“Black artists by and large, who were the ones who performed and recorded, get wiped out of the picture because they say, ‘Well, it’s not really country.''
The specialty label Archeophone Records has issued a 45-rpm record of New Orleans singer Louis Vasnier performing “Thompson’s Old Gray Mule.” MUST CREDIT: Archeophone RecordsAbout 10 years ago, the collector paid about $100 for a box of wax cylinders at an auction in Pennsylvania coal country.
This month, Archeophone, a specialty label devoted to restoring recordings dating back to the 19th century, released a 45-rpm record of the 1891 performance. Label co-founder Rich Martin’s research on Vasnier comes with a revelation: The oldest country recording in existence was recorded by a Black man.
Martin wants to revisit the complicated relationship country music has had with race. Credit and record deals have typically been hard to come by for Black musicians. It took until 2000 for the Country Music Hall of Fame to induct its first Black artist, Charley Pride, and only two others have joined him.
“We shouldn’t have to do this at all,” Giddens says. “Like, this should have been part of the story all along. But fine, we spend the energy doing it because you see what’s happening right now in the United States, the divisions and how even a discussion of whether Beyoncé is allowed to make country music becomes a political part of a political agenda.”
“I treat these things, they’re like polar bears or the California condor,” Levin says. “If they’re not brought in from the wild, they’re basically getting destroyed. Every 10 or 20 years, they go from one private collector to another and they’re soft wax. You drop them from one half inch on a table and they shatter.”
Martin’s extensive liner notes draw on historical census documents and cylinder catalogues to tell the story of Vasnier and the Louisiana Phonograph Co., one of many outfits that seized on Thomas Edison’s sound-capturing invention in the late 19th century.
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