Banjo recording from 1889 - Old Folks At Home played by Clarke & Ray

Thought you guys might be interested in this - a new addition to my 78 collection - and certainly the most unusual.

Old Folks At Home played by Clarke & Ray.

This is a rare Berliner 78 with a hand written label dated May 10th 1889. It was recorded in London. Clarke is Harry Clarke, a pioneering plectrum banjoist who played a banjo tuned eCDGA. 

I haver recently been investing in my collection of classic banjo 78s and I reckon I now have as good a collection as there is.

I will be posting more things of interest as I work through cataloguing everything.

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Russ, are you sure about that banjo tuning? Two overlapping fifths (C and G/  D and A) is an odd tuning for playing chord based music.  Maybe there is a typo and the actual tuning is CG D A. That makes sense to me.   Given the date of the recording it likely that Harry Clarke is not playing the yet-to-be invented plectrum banjo but is playing a five-string banjo with a plectrum.   Playing a five-string banjo with a plectrum using viola tuning which years later would be used for the also yet-to-be invented *tenor* banjo makes sense to me. The 5th string at E is a bit of a puzzle not nearly as strange as CDGA for the long strings. The Harry Clarke entry in "The Banjo On Record" also gives this unlikely tuning. I am skeptical.

I confess I got that little snippet straight out of Heier & Lotz, Jody. I'm sure you're correct.

H & L also say that Harry Clarke was American.  The tuning of eCGDA for five-string banjo as  by a 19th century American banjo player  as his standard tuning supports my idea that there have always been a variety of tunings for banjo.

Russ Chandler said:

I confess I got that little snippet straight out of Heier & Lotz, Jody. I'm sure you're correct.

Russ, this isn't from 1889, it is from 1899. The earliest Berliner discs date from 1892. Typical ones found date from 1896 and later. I have 17 of them and none are banjo! The Smithsonian has a large archive of these discs and it can be dated from the pressing number as well.

I would expect the listed tuning to be a simple mis-communication or just a fabrication by someone who didn't know. This piece in this style was common in gCGBD tuning in England and America (but this is in the "A Notation" period over here so perhaps it has been confabulated from gCGBD and eAEG#B...)

Whoops. Sure enough, "99" is written on the disc label.

Trapdoor2 said:

Russ, this isn't from 1889, it is from 1899. The earliest Berliner discs date from 1892. Typical ones found date from 1896 and later. I have 17 of them and none are banjo! The Smithsonian has a large archive of these discs and it can be dated from the pressing number as well.

I would expect the listed tuning to be a simple mis-communication or just a fabrication by someone who didn't know. This piece in this style was common in gCGBD tuning in England and America (but this is in the "A Notation" period over here so perhaps it has been confabulated from gCGBD and eAEG#B...)

Sorry, a slip of the keyboard. A Berliner from 1889 really would be a collectors item wouldn't it?!

Yah! Collectors would be all over that!. I found mine as a set in an antique store selling as 45s. I had no idea, but the engraved dates and the small spindle hole were suspicious of "early". The whole pile of 17 were only $15, so I obeyed my intuition and bought them all. The only one that is really neat is a recording of Sousa's band playing "The Stars and Stripes Forever" dated just six months after Sousa debuted it (May 1897, the recording is dated November 1897).

Russ Chandler said:

Sorry, a slip of the keyboard. A Berliner from 1889 really would be a collectors item wouldn't it?!

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