Blind Skeleton's Three Tune Tuesday

Boneapart and Yulia

Welcome to “Three Tune Tuesday,” where vintage sound meets timeless music in a weekly exploration of acoustically recorded gems. Each episode, join us on a unique auditory journey through different genres and eras, as we feature three carefully selected tracks that showcase the rich tapestry of music history. Whether you’re a seasoned audiophile or new to the world of vintage entertainment, there’s something here for everyone. Dive into the heart of music with your host, a passionate collector who brings these tracks to life on period-appropriate phonographs, offering not just songs but an authentic listening experience. From jazz and blues to folk and beyond, our “theme of the week” format keeps every episode fresh and exciting, blending informative insights with a casual, engaging style. “Three Tune Tuesday” is for music lovers and vintage enthusiasts alike, providing a rare glimpse into the past through the lens of a private collection that stands as a testament to the enduring power of music. Tune in weekly to rediscover the sounds that shaped generations, played as they were meant to be heard, on the machines that first brought them to the world’s ears.

  1. Victoria Day

    11H AGO

    Victoria Day

    This week’s Three Tune Tuesday takes us back to the origins of Victoria Day — not the long weekend, not the fireworks, but the woman herself. We open with an “On This Day” entry: “June Brought the Roses,” recorded by contralto Marcia Freer on May 19, 1924, one hundred years to the day before this episode was released — nothing to do with Queen Victoria, but everything to do with the warmth her holiday signals for Canadians. From there we travel to Montreal in 1902, where the Kilties Band of Canada pressed “The Maple Leaf Forever” onto a maroon disc with a tartan paper label for the Berliner Gramophone Company — one of the rarest and most distinctly Canadian objects the early recording industry produced. We close with the song that was Victoria herself: Ian Colquhoun’s “Soldiers of the Queen,” captured in London around 1900, the sound of an empire that believed without question in its own permanence. A New Zealand newspaper noted in 1901 that the death of Queen Victoria had rather interfered with the popularity of the song. It had. Nothing could have replaced her. Berliner Tartan Label

    1h 1m
  2. Preventative Health (The Purge)

    MAY 12

    Preventative Health (The Purge)

    This week on Three Tune Tuesday, we’re thinking about health — specifically, the kind of health check that requires preparation, a gown, and a level of personal exposure that no one particularly looks forward to. We open with a piece of good timing: “By the Saskatchewan,” recorded on this very date in 1911 by baritone Andrea Sarto, taken from the hit Broadway musical comedy The Pink Lady, with music by Ivan Caryll — who, as it happens, was also born on May 12, making this a double centenary of sorts. From there we move to Rosa Henderson’s 1923 Victor recording of “Good Woman’s Blues,” a spare and dignified classic blues performance written by George Butts and Hulbert Esmere, in which a woman of considerable self-possession states her case plainly, accompanied by nothing more than Wendell Talbert’s piano. We close with Dame Clara Butt, whose vast contralto fills Samuel Liddle’s setting of Henry Francis Lyte’s immortal hymn “Abide with Me” — written by Lyte on his deathbed in 1847 and first sung at his funeral. It is, in short, a playlist assembled in the spirit of a colonoscopy: you go in hoping for reassurance, you endure what must be endured, and you emerge, if all goes well, with a clean bill of health and a renewed appreciation for being upright.

    49 min
  3. Cinco de Mayo

    MAY 5

    Cinco de Mayo

    This week’s Three Tune Tuesday heads south of the border for Cinco de Mayo, tracing the sound of Mexican national pride through three recordings from the acoustic era. We open with a happy accident of the calendar: Arthur Pryor’s Band recorded Franz von Suppe’s “Jolly Robbers Overture” on this very date in 1909, a piece of spirited Viennese theatricality that had been delighting concert audiences since 1867. From there we travel to Mexico City and July 1907, where Victor dispatched a recording team to capture the country’s musical culture on disc — baritone Manuel Romero Malpica delivering Miguel Lerdo de Tejada’s danza mexicana “No lo diré,” followed by the Banda de Policia de Mexico under Velino M. Preza playing his march “Viva Mexico!” Together, these three recordings offer a rare glimpse of how Mexico sounded to itself, and to the world, at the height of the Porfiriato.

    55 min
  4. April

    APR 28

    April

    April has a sound, and this week’s Three Tune Tuesday goes looking for it across three recordings that span a decade of the early phonograph era. We open with Charles Harrison’s 1922 Victor recording of “April Showers,” the optimistic Tin Pan Alley standard that Al Jolson had introduced just months earlier on Broadway in Bombo — a song built on the oldest of consolations, that rain makes the flowers grow. From there we move into stranger, more beguiling territory with Sybil Sanderson Fagan’s 1923 Vocalion recording of “April Sighs,” a whistling solo that trades Harrison’s warm tenor reassurance for something altogether more elusive — an April mood rendered not in words at all, but in pure breath and tone. We close with the oldest recording in the set, the Emerson Military Band’s 1918 take on “April Smiles,” a waltz originally composed by the French Maurice Depret and arranged for band by the Canadian Louis-Philippe Laurendeau — the man who also gave the world its definitive circus clown theme. Showers, sighs, and smiles: three ways April announces itself, caught in shellac before the world had quite decided what recorded music was supposed to be.

    53 min
  5. 420

    APR 21

    420

    Three Tune Tuesday marks 4/20 the only way it knows how: by reaching into the pre-1926 catalog and finding three recordings whose names, in combination, do all the work without saying anything at all. We open under the canopy — Renée Chemet’s violin drifting through Francis Thomé’s pastoral miniature “Under the Leaves,” recorded the day after 4/20 in 1924. Then the Victor Military Band crashes in with a one-step medley from Rudolf Friml’s Broadway smash High Jinks, whose plot concerns patients of a Dr. Thorne who take a mysterious Tibetan elixir that causes them to laugh and fall in love — and the show’s best-loved song is the one where they try to describe how it feels. We close with “Some Smoke,” a 1913 dance number by Sigmund Romberg, one year before he’d become Broadway’s most prolific house composer. Plausible deniability maintained throughout. Happy 4/20.

    46 min
  6. Wax Cylinders

    APR 14

    Wax Cylinders

    This week on Four Tune Tuesday, we’re going old. Very old. Rather than our usual today-in-history framing, we’re taking a detour into the cylinder era — the format that preceded the 78rpm disc entirely, and the one that gave birth to the commercial recording industry in the first place. We open in 1891 with what is, as best as we can determine, the oldest cylinder in the UCSB Cylinder Audio Archive: a cornet solo by D.B. Dana, accompanied at the piano by bandleader Edward Issler, performing the “Cujus Animam” from Rossini’s Stabat Mater — recorded live, by hand, into a phonograph horn, with no possibility of duplication. Our second cylinder is a vocal piece from the same year, J.W. Myers singing “Bell Buoy” for the North American Phonograph Company — not a record label, but the chaotic network of thirty-three regional companies through which Edison tried, and ultimately failed, to dominate the nascent industry. From there, we turn to the violin — and to one of the more quietly fascinating chapters in recording history. Charles D’Almaine was the first person ever to record with a Stroh violin, an instrument invented in 1899 specifically to solve the problem that the standard violin posed for acoustic recording. We hear him first in 1899, before the Stroh, on a conventional violin in a solo arrangement of the “Miserere” from Verdi’s Il Trovatore — and then in 1904, after, on a joyful fiddle medley that includes, somewhere in the middle, a reel he apparently named after himself. Stroh Violin [(https://ids.si.edu/ids/deliveryService?id=NMAH-92-13660&max=600)](https://ids.si.edu/ids/deliveryService?id=NMAH-92-13660&max=600)

    58 min
  7. Easter and Passover

    APR 7

    Easter and Passover

    Spring arrives with music this week on Three Tune Tuesday, as we mark the convergence of Easter and Passover with three recordings that span the full range of what this season sounded like on early shellac. We open with a detour into pure coincidence — Vessella’s Italian Band recorded the “Blushing Maiden March” on this very date in 1911, a bright and breezy piece of light entertainment from one of Victor’s most beloved concert bands, the resident ensemble of Atlantic City’s famous Steel Pier. From there we turn to the sacred, with tenor Frederic Freemantel’s “Resurrection,” a 12-inch Red Seal recording of Oliver Holden’s great hymn tune “Coronation” — a melody so enduring it is considered the oldest American hymn tune still in continuous use, here given the full solemnity of Victor’s prestige format. We close on the other side of spring’s spiritual calendar, with Cantor Mordechai Hershman’s deeply moving “K’shimcho,” a Passover prayer recorded with Nathaniel Shilkret conducting, in which one of the golden age of chazzanut’s finest voices brings an ancient liturgical text into the modern world of recorded sound.

    58 min
  8. Inner Peace

    MAR 31

    Inner Peace

    This week on Three Tune Tuesday, the theme is Inner Peace — inspired by a vision over the weekend. We open with a Today in History pick: on this very date in 1907, Prince’s Military Band recorded The Dream of the Rarebit Fiend for Columbia Records, a chaotic, lurching musical portrait of the nightmare state that reminds us what peace is not. From there we move to something quieter — the Revillon Trio’s 1915 instrumental recording of Somewhere a Voice Is Calling, a melody written by Arthur F. Tate on holiday in Whitby, England, in which the voice of the title goes unheard and the listener is left simply waiting, still, in the dusk. We close with one of the most hard-won declarations of peace in the entire hymn tradition: It Is Well With My Soul, recorded in 1906 by William F. Hooley and the Handel Mixed Quartet, the text written by Horatio Spafford as his ship crossed the spot in the Atlantic where his four daughters had drowned. Three recordings, three different ways of arriving at the same place — because inner peace, it turns out, is never simply given. It has to be found. Lyrics Somewhere a Voice is Calling Dusk and the shadows falling O’er land and sea; Somewhere a voice is calling Calling for me Dusk and the shadows falling O’er land and sea; Somewhere a voice is calling Calling for me Night and the stars are gleaming Tender and true; Dearest, my heart is dreaming Dreaming of you Night and the stars are gleaming Tender and true; Dearest, my heart is dreaming Dreaming of you It is Well With my Soul When peace, like a river, attendeth my way, When sorrows like sea billows roll; Whatever my lot, Thou hast taught me to say, It is well, it is well with my soul. Refrain: It is well with my soul, It is well, it is well with my soul. Though Satan should buffet, though trials should come, Let this blest assurance control, That Christ hath regarded my helpless estate, And hath shed His own blood for my soul. My sin—oh, the bliss of this glorious thought!— My sin, not in part but the whole, Is nailed to the cross, and I bear it no more, Praise the Lord, praise the Lord, O my soul! For me, be it Christ, be it Christ hence to live: If Jordan above me shall roll, No pang shall be mine, for in death as in life Thou wilt whisper Thy peace to my soul. But, Lord, ’tis for Thee, for Thy coming we wait, The sky, not the grave, is our goal; Oh, trump of the angel! Oh, voice of the Lord! Blessed hope, blessed rest of my soul! And Lord, haste the day when the faith shall be sight, The clouds be rolled back as a scroll; The trump shall resound, and the Lord shall descend, Even so, it is well with my soul.

    55 min
See All (114)

About

Welcome to “Three Tune Tuesday,” where vintage sound meets timeless music in a weekly exploration of acoustically recorded gems. Each episode, join us on a unique auditory journey through different genres and eras, as we feature three carefully selected tracks that showcase the rich tapestry of music history. Whether you’re a seasoned audiophile or new to the world of vintage entertainment, there’s something here for everyone. Dive into the heart of music with your host, a passionate collector who brings these tracks to life on period-appropriate phonographs, offering not just songs but an authentic listening experience. From jazz and blues to folk and beyond, our “theme of the week” format keeps every episode fresh and exciting, blending informative insights with a casual, engaging style. “Three Tune Tuesday” is for music lovers and vintage enthusiasts alike, providing a rare glimpse into the past through the lens of a private collection that stands as a testament to the enduring power of music. Tune in weekly to rediscover the sounds that shaped generations, played as they were meant to be heard, on the machines that first brought them to the world’s ears.

Information