1900

Oh, oh, oh, I can barely type I'm so excited. I just got this collection of recordings from 1900, really 1900, not the 1900s but 1900! I am tingly. Enough typing, here are the songs.

Columbia Quartet
Camp Meeting Jubilee
"The name Columbia Quartet was not used for early Columbia discs known as Climax discs. Instead, the Climax Quartet sang on early discs. After the record company switched from its early Climax disc label to the Columbia label, the name Columbia Quartet was cited in spoken announcements. As late as 1908 or so Columbia used the generic "vocal quartette" on labels for performances that had been cut years earlier and remained in the catalog, but by 1906 for new performances the company sometimes put Columbia Quartette on discs."

Edna May
Purity Brigade
"Few people today have heard of Edna May but 100 years ago she was the toast of London and New York. Millionaires sought her hand in marriage, train loads of admirers would follow her where ever she went, she commanded some of the highest fees of her day, and her exploits were reported on both sides of the Atlantic....Edna May first took to the stage at the age of 5, when she played Little Willie Allen in a production of "Dora". By the age of 7 she had joined a children's opera company and performed Gilbert & Sullivan productions in Syracuse." This is so much what I imagine when I think of what music was like in 1900.

Dan W. Quinn
Vaudeville Specialty
"The singer was born in San Francisco, perhaps in 1859 since Jim Walsh reports in the December 1961 issue of Hobbies that Quinn was 79 years old when he died. Posing with other Edison artists of 1900, Quinn appears to be around 40 years old in a photograph that is reprinted in the January 1971 issue of Hobbies. He was occasionally identified as a baritone but most often as a tenor. Quinn was a boy soprano in an Episcopal choir and was evidently a vaudeville performer when he was a young man. His photograph is on the cover of sheet music of the 1890s."