HMR Project: History of Music & Modern Recording

William F. Denny

Thought to have been born in Boston in 1860, tenor William F. Denny's first recordings for the New England Phonograph Company went down in 1890, issued in 1891. Will F. Denny, the form to which this brief profile keeps, had started, spent and ended his career performing on the vaudeville stage, a greatly popular variety show which circuits throughout the land kept America freshly entertained. As Denny's career was peaking, Theodore Roosevelt became President (1901) and straw-hat ragtime was booming. There not yet a Federal Reserve nor an income tax, America had become a land of milk and honey which, of course, wouldn't last with World War I just ahead. The iceman yet did a little moaning and groaning as well, lugging blocks of ice up apartment stairs to keep food fresh in ice boxes prior to refrigeration. The refrigerator was invented in 1899 by Albert Marshall. But until it became a common appliance, ice houses carved from lakes to make domestic deliveries. Being at the avant-garde of cylinder recording also made Denny among the first to record on flat disc. DAHR begins its sessionography of Denny on disc per 'Czar of the Tenderloin' on Berliner 1748 in 1887. The Berliner label was the first to distribute disc recordings, founded by Emile Berliner who had also invented disc recording and the gramophone in Washington D.C. in 1887, the first getting pressed in 1894. His 'Meet Me In St. Louis, Louis' below is a classic ragtime standard written in 1904 by Kerry Mills and Andrew Sterling.