About the History of Music & Modern Recording Project

Pride & Joy   Double Trouble w Stevie Ray Vaughn   1985

In April of 2023 I developed problems with the server that I've used for the last twenty years. Though this has been damaging to this website, concerning which said server cares not, I've experienced some difficulty switching to a more capable website host which can offer basic reliability in return for the money, or at least try. When a server seems more an enemy than anything else it's time to split, long since. And yet I'm still inexplicably stuck with an everyday Jabba the Hutt which is paid an incentive to pimp WordPress while not giving a damn about doing a fundamental job as a website host. That is, there are a plethora of servers, but nearly all are trying to be more worthless in order to suck up big money with even less effort. Server problems arrived with several other troubles so I took an hiatus of several months. I also wished to give opportunity to some other vocation more important or valuable in the world than music history. But one must be in situation and none arrived beyond music history. Though not all of those problems got solved, by September I was beginning to regret taking so much time away from this project. Now that I'm back at it, regretting that not all of those problems got fixed, I'm about 60 articles behind, only starting what should have been finished long since. As of October (2023) I'm only nearing the end of the Baroque period, and have a considerable distance to go to complete early jazz and blues in the twenties. I may be working on early blues alone for the remainder of 2024. I typically write three profiles each week, one in classical, two in modern recording. Once I arrive to artists who began their recording careers in the thirties we'll have covered the first four decades of modern recording through cylinders or shellac and will start examining other genres, periods and locations (in the Western hemisphere). We'll have reached the vinyl era in modern recording and have passed through Classical (Mozart its height) well into the considerably more extensive realm of the Romantics.

The HMR Project is Version 2 begun in 2021 of Version 1 that is the VF History which serves as notes to this work begun tentatively in 2011, in earnest in 2013 when I no longer drove big trucks. The VF History is dated by releases whereas the HMR is dated per recording sessions. The VF History is a densely compacted contextual arrangement of chronological chapters intended to cover the Western Hemisphere from circa 500 AD to artists of the modern period who recorded to commercial issue by 1970. The design of jamming, say, 40 artists, on the same page in the VF didn't permit the best coverage of individual musicians, that getting sacrificed to scheme. Thus Version 2 in which each artist finds an individual page to take up all the space that is needed. Though planned from the beginning, it took at least nine years to "finish" Version 1 first. Like the VF History, the ten main divisions of this Project are Black Gospel, Blues, Classical, Country (C&W), Folk, Jazz, Latin, Boogie Woogie, R&B-Rock and Popular including ragtime and the silver screens of film and later television.

Background: The rough draft of nigh all of the VF History had been written between 2012 and 2015. I then spent six years going more in depth with sessionographies and such. Unfortunately, I grossly miscalculated the time it would require to finish Version 2. I've sabotaged myself yet again with another impossible task, for there are nearly 2700 profiles in VF. This means that a lot of errors like typos in the VF History won't get addressed for years to come. Most such errors are spooky actions of my own, but sometimes I've got to wonder.

I experimented with making the HMR Project its own website until I couldn't get anywhere by various other options for too long. So I simplified and gave Viola Fair another gig as the Fat Lady. The launch of the HMR Project was populated per organizational and representative purposes (directions it will be heading). HMR will cover largely Classical, Jazz and R&B-Rock as I cycle through genres and periods.

As of this update (4/23) I'm happy to keep to a chronological pace through baroque which I might be able to finish by August of 2023. (No longer: shut down in April.) In modern recording I'm aiming to be largely finished with the Roaring Twenties by August as well, having traced recording through its first forty years (ditto shutdown in April). Delay of late means January of 2024 instead of (last) August, though I doubt if I'll be able to cover jazz in the twenties by then. When I finally do, sometime next year, instead of chronologically advancing into swing, which time period could require a couple years to complete including above 100 jazz artists alone, I intend to start cycling through all 33 sections of modern recording in the VF History, thus far neglected in order to see the first four decades of recording emerge in the rearview mirror, around the time that Edison Records shuttered its windows in 1929 and Victor issued its first vinyl in 1931. Once farewell to shellac begins or thereabout is a good place to bust out of the box of a tight chronological procedure. Early before late will remain my notion in general, though not strictly. I can envision actually possibly completing Classical several years down the road. But cycling through 33 sections of modern recording means visiting each only every seven or eight months. That is, once I present a chord of blues, folk, Latin, rock, whatever, it won't cycle back around to that genre or period for at least another half year: it could take thirteen years to address only the 26 artists in Gospel, with most of other genres and periods yet undone.

Background: The VF histories had originally been pursued upon discovering so much at YouTube of high historical or rare value. One could provide a chronological history pointing to audio or video samples of just about anyone or anything at any time. Unfortunately, a link check in 2013 returned so many flown that I wondered if I should pursue it at all. YouTube's value as an archival tool was peerless for but a moment, the next nigh nil due to disappearing references, meaning a history built on shifting sands. I nevertheless continued to approach it as a YouTube History to gain aught that one could of a musical source of yet considerable value. References kept disappearing as fast as I pointed to them, but I kept calling it a YouTube History until 2021 when the sun came out, I surprised to learn that it was actually a Viola Fair history with the YouTube part continuously vanishing. YouTube references in this project began disappearing several months even before its launch. They are included as are because I can't go forward by rewriting all the past. For now, embedded videos in HMR reveal extinct sources better than only text links in VF. Nor do I repair those, having been constant. As for all the "Video Unavailable" on web pages featuring videos, individual channels decide whether or not their material should display on websites other than YouTube. I use this opportunity to thank all the music curators at YouTube without whose video contributions there would be neither VF nor HMR at all. Howsoever, advertising at YouTube has long been making waste of what had considerable potential once upon a time. Advertising at YouTube is a complicated mystery for individual channels whether monetized or not. Even channels which don't want advertising blocking their flow can end up with it anyway. But this is Earth, where doing anything at all if not for some scratch tends more toward the unique than common, and YouTube is a corporate machine with only one objective (call it monotheism if, perchance, money really is God). Where music is concerned it cares not, say, that some curator may host the last existing copy of a rare recording, then die, and that disc end up forever lost in a landfill. YouTube's only concern is to draw as much profit as possible from that history before it disappears. While YouTube would appear to host a wealth of historically important material at any given time, it is at once fleeting and can be extremely difficult to use as a referential source, which advertising absent of any sense of measure in the least doesn't much assist.

This website doesn't look real good on smartphones, that is, the back of a postage stamp. My apologies to the many without access to screens of reasonable size, but endlessly geeking smartphone code doesn't get music history done. This site is built with a rather ancient editor and code isn't one of my favorite things. Since writing code for smartphones wants to compete with music history I've largely blown off the former. I might get this fixed sometime, as this doesn't do wonders for traffic in a world where only phones are used, but not today, since numerous sites now compatible with smartphones are also now more difficult to use with a PC. Google doesn't give a fig about websites coded for any interface excepting phones. Only to have a website at all has become a never ceasing technological pain in the neck. Mom and Pop disappeared to Facebook years ago as billion dollar corporations took over the web to bloat it with advertising and hype. Content is no longer Google's major concern, but that people can be steered to Amazon with a phone as the internet moves from a means of sharing information to an agora. Selling knowledge has become infinitely more important in the world than knowledge itself. Universities and newspapers have been ignoring the latter for ages now.

As this project begins I note some major changes in references since the VF History. One major loss to online discography is a restructuring of DAHR (ADP) with some of its master lists entirely removed. Hopefully this is temporary and will resolve itself. Some references to Google Books, the LOC, the BBC, et al, no longer point. Of major loss is Scott Alexander's Red Hot Jazz discography from 1895 through 1929. Google doesn't pull the pages that I cached when Red Hot Jazz went down before. I should have taken screen shots of Alexander's entire website. References to Red Hot Jazz will remain in the VF History, like other dead links, to inform of the source. Fortunately for HMR, Syncopated Times has assumed the project of presenting Alexander's extensive sessionography of early recording. This is incomplete at this writing and it's a big job. As well, the WorldCat authority source has been removed from the internet as of March 2023. Not a few dead links will have to remain. I also link often to Internet Archive: historical audio, historical documents, other manuscripts and scores. I don't use Internet Archive in research itself a lot, but point to it often as an instrument of confirmation, example or evidence. Where is the proof that Blah Blah was published in 1733 and what are its contents? There at Internet Archive. It remains to be seen how the recent lawsuit against Internet Archive will affect the HMR Project, but it won't be positive if a link to Blah Blah published in 1733 with an analysis of x by X on page 248 goes dead. That's the transitory internet where all are homeless. Though links that are ten or twenty years old on this website remarkably remain steady, references tend to fade more than collect, eventually never getting out alive. When does Wikipedia disappear, everything as secret in the end as the beginning?

Discographies should be fairly well covered in HMR with the exception of Tom Lord's jazzography. Though used extensively, I don't link to it because I try to keep references, in general, to what anyone can access. Find the Index to Lord's sessionography and its Home Page.

As for works by classical composers, find directories or thematic catalogs at ClassicalNet. I had begun to include a kind of geographical or national menu in this project since those are major frames for histories like this. But that somehow got left behind like a suitcase at the station while the train was taking off. In lieu of that there is the Petrucci Music Library (IMSLP). A menu of composers by religious affiliation would also be a good reference, enough and perhaps not so difficult (ha ha) as to tempt me to make one. With religion playing so major a part in music history I shake my head with "How did I miss this?" that a menu for such was wholly absent when the train took off. It doesn't go far, leaving out such as Lutherans, atheists, et al, but here are lists at the least of those who were Catholic or Anglican.

A hearty thank-you to Nhu Thao of Discogs for her superhuman assistance with not a few images.

One might note the want of advertising on this website. I find it distracting from other tasks at hand. There is one product, however, without which this website wouldn't be for the last twenty years, that CCleaner which I particularly recommend for the giant assistance and zero problem that it's ever been. I've no affiliation with CCleaner other than constant use of it. Nor do I affiliate or engage in commercial relationships with anyone else. This website is wholly educational. I've nothing to gain from any links, all of which are placed because that's where the information is. They contribute to understanding the topic at hand. Who use this site will never be impeded by an intrusive advertisement stuck exactly where you're reading. There aren't 57 varieties of cookies from which to choose here, zero pop-ups, no cosmic mysteries requiring subscriptions, and the only notifications anyone is ever going to get are what's already here: you're reading it, your email address not requisite. There's nothing in your face here except the subject at hand as clear as I can make it. Among scholastic sources I list not a few vendors because it's usually a mixed bag. Information is otherwise in the interest of making it easy to find something on the internet relevant to content, having no opportunity to be biased by considerations of profit. If it's listed in the HMR Project it's simply because it's a good source or better than others as I try to cover the spectrum. Nor is mine any agenda beyond what is a responsibility to itself, being a directly objective history of music and modern recording. It doesn't exist to persuade anyone of any way to go ideologically, philosophically, politically, religiously or otherwise. While not suggesting to anyone how to spend their money, the references that I use because they've done the work are a good clue, because I have too.

For various perspectives on this or that like humor or news I visit a small spectrum of social media sites from Gettr to Mastodon once per week while making drops. I also share this journey through music history at:

Bluesky

Pinterest Classical & Modern Recording (launch only)

Trust Cafe

Truth Social

Tumblr Classical

Twitter now X Modern Recording

YouTube Playlists (launch only)

The HMR Project icon at all the above webpages is from Man Ray's Le Violon d’Ingres of 1924 for reason that HMR is hosted at Viola Fair, which website got its name nigh twenty years ago inspired by that photograph. I mention this here across my lady's back.

So where is this humbly trumpeted HMR Project?