given exactly as
these artists performed in the Welte studios in Leipsig.
No words can describe the marvelous work of this instrument. It must be heard to be understood. And to an early
hearing you are cordially invited.
The Welte-Mignon is not sold for use 111 any public place.
PRICE, $1,500.
The S. Hamilton Co.
HAMILTON HALL,
S31~533
WOOD ST., PITTSBURGH.
MASON &. HAMLIN
PIANOS
5
113
ADVERTISING
GENERAL INFORMATION ABOUT
ALL ADVERTISING IN THE AMICA BULLETIN
All advertising should be directed to:
Robin Pratt
Phone (419) 626-1903
Ad copy must contain text directly related to the product/service
being offered. Extraneous text will be deleted at the Publisher’s
discretion. All advertising must be accompanied by payment in
U.S. funds. No telephone ads or written ads without payment will
be accepted. This policy was established by a unanimous vote of
the AMICA Board at the 1991 Board Meeting and reaffirmed at
the 1992 meeting. AMICA reserves the right to edit or to
reject any ad deemed inappropriate or not in keeping with
AMICA’s objectives.
The BULLETIN accepts advertising without endorsement,
implied or otherwise, of the products or services being offered.
Publication of business advertising in no way implies AMICA’s
endorsement of any commercial operation.
AMICA PUBLICATIONS RESERVES THE RIGHT TO
ACCEPT, REJECT, OR EDIT ANY AND ALL SUBMITTED ARTICLES AND ADVERTISING.
All items for publication must be submitted directly to the
Publisher for consideration.
CLASSIFIED ADVERTISING: $.20 per word, $5.00 minimum
for AMICA members. Non-members may advertise double the
member rates ($10.00 minimum). Because of the low cost of
advertising, we are unable to provide proof copies or “tear sheets”.
DISPLAY ADVERTISING
Full Page — 71/2 " x 10" . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Half Page — 71/2 " x 43/4" . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Quarter Page —35/8 " x 43/4" . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Business Card — 31/2 " x 2" . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
$150.00
$ 80.00
$ 45.00
$ 30.00
Non-member rates are double for all advertising.
Special 6 for 5 Ad Offer - Place any ad, with no changes, for a
full year (6 issues), and pay for only 5 issues. Payable in advance.
Photographs or halftones $15.00 each
Loose Sheet or Insert Advertising: Inquire
We recommend that display advertisers supply camera-ready
copy. Copy that is oversized or undersized will be changed to
correct size at your cost. We can prepare advertisements from
your suggested layout at cost.
PAYMENT: U.S. funds must accompany ad order. Make check
payable to AMICA INTERNATIONAL. Typesetting and
layout size alterations charges will be billed.
DEADLINES: Submissions must be received no later than the
first of the odd months (January, March, May, July, September,
November). The Bulletin will be mailed the first week of the
even months.
(Rev. 6-98)
“ Ninety percent of the work done
in this country is done by
people who don’t feel well.”
Teddy Roosevelt
114
FOR SALE
AMPICO ROLLS for sale. Over 200 classical and popular
originals and recuts in top condition. For list and prices by email
or fax, contact [email protected] or telephone
1-415-398-4898. (3-01)
RARE CARLTON A roll phono / see Bowers guidebook page 77,
CHICKERING Ampico A upright. 4 SEEBURG E pianos, Seeburg G parts, pump, spool frame, pipes and misc. ROOS DUTCH
ORGAN. J. Pohlpeter, 503-656-9757. (2-01)
WURLITZER 125 Military Band Organ, trailer, generator, many
125 rolls. Rally ready package or separate. Retired owner, delivery
possible from Iowa. Bob Brandel, 319-583-7537 or e-mail
[email protected] (2-01)
PIANOLA 65 note Piano Player, circa 1903-07, restored. 45+ rolls
(pin end), $1100. Photo on request. John 503-297-9684. (2-01)
1927 SOHMER 6’ Welte-Mignon, Spanish Renaissance art deco
case in suntone walnut and wrought iron accents, from Jean
Harlow’s Home. (See its twin on Roehl pg. 73 in Tom Mix’s
home.) Original finish, mech. Restored. Photos on request.
John 503-297-9684. (2-01)
1918 KNABE Ampico Upright, top of the line American Piano
Company upright in semi-mission/arts and crafts mahogany case,
large full tone like a six foot grand, unrestored, good condition, the
Rarest of the Ampico uprights! Asking $1375. Piano located in
northeastern Ohio with easy access for moving. Mike Kukral,
812-238-9656. (2-01)
Will trade 1995 London Convention piano roll for Sacramento
2000 roll and table favor. Ken Hodge, 42846 Cinema Ave.,
Lancaster, CA 93534; 661-945-4702. (2-01)
MUST SELL!!! Personal Collection of AMICA Honorary
Emmett Ford — 1921 J. & C. Fischer Ampico Grand, restored,
includes bench and 15 rolls - $8,500.; 1922 George Steck
Duo-Art, restored, includes bench and 15 rolls - $8,500.
Contact Emmett Ford - (316) 683-2508 (2-01)
MASON & HAMLIN, Red Welte upright. Exceptionally clean,
operating original. Matching bench and 140-roll library - $7900.00.
Paul Ciancia, 437 Sicomac Ave., Wyckoff, NJ 07481; days:
201-569-8255, eves: 201-891-6842. (3-01)
1922 KNABE Ampico A Grand Reproducer. Excellent unrestored
condition. $4450 including 36 rolls. Reproducer mechanism not
operating, but has not been tampered with. Ivories, piano action,
soundboard, bridges excellent. Mahogany cabinet 5’6”, is checked
but free from gouges which would show as flaws when refinished.
In family since new. Serial No. 92991. Phone: 858-518-4394 and
858-279-8155 San Diego, CA (2-01)
Beautiful 5’8” 1919 CHICKERING AMPICO #130428, piano
completely rebuilt approx. 20 years ago. New strings and new
hammers. Exquisite hand-rubbed lacquer finish on case has been
returned to the original brown mahogany color. This Stoddard
Ampico is the “universal” Ampico: it plays all Ampico rolls
beautifully with ease from the earliest Stoddard rolls to the late ‘B’
rolls. Includes matching bench and thirty-five Ampico rolls. Asking
$15,000. David Wallis 708-366-3103 (Chicago area). (2-01)
NEW PIANO ROLL BOXES - Large and Small available. Small
boxes (2 x 2) are covered with White Litho (bottom), and either
Black Leather or Brown Leather paper (top). Large boxes (3 x 3)
are covered with Black Leather paper (bottom), and Black Alligator
paper (top). Prices are: $1.20 each (small), $2.50 each (large), plus
shipping. A 20% discount will be given for orders over $100.
Many other repair supplies available (leaders, tabs, tubes, flanges,
repair tape). New QRS Rolls 20% off catalog price on orders over
$100, 5% on orders less than $100. Refurbished 88-note rolls (new
leader, tab, labels and box), $6.00 each. Hundreds of used rolls
starting at $3.00 each (guaranteed playable). California Player Roll
Co., www.calroll.com, (760) 244-ROLL (7655) (6-01)
AMPICO B stack for 5’8” Mason & Hamlin $1,000 / offers
considered. Mel Septon (847) 679-3455. (2-01)
AMPICO, DUO-ART & WELTE Rolls, great selection of
popular, classical and medleys. Also, 88-Note Piano Rolls,
hundreds of used rolls, - $3.00 each plus shipping. Also New Old
Stock QRS Rolls, $5.00 each. Will furnish lists on request. Dave
Caldwell, 400 Lincoln Lake Road NE, Lowell, Michigan 49331;
(616) 897-5609 (6-01)
WELTE-MIGNON RECUTS!!! 32 titles in our current catalog.
THRILLING CLASSICAL and HOT LATE POPULAR selections!
Rolls are limited in quantity so order now! Robin Pratt,
[email protected], ARTISTS’ CHOICE MUSIC ROLLS,
419-626-1903, http://www.wiscasset.net/artcraft/pratt.htm
CD’s and Tapes of the San Francisco Starlight Orchestra.
Recordings available are: Charleston Is The Best Dance (tape
only), Doin The Raccoon (tape and CD), Cheerful Little Earful
(tape and CD), Rose Colored Glasses (CD only). CD’s are $18
each, tapes are $12 each which includes shipping and handling.
Payment is by personal check or money order - no credit card sales.
Orders/Inquiries: San Francisco Starlight Orchestra (SFSO),
c/o Jim Brennan, 442 Skylark Street, Windsor, CA 95492;
phone 707-973-6107 (2-01)
1923 CHICKERING 5’8” Grand Ampico; 1921 HAINES 5’4”
Grand; 1913 JACOB DOLL Welte Upright; 1911 STEINWAY
65/88 Upright. All refinished and restored. 1921 CHICKERING
5’8” Grand and 1923 WEBER 5’8” Grand Duo-Art walnut
unrestored. Ashley J. Benson, 217 Madora Lane, Powell, TN
37849; phone 865-947-0481. (2-01-G)
John Wrasse
Piano Moving
Specializing in:
Player Grands, Nickelodeons, & Orchestrions
Anywhere in Continental US & Canada
•••••
25 years experience
Knowledgeable Rebuilder and Collector
Well-known • References Available
Insured
•••••
Your instrument is wrapped, padded and
secured for transport in an insulated and
clean custom-built heavy-duty trailer.
Professional and personal service.
WANTED
John P. Wrasse
AMPICO, DUO-ART, WELTE, RECORDO rolls wanted. I’ll
buy small or large collections. Now is the time to clean out
duplicates and unwanted tunes! Contact: Dave Caldwell,
400 Lincoln Lake Rd. Lowell, MI 49331, phone: 1-616-897-5609,
email: [email protected] (1-02)
WURLITZER Model A harp, Ramey repro. Banjo. J. Pohlpeter,
503-656-9757. (2-01)
All kinds of disc & cylinder music boxes and rare ones as well.
Orchestrions of German origin. Organs of German origin. Related
instruments. Small to medium collections welcome. Offers to: H.P.
Kyburz, Jubilaumsweg 10, CH-5036 Oberentfelden/Switzerland.
(6-01)
We buy all types of standard pianos - “concert grand to miniature
grand” - we sell wholesale to the trade. We exchange pianos for
what you are looking for! Jay Mart Wholesale, “The Piano Store
for Piano Stores”, 800-411-2363; 216-382-7600. (4-01)
Lively ethnic rolls, particularly Arabic and Yiddish. Also need
rolls for harmonica, and Recordo rolls, any condition. For personal
collection, not for resale at mart. [email protected]
Phone 617-864-0808. (2-01-G)
Phone: 319-872-3495 - Cell: 630-542-4298
31449 216th St., Bellevue, IA 52031
(6-01)
A pneumatic restoration service for reproducing
pianos, nickelodeons and player pianos. Factory
new restoration techniques will insure many years
of trouble free operation. UPS shipping cartons
furnished for any style action.
464 Dugan Rd.
•
Richfield Springs, NY 13439
315-858-2164
(6-01)
Magic Melodies
360 LAWLESS ROAD - JAMESTOWN, KY 42629
Reproducing and 88 Note Rolls
Program Rolls
Collectibles
AUCTIONS AND FIXED PRICE SALES!
ALL ROLLS IN PERFECT PLAYING CONDITION
WITH GOOD BOXES
For Periodic Lists Write or Call
Tel. 270-343-2061
Laura
Shelby
(5-01)
115
FOR SALE - TWO E.XQUISITE PIANOS
Weber upright Themodist-Metrostyle 65-note
foot-pumper in an incredible Sheraton-style inlaid _
case which has to be seen to be believed. Serial
number 62012; dates from 1908. Restored some
time ago including hammers and dampers, original pins (tight) and strings, original ivories are
perfect. Could use new bass strings, needs veneer
repair at bottom, case finish is near perfect, but
looks "tired;" could use a top coat or French polishing. For most of its life this piano sat in a
Sheraton-style dining room and was never played,
thus ex<;;ept for the bottom veneer and the pneumatic restoration, the condition is nearly perfect
original. With non-matching slant top bench. Includes a library of 173 65-note rolls collected over
25 years, primarily popular, dozens of ragtime,
musical shows, and operatic fantasies including a
mind-blowing Barber of Seville. If music of this
period and/or ornate pianos are important to you,
this piano and its roll library is "must-have."
$10,000
~
"'-
-,-'"'
Kranich and Bach 5' 4" single-leg Queen Anne mahogany case Welte Licensee with matching bench,
Serial number 70514; dates from 1929. Restored
some time ago with new pins, strings, hammers,
dampers, lacquer finish, original ivories with a few
small cracks on front edges. Matching bench needs
new fabric top. Reproduces magnificently. Offered
together with a roll library painstakingly collected
over 35 years of 419 rolls, 85% classical. It would be
difficult or impossible to assemble these rolls today
and, if done, would be very expensive. You would
be the fourth owner of this piano.
$20,000
Additional larger close-up color photos available on request or visit at a mutually
agreeable time to inspect and play these instruments.
Bill Edgerton, P. O. Box 88, Darien, CT 06820
Tel: 203-655-0566 Fax: 203-655-8066
116
,~-
'\! -./
Meliora Music Rolls
Is now pleased to announce its offering of rare
Welte Licensee
NOTICE TO
AEOLIAN-HA MMOND
ORGAN OWNERS!!!
We are offering two sets of Aeolian-Hammond Organ rolls.
Set #1 is 35 rolls representing a mix of the better music.
classical rolls in addition to its regular catalog
of original and recut 88-Note and Duo-Art rolls.
Set #2 of 55 rolls will augment Set #1 making a nice library
of great music for those desiring a larger variety of music.
Reproducing rolls are chosen for recut
on the basis of musicality, expressiveness
on your instrument and rarity.
Rolls are recut on high-quality paper with quality boxes
and labels. Sets may be ordered separately or as one. Rolls
will have labels, but will not have printed
expression or stop information on them.
Set #1 35 rolls @ $1085
Set #2 55 rolls @ $1705
Call, write or e-mail for our list of titles:
Terms: 1/2 down when reserving your set(s).
Balance and shipping ($1.50 per roll) due when paper,
boxes, flanges and cores arrive.
Shipping is anticipated in several months.
Selections are subjected to minor changes.
Orders, selection list or questions:
Meliora Music Rolls
939 Briarcliff Road, NE
Atlanta, GA 30306-4664
(404) 377-1220
Dick Hack
HACK MECHANICAL MUSIC
2051 Chesapeake Road • Annapolis, MD
410-757-2965 • [email protected]
Please visit our web page at:
http://members.aol.com/meliorarol
(2-01)
WANTED!!!
Can You Help???
AMICA
BROCHURES
(Free)
and
Looking to buy in orginal
and unrestored condition
an Aeolian Company built
BROCHURE HOLDERS
THEMODIST-METROSTYLE
Order from:
($3.00 each Post Paid)
ROBIN PRATT
Pianola pedal player piano
Please call Carl Guhlow
Phone: 419-626-1903
1-909-677-7007
(3-01-G)
117
invites AMICAns to its
Sept. 1-2, 2001 (Labor Day Weekend)
in scenic Ocean Shores, Washington
Join us at the Ocean Shores Convention Center for a weekend of American
and European fair organs, street organs, a steam calliope, and a host of other
mechanical musical instruments. Enjoy the large organs outside, then go indoors
to the exhibit and demonstration rooms. Registration fee includes a mart,
banquet, two box lunches, open house, door prizes, and discount coupons from
local businesses.
Located on the Pacific Ocean, midway between Seattle and Portland, our rally
site is only minutes from beautiful sandy beaches. Galleries, shops, good
restuarants, and recreational activities abound, all within easy walking distance of
the rally. The host hotel, Linde's Landing, is offering special rates.
Information: Norm or Sally Gibson, 125 Taholah St. SE,
Ocean Shores, WA 98569-9549
WANTED TO BUY
~IUSIC BOXES
NIUSICAL CLOCKS
MEUIIJ1NICAL ORGANS
Always in the market for better quality disc and cylinder
music boxes, musical clocks, singing birds, band organs,
player organs, monkey organs, Wurlitzer 78 rpm jukeboxes,
slot machines. Any condition.
MARTIN ROENIGK
75 Prospect Avenue
Eureka Springs, AR 72632
(800) 671-6333
•
(501) 253-0405
www.mechantiques.com·[email protected]
118
(6-02)
AMICA ITEMS FOR SALE
kN
c
o
t
nS
I
ow
Get the Whole Story !
Ship
ped I
mme
diate
The AMICA Bulletin remains the single source of complete information about the technical and
social aspects of our hobby. No home library would be complete without a FULL SET of the
AMICA Bulletins, bound into sets by year.
In addition, technical articles published in the bulletin have been extracted and published as
invaluable reference volumes. More than 30 years of knowledge, discovery and revelation can be
found in the TECHNICALITIES, a complete set of which takes less than 30 inches of shelf space!
ly !
ORDER TODAY! In stock for immediate shipping via United Parcel Service or US Mail.
AMICA Technicalities
Since 1969, AMICA has been publishing into bound volumes, collections of technical articles written and contributed by its members for publication in The AMICA
Bulletin. They may be purchased as follows:
Vol 1 - 1969 to 1971 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .$10.00
Vol 2 - 1972 to 1974 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .8.00
Vol 3 - 1975 to 1977 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .9.00
Vol 4 - 1978 to 1980 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .7.00
Vol 5 - 1981 to 1988 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .20.00
Vol 6 - 1989 to 1993 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .20.00
Postage Paid
Please note: Supplies of the earlier volumes may be
temporarily unavailable as stock is depleted.
Overseas orders may take longer than domestic shipments.
The AMICA Bulletin
1971 through 1999 bound annuals
of the AMICA Bulletins
$24.00 (U.S. Dollars) per year postage paid
Make checks payable to: AMICA International
Send Orders to: Stuart Grigg
Grigg Graphic Services, Inc.
20982 Bridge Street
Southfield, MI 48034
Fax: (248) 356-5636
Attention Chapters!
AMICA
STATIONERY
and
ENVELOPES
This is a reduced
sample of
the small letterheads
which can be purchased.
AMICA Brochure Holders
are now available
for $3.00 each.
They are clear plastic
with AMICA Logo imprinted
on a gold label.
Included will be as many
AMICA New Member Info Brochures
as you wish at no charge.
AMICA STATIONERY & ENVELOPES
For Quantities and Pricing contact:
Stuart Grigg
Grigg Graphic Services, Inc.
20982 Bridge Street
Southfield, MI 48034
Fax: (248) 356-5636
Make checks payable to
AMICA International.
Order from:
Robin Pratt
AMICA Publications
Sandusky, OH 44870-3708
[email protected]
119
REPLACEMENT LEADERS
These 11 1/4" x 17" reprints, not trimmed and without tabs, are excellent replicas of the more popular types of
reproducing piano roll leaders. While intended for roll repairs, they may also be used for decorative purposes. To
splice, overlay new leader on old roll, lay a straightedge on an angle, cut through both papers with a sharp knife,
discard scrap, and butt-join with magic mending tape on top surface.
A. Brown on buff
(For early red label boxes)
B. Black on ivory
(Area for reusable
artist photo)
C. Black on ivory
(Most common)
D. Black on ivory
(Very late rolls by combined
Aeolian!American)
Note: Early Welte's
with blue leaders may
be repaired with this
brown leader. Many of
these when reissued
had brown leaders.
E. Green on ivory
(Most common)
Please make checks payable to
AMICA INTERNATIONAL,
And send to:
BRIAN K. MEEDER
904A West Victoria Street
Santa Barbara, CA 93101-4745
e-mail address for orders:
[email protected]
120
F. Green on ivory
(Favorite Fifty &
Selected Roll Service)
Checks or money
orders from foreign countries
must be drawn
on U.S. bank.
G. Welte
Brown on buff
(Most common)
Style
Price: $ 1.00 each
Minimum Order: $10.00
Quantity
A
B
C
D
Postage and Handling
$ 5.50
Roll Order
$
_
Total Amount (US. $) $
_
E
F
G
Total Quantity
------:'/--~.
v/
------'/
_

JLgarden Quaint oflong ago

Transcription

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