How the Sounds You Hear in Movies Are Really Made: Discover the Magic of “Foley Artists”

Have you ever worked as an “extra” on a film or tele­vi­sion shoot, one of the anony­mous many some­where in the back­ground while the main char­ac­ters advance the sto­ry up front? If so, you know that to be seen but not heard onscreen requires doing exact­ly that. Even though a crowd­ed par­ty scene, for instance, real­ly does sound like a crowd­ed par­ty scene in the final prod­uct, the shoot hap­pens in some­thing close to silence. Only the stars speak, and indeed make any sound at all; every­one else just mimes their live­ly con­ver­sa­tions. Sound design­ers add the crowd noise lat­er, after the shoot, just like they add music, foot­steps, doors open­ing and clos­ing, crack­ling of fires and the whip­ping of winds, and pret­ty much every oth­er sound you hear besides speech.

“The Mag­ic of Mak­ing Sound,” the Great Big Sto­ry video above, reveals the work of Foley artists, some of the most lit­tle-known crafts­men in the enter­tain­ment indus­try. We usu­al­ly think of real­ism as a pri­mar­i­ly visu­al qual­i­ty, prais­ing some­thing that “looks real” almost as often as we com­plain about what “looks fake,” but much of what makes dra­mat­ic action onscreen feel real hap­pens on a com­plete­ly unseen lev­el.

Foley artists (named for ear­ly sound-effects design­er Jack Foley) cre­ate all the inci­den­tal sounds you’d expect to hear in real life, so if and only if they do their work well, nobody in the audi­ence will notice it. (Min­i­mal Foley work, com­bined with dia­logue dubbed in a stu­dio instead of record­ed dur­ing the shoot, con­tributes great­ly to the “dream­like” qual­i­ty of some old­er films, espe­cial­ly from Europe and Asia.)

The Great Big Sto­ry video, along with the short pro­file of vet­er­an Hol­ly­wood Foley artist Gary Heck­er just above, show mas­ters of the trade employ­ing a vari­ety of its tools: bags of corn starch for snow, gloves with paper­clips taped to the fin­ger­tips for dog paws, and for that inevitable (if implau­si­ble) schwing of a sword being unsheathed, a kitchen spat­u­la. Just like visu­als, sound requires a cer­tain degree of not just imag­i­na­tion but exag­ger­a­tion to achieve that “larg­er than life” feel­ing. Still, the Foley craft has its ori­gins in noth­ing more grand than the sounds made by hand to accom­pa­ny radio dra­mas in the 1920s. The pro­fes­sion may have moved on from the coconut-shell horse hooves of near­ly a cen­tu­ry ago — these videos show the cur­rent indus­try stan­dard, a jer­ry-rigged look­ing device made of plunger cups — but most of its equip­ment has remained reli­ably unchanged. How many oth­er kinds of film-and-tele­vi­sion tech­ni­cians can say the same?

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How the Sound Effects on 1930s Radio Shows Were Made: An Inside Look

Hear 9 Hours of Hans Zim­mer Sound­tracks: Dunkirk, Inter­stel­lar, Incep­tion, The Dark Knight & Much More

Why Mar­vel and Oth­er Hol­ly­wood Films Have Such Bland Music: Every Frame a Paint­ing Explains the Per­ils of the “Temp Score”

240 Hours of Relax­ing, Sleep-Induc­ing Sounds from Sci-Fi Video Games: From Blade Run­ner to Star Wars

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

Why Stradivarius Violins Are Worth Millions

In 2011, a Stradi­var­ius vio­lin in pris­tine con­di­tion sold for $15.9 mil­lion. And then, in 2014, anoth­er Strad went up for auc­tion with a min­i­mum bid of $45 mil­lion. That auc­tion failed, but it under­scored a trend: The price and pres­tige of Stradi­var­ius vio­lins keep climb­ing, dri­ven by the insa­tiable demand of investors and pro­fes­sion­al musi­cians.

But is a Stradi­var­ius real­ly worth that large sum of mon­ey? As this primer from Vox sug­gests, it depends who you ask. In a high­ly-pub­li­cized blind test, pro­fes­sion­al vio­lin­ists could­n’t tell the dif­fer­ence between mul­ti-mil­lion dol­lar Strads and more mod­est­ly-priced mod­ern vio­lins. On the oth­er hand, some elite vio­lin­ists swear by the Stradi­var­ius, claim­ing that the sub­tle supe­ri­or­i­ty of the instru­ment only becomes appar­ent over time, when it’s played over years, not days or months.

That debate will con­tin­ue. And as it does, the Stradi­var­ius will only get older–and, yes, more fetishized as an his­tor­i­cal object that’s con­sid­ered price­less.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

What Makes the Stradi­var­ius Spe­cial? It Was Designed to Sound Like a Female Sopra­no Voice, With Notes Sound­ing Like Vow­els, Says Researcher

Why Vio­lins Have F‑Holes: The Sci­ence & His­to­ry of a Remark­able Renais­sance Design

Musi­cian Plays the Last Stradi­var­ius Gui­tar in the World, the “Sabionari” Made in 1679

Watch Price­less 17-Cen­tu­ry Stradi­var­ius and Amati Vio­lins Get Tak­en for a Test Dri­ve by Pro­fes­sion­al Vio­lin­ists

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19th Century Atlas Creatively Visualizes the Expansion of Geographical Knowledge Over 4000 Years of World History: From the Biblical flood to the Industrial Revolution

The age of the “uni­ver­sal his­to­ry” has come and gone. The genre flour­ished in times when it seemed pos­si­ble to assume a van­tage point out­side of time—to see pur­pose and pat­tern in thou­sands of years of human action. “It might be pos­si­ble,” wrote Immanuel Kant, “to have a his­to­ry with a def­i­nite nat­ur­al plan for crea­tures who have no plan of their own.” The view assumed by such a his­to­ry tends to exclude the cir­cum­scribed per­spec­tive of the view­er, or—in Ralph Wal­do Emerson’s famous, and oft-par­o­died, phras­ing, “all mean ego­tism van­ish­es. I become a trans­par­ent eye­ball; I am noth­ing; I see all; the cur­rents of the Uni­ver­sal Being cir­cu­late through me; I am part and par­cel of God.”

Few his­to­ri­ans today assume such a gods-eye-view, for bet­ter or worse, but with­out it, we would nev­er have seen the devel­op­ment of its visu­al ana­logue: the time­line map, an info­graph­ic form espe­cial­ly pop­u­lar in the 18th to the ear­ly 20th cen­turies, when thinkers from Schiller to Herder to Kant to Hegel to Marx to Weber pro­duced uni­ver­sal accounts of human his­to­ry that, to vary­ing degrees, pur­port­ed to account for vast his­tor­i­cal devel­op­ments as the move­ment of imper­son­al forces toward some def­i­nite goal.

From the per­spec­tive of the time­line map, civ­i­liza­tions grow nat­u­ral­ly from each oth­er like branch­es from a tree, or flow one into anoth­er like a river’s trib­u­taries, or pro­duce, as in John B. Sparks “His­tom­ap,” col­or­ful puz­zles in which every piece has its neat­ly-assigned place….

We’ve fea­tured sev­er­al such maps here, like the His­tom­ap and Eugene Pick­’s 1858 Tableau De L’His­toire Uni­verselle, both from the exten­sive map col­lec­tion of David Rum­sey. In the ver­sion you see here, we have a very unusu­al vari­a­tion on the theme—rather than a his­tor­i­cal time­line map, Edward Quin pro­duced in 1830 An His­tor­i­cal Atlas; In a Series of Maps of the World as Known at Dif­fer­ent Peri­ods.

The ques­tion, “as known by whom?” seems entire­ly rel­e­vant. The per­spec­tive of Quin’s atlas is god­like, gaz­ing down at the world through the clouds, but unlike Emerson’s trans­par­ent view, it does not “see all”—those clouds occlude the vision, restrict­ing it to indi­cate, as the Rum­sey col­lec­tion notes, “the expan­sion of geo­graph­i­cal knowl­edge over time.” You’ll have to read Quin’s text—avail­able here—to under­stand how he accounts for the chronol­o­gy and per­spec­tive.

The atlas begins in 2348 B.C. with “the Del­uge,” the myth­i­cal Bib­li­cal flood. Bib­li­cal his­to­ry inex­plic­a­bly gives way to the sec­u­lar. In a descrip­tion of the atlas by Don­ald A. Head rare books, this strange doc­u­ment “intend­ed to car­to­graph­i­cal­ly depict polit­i­cal change from the time of cre­ation to the year 1828,” when it reveals “the enlight­ened world in the midst of the Indus­tri­al Rev­o­lu­tion…. Divid­ed into twen­ty-one peri­ods… the clouds ful­ly dis­ap­pear at the nine­teenth peri­od: ‘A.D. 1783 at the sep­a­ra­tion of the Unit­ed States of Amer­i­ca, from Eng­land.” In his pref­ace, Quin explains his project in the typ­i­cal terms of uni­ver­sal his­to­ry, as illus­trat­ing “by the changes of colour the empires which suc­ceed each oth­er.”

Quin’s descrip­tion of the unchang­ing per­spec­tive he adopts might remind some mod­ern read­ers of cer­tain com­ic book char­ac­ters as much as of the vision of a god or a trans­par­ent, detached eye: “Like the watch­man on some bea­con-tow­er, he views the hills and peo­pled val­leys around him, always the same in sit­u­a­tion and in form, but every chang­ing aspect of the hours and sea­sons….” View Quin’s com­plete His­tor­i­cal Atlas, scanned in high res­o­lu­tion detail, at the David Rum­sey Map Col­lec­tion.

On our page here, see indi­vid­ual pages from the His­tor­i­cal Atlas. Or, up top, see an ani­mat­ed gif that lets you view all 21 maps in the atlas in chrono­log­i­cal order.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

4000 Years of His­to­ry Dis­played in a 5‑Foot-Long “His­tom­ap” (Ear­ly Info­graph­ic) From 1931

Ground­break­ing Map from 1858 Col­or­ful­ly Visu­al­izes 6,000 Years of World His­to­ry

10 Mil­lion Years of Evo­lu­tion Visu­al­ized in an Ele­gant, 5‑Foot Long Info­graph­ic from 1931

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

Hear a 12-Hour Playlist of Experimental Symphonic Noise Rock by Avant-Garde Guitarist and Composer Glenn Branca (RIP)

Glenn Bran­ca died on Mon­day at age 69. In trib­utes from august pub­li­ca­tions like The Guardian and The New York Times, the gui­tarist and composer’s name is men­tioned by and along­side min­i­mal­ist lumi­nar­ies like Steve Reich and John Cage. Bran­ca him­self cit­ed com­posers like Olivi­er Mes­si­aen and Györ­gy Ligeti as influ­ences. He belongs in the com­pa­ny of these avant-garde pio­neers, but many who might rec­og­nize their names may not have heard the name Glenn Bran­ca.

Bran­ca worked in a much more anar­chic milieu, name­ly the down­town New York noise rock scene that came to be called No Wave. “My real influ­ence was punk,” he told Pitch­fork in 2016. “I must have lis­tened to the first Pat­ti Smith album 300 times.” In turn, the com­pos­er influ­enced the next gen­er­a­tion of under­ground New York artists, nur­tur­ing the tal­ents of Son­ic Youth’s Thurston Moore and Lee Ranal­do, who honed their art-rock chops—the drone notes, odd tun­ings, etc.—in the ear­ly ‘80s while play­ing in one of Branca’s noto­ri­ous­ly noisy gui­tar ensem­bles.

Bran­ca released Son­ic Youth’s first two albums on his record label, tutored abra­sive noise pio­neers Swans’ gui­tarist Nor­man West­berg, and inspired essen­tial down­town fig­ures like Lounge Lizards’ John Lurie, who described see­ing the composer’s band The­o­ret­i­cal Girls in 1979 as a life-chang­ing event. Min­i­mal­ist post-rock mas­ter­minds like God­speed You! Black Emper­or owe much to Branca’s inno­va­tions. Giv­en that he occu­pied such a sem­i­nal place at such a key musi­cal moment, giv­ing birth to such sem­i­nal bands, why isn’t Branca’s work bet­ter known?

Per­haps this is because, while he drew from clas­si­cal avant-garde, jazz, and punk rock, he refused to set­tle com­fort­ably into any par­tic­u­lar camp or to clear­ly define the bound­aries of his work. Bran­ca cre­at­ed a tem­plate all his own. Reich described him as “an absolute orig­i­nal,” which made him a very inspi­ra­tional fig­ure, but a dif­fi­cult one to slot into a genre bin.

His treat­ment of rock instru­ments in orches­tral set­tings made for intense, and for some unlis­ten­able, music that thor­ough­ly defied the con­ven­tions of rock and orches­tral music, with ensem­bles of up to 100 elec­tric gui­tars play­ing at once. (John Cage object­ed to Bran­ca’s over­whelm­ing per­for­mances on “polit­i­cal” grounds, say­ing they “resem­bled fas­cism.”)

But while Branca’s music has nev­er had mass appeal, the few who love it, love it pas­sion­ate­ly. Of his clas­sic 1981 album The Ascen­sion (hear the title track at the top), Allmusic’s Bri­an Olewnick writes, “if one choos­es to cat­e­go­rize the music on this record­ing as ‘rock,’ this is sure­ly one of the great­est rock albums ever made.” One hears in The Ascen­sion and Branca’s work in gen­er­al the gen­e­sis of a mus­cu­lar, noisy, orches­tral post-rock sound now famil­iar in, say, the sound­track work of artists like Radiohead’s Jon­ny Green­wood.

Despite his con­tention, as he told the NYT, that “I don’t change,” his work has evolved over time, devel­op­ing new depths and com­plex­i­ty. In the Spo­ti­fy playlist fur­ther up, hear Branca’s devel­op­ment as a com­pos­er in 66 tracks (or 12 hours) of sym­phon­ic exper­i­men­tal noise rock, and in the inter­view just above with the Louisiana Chan­nel, see Bran­ca describe (and demon­strate) his unusu­al gui­tar tech­niques and his breadth of musi­cal influ­ences.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear Steve Reich’s Min­i­mal­ist Com­po­si­tions in a 28-Hour Playlist: A Jour­ney Through His Influ­en­tial Record­ings

The Music of Avant-Garde Com­pos­er John Cage Now Avail­able in a Free Online Archive

Son­ic Youth Gui­tarist Thurston Moore Teach­es a Poet­ry Work­shop at Naropa Uni­ver­si­ty: See His Class Notes (2011)

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

Hear Tom Wolfe (RIP) Tell Studs Terkel All About Custom-Car Culture, the Subject of His Seminal Piece of New Journalism (1965)

Pho­to by Susan Stern­er, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

Amer­i­can jour­nal­ism breaks down into two basic vari­eties: that which came before Tom Wolfe, and that which came after. The 1960s coun­ter­cul­ture, the space pro­gram, the mod­ern art scene, the influ­ence of Bauhaus archi­tec­ture: what­ev­er the sub­ject, read­ers could trust Wolfe–who died this past Mon­day after a more than six­ty-year career in letters–to con­vey it with great vivid­ness of imagery and inven­tive­ness of prose. He first devel­oped his style of “New Jour­nal­ism” in 1962, almost inad­ver­tent­ly: while strug­gling to shape his research on Cal­i­for­nia cus­tom car-cul­ture into an arti­cle for Esquire, he wrote a let­ter to his edi­tor describ­ing what he had seen. The edi­tor, so the leg­end goes, sim­ply removed the let­ter’s salu­ta­tion and print­ed it — leav­ing its volu­mi­nous detail and casu­al, con­ver­sa­tion­al style untouched — as reportage.

That piece became the lead essay in 1965’s The Kandy-Kolored Tan­ger­ine-Flake Stream­line Baby, a col­lec­tion now con­sid­ered one of the defin­ing books of the 1960s in Amer­i­ca (a list that also includes Wolfe’s own The Elec­tric Kool-Aid Acid Test). After its pub­li­ca­tion, Wolfe made this appear­ance on the radio (part one, part two) across from Studs Terkel — a fel­low jour­nal­ist with an equal work eth­ic but a very dif­fer­ent sen­si­bil­i­ty indeed — to talk about the Cal­i­for­nia car cus­tomiz­er’s high­ly spe­cial­ized enter­prise as well as his own.

“It’s some­thing that’s a real form of expres­sion,” Wolfe says to Terkel. This is some­thing we’ve over­looked in this coun­try about the auto­mo­bile and the motor­cy­cle: that these things are forms of expres­sion. We thought we were being very sophis­ti­cat­ed a few years ago when we dis­cov­ered that the auto­mo­bile was a sta­tus sym­bol.” Look­ing back, the realm of the Kandy-Kolored Tan­ger­ine-Flake Stream­line Baby-builders was Wolfe’s ide­al start­ing point, vivid­ly crys­tal­liz­ing as it did phe­nom­e­na that would go on to num­ber among his major themes: style, sta­tus, sub­cul­ture, self-indul­gence.

Just as one can’t imag­ine William Make­peace Thack­er­ay out­side mid-19th-cen­tu­ry Eng­land or Émile Zola out­side late 19th-cen­tu­ry France — two cit­ed inspi­ra­tions in Wolfe’s lat­er efforts to write not just nov­el jour­nal­ism but jour­nal­is­tic nov­els — could Tom Wolfe have become Tom Wolfe any­where oth­er than post­war Amer­i­ca? Look­ing back, that vast coun­try plunged sud­den­ly into a brand new kind of moder­ni­ty, brim­ming as it was with wealth and won­der, vul­gar­i­ty and vio­lence, seemed to have been wait­ing for just the right chron­i­cler, one suf­fi­cient­ly (in the high­est sense) unortho­dox and (in an even high­er sense) undis­crim­i­nat­ing, to come along. That chron­i­cler came and now has gone, but the writ­ing he leaves behind will let gen­er­a­tion after gen­er­a­tion expe­ri­ence the over­whelm­ing­ly vital decades in Amer­i­ca he both observed and had a hand in cre­at­ing.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Begin­nings of New Jour­nal­ism: Capote’s In Cold Blood

Read 11 Free Arti­cles by Hunter S. Thomp­son That Span His Gonzo Jour­nal­ist Career (1965–2005)

Hunter S. Thomp­son Chill­ing­ly Pre­dicts the Future, Telling Studs Terkel About the Com­ing Revenge of the Eco­nom­i­cal­ly & Tech­no­log­i­cal­ly “Obso­lete” (1967)

Read 12 Mas­ter­ful Essays by Joan Did­ion for Free Online, Span­ning Her Career From 1965 to 2013

Studs Terkel Inter­views Bob Dylan, Shel Sil­ver­stein, Maya Angelou & More in New Audio Trove

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

Watch the Brand New Trailer for Bohemian Rhapsody, the Long-Awaited Biopic on Freddie Mercury & Queen

“Talk of a movie about [Fred­die Mer­cury], who died in 1991, has gone on for years: Dex­ter Fletch­er came up as a poten­tial direc­tor, and for the role of Mer­cury both Ben Wishaw and Sacha Baron Cohen have at dif­fer­ent times been attached. But now the film has entered pro­duc­tion, hav­ing found a direc­tor in Bryan Singer, he of the X‑Men fran­chise, and a star in Rami Malek, best known as the lead in the tele­vi­sion series Mr. Robot.”

That’s how our Col­in Mar­shall intro­duced a post last fall which, among oth­er things, gave us a first unof­fi­cial glimpse of Rami Malek as Fred­die Mer­cury. Now comes the first offi­cial glimpse of Malek as Mer­cury. Above, watch the new­ly-released trail­er for Bohemi­an Rhap­sody, the long-await­ed biopic that explores 15 years in the his­to­ry of Queen–from the for­ma­tion of the band, to their cap­ti­vat­ing, career-defin­ing 1985 per­for­mance at Live Aid, pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured on our site here.

Enjoy the trail­er, and look for Bohemi­an Rhap­sody to hit the­aters on Novem­ber 2.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch Queen’s Stun­ning Live Aid Per­for­mance: 20 Min­utes Guar­an­teed to Give You Goose Bumps (July 15, 1985)

Lis­ten to Fred­die Mer­cury and David Bowie on the Iso­lat­ed Vocal Track for the Queen Hit ‘Under Pres­sure,’ 1981

65,000 Fans Break Into a Sin­ga­long of Queen’s “Bohemi­an Rhap­sody” at a Green Day Con­cert in London’s Hyde Park

Sci­en­tif­ic Study Reveals What Made Fred­die Mercury’s Voice One of a Kind; Hear It in All of Its A Cap­pel­la Splen­dor

Hear Fred­die Mercury’s Vocals Soar in the Iso­lat­ed Vocal Track for “Some­body to Love”

Get the History of the World in 46 Lectures: A Free Online Course from Columbia University

When you dive into our col­lec­tion of 1,700 Free Online Cours­es, you can begin an intel­lec­tu­al jour­ney that can last for many months, if not years. The col­lec­tion lets you drop into the class­rooms of lead­ing uni­ver­si­ties (like Stan­ford, Har­vard, MIT and Oxford) and essen­tial­ly audit their cours­es for free. You get to be a fly on the wall and soak up what­ev­er knowl­edge you want. All you need is an inter­net con­nec­tion and some free time on your hands.

Today, we’re fea­tur­ing two cours­es taught by Pro­fes­sor Richard Bul­li­et at Colum­bia Uni­ver­si­ty, which will teach you the his­to­ry of the world in 46 lec­tures. The first course, His­to­ry of the World to 1500 CE (avail­able on YouTube and iTunes Video, or ful­ly stream­able below) takes you from pre­his­toric times to 1500, the cusp of ear­ly moder­ni­ty. The ori­gins of agri­cul­ture; the Greek, Roman and Per­sian empires; the rise of Islam and Chris­t­ian medieval king­doms; trans­for­ma­tions in Asia; and the Mar­itime rev­o­lu­tion — they’re all cov­ered here.

In the sec­ond course, His­to­ry of the World Since 1500 CE (find it on YouTube, iTunes or embed­ded below), Bul­li­et focus­es on the rise of colo­nial­ism in the Amer­i­c­as and India; his­tor­i­cal devel­op­ments in Chi­na, Japan and Korea; the Indus­tri­al Rev­o­lu­tion; the Ottoman Empire; the emer­gence of Social Dar­win­ism; and var­i­ous key moments in 20th cen­tu­ry his­to­ry.

Bul­li­et helped write the pop­u­lar text­book The Earth and its Peo­ples: A Glob­al His­to­ry, and it serves as the main text­book for the course. Above, we’re start­ing you off with Lec­ture 2, which moves from the Ori­gins of Agri­cul­ture to the First Riv­er — Val­ley Civ­i­liza­tions, cir­ca 8000–1500 B.C.E. The first lec­ture deals with method­olog­i­cal issues that under­pin the course. All of the remain­ing lec­tures are avail­able below.

Once you get the big pic­ture with Pro­fes­sor Bul­li­et, don’t for­get to vis­it our col­lec­tion of Free Online His­to­ry Cours­es, a sub­set of our big col­lec­tion, 1,700 Free Online Cours­es from Top Uni­ver­si­ties.

His­to­ry of the World to 1500 CE 

His­to­ry of the World Since 1500 CE

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in April, 2013.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Big His­to­ry: David Chris­t­ian Cov­ers 13.7 Bil­lion Years of His­to­ry in 18 Min­utes

Down­load 78 Free Online His­to­ry Cours­es: From Ancient Greece to The Mod­ern World

The Com­plete His­to­ry of the World (and Human Cre­ativ­i­ty) in 100 Objects

A Free Yale Course on Medieval His­to­ry: 700 Years in 22 Lec­tures

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Hear the Recently Discovered, Earliest Known Recording of “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” (1894)

As keen observers of Amer­i­can cul­ture and his­to­ry like W.E.B. Du Bois and Ralph Elli­son have writ­ten, there is no Amer­i­can music with­out African-Amer­i­can music. The his­to­ry of the record­ing indus­try bears wit­ness to the fact, with jazz, blues, and rag­time dom­i­nat­ing the ear­ly releas­es that drove the indus­try for­ward. Before these pop­u­lar forms and the age of “race records,” how­ev­er, came the spir­i­tu­als, gospel songs dat­ing back to slav­ery, whose fame spread across the world in the lat­ter half of the 19th cen­tu­ry with groups like the Fisk Jubilee Singers. As Du Bois wrote in 1903, “their songs con­quered till they sang across the land and across the sea, before Queen and Kaiser, in Scot­land and Ire­land, Hol­land and Switzer­land… they tell of death and suf­fer­ing and unvoiced long­ing toward a truer world, of misty wan­der­ings and hid­den ways.”

Giv­en the world­wide fas­ci­na­tion with the spir­i­tu­al and the singing groups who spread them across the world, it’s no won­der this was sought-after mate­r­i­al for a nascent indus­try eager for music that appealed to the mass­es. And no spir­i­tu­al has had more mass appeal than “Swing Low, Sweet Char­i­ot.”

The first record­ing of the song was long thought to have been per­formed in 1909 by a four­some, the Fisk Uni­ver­si­ty Jubilee Quar­tet, “car­ry­ing on the lega­cy,” notes Pub­lic Domain Review, “of the orig­i­nal Fisk Jubilee Singers of the 1870s.” You can hear that record­ing below, made by Vic­tor Stu­dios.

Even before the turn of the cen­tu­ry, writes Toni Ander­son at the Library of Con­gress, “the musi­cal land­scape was pep­pered with over ten com­pa­nies fash­ioned after the orig­i­nal Jubilee Singers, and by the 1890s, many black groups had launched suc­cess­ful for­eign tours.” (Du Bois laments the poor qual­i­ty of many of these imi­ta­tors.) The 1909 record­ing, writes Pub­lic Domain Review, “pop­u­lar­ized the song huge­ly,” or, we might say, even more huge­ly, help­ing to make it a sta­ple in decades to come for artists like Paul Robe­son, Louis Arm­strong, Etta James, John­ny Cash, and Eric Clap­ton (in a 1975 reg­gae take). How­ev­er, it turns out that an even ear­li­er record­ing exists, made by one of those suc­cess­ful trav­el­ing groups, the Stan­dard Quar­tette, in 1894.

Record­ed on a wax cylin­der by Colum­bia Records in Wash­ing­ton, DC while the group made a stop on a spring tour, this “’holy grail’ of ear­ly record­ing his­to­ry,” writes Archeo­phone Records, “push­es back by fif­teen years the first known record­ing of the clas­sic spir­i­tu­al,” but it might have been lost for­ev­er had not a care­ful col­lec­tor pre­served it and Archeophone’s Richard Mar­tin not iden­ti­fied its bad­ly-decayed sounds as “Swing Low, Sweet Char­i­ot.” The record­ing has been includ­ed on a 102-track com­pi­la­tion, Wax­ing the Gospel: Mass Evan­ge­lism and the Phono­graph, 1890–1900.

First dis­cov­ered on a “large group of dam­aged ear­ly cylinders—moldy, noisy, and thought to have no retriev­able con­tent,” the song has been unearthed from beneath “an ocean of noise.” What Archeophone’s Mea­gan Hen­nessey found is that the ver­sion “is very dif­fer­ent from what peo­ple expect. The cho­rus is famil­iar, but the vers­es are dif­fer­ent. The Stan­dard Quar­tette sing lyrics we asso­ciate with oth­er jubilee songs.” Also, as Mar­tin points out, the song’s arrange­ment is unusu­al: “there are com­plex things going on here with har­mo­ny and rhythm, but you’ve got to lis­ten close­ly through the noise.” (Learn more about the dis­cov­ery and restora­tion in the short video above.)

The song itself may have been writ­ten in the mid-1800s by an enslaved man named Wal­lace Willis, who was tak­en from Mis­sis­sip­pi to Okla­homa by his half-Choctaw own­er dur­ing forced relo­ca­tion in the 1830s, then “rent­ed out” to a school for Native boys. The head­mas­ter heard him sing it, and passed it on to the Jubilee singers. In anoth­er, more dra­mat­ic, account of the song’s com­po­si­tion, it “’burst forth’ from the anguished soul of Sarah Han­nah Shep­pard, the moth­er of Ella Shep­pard of Fisk Jubilee Singer fame,” when Sarah learned she would be sold and sep­a­rat­ed for­ev­er from her daugh­ter.

In his live per­for­mance of the song, above, John­ny Cash gives a pic­turesque ori­gin sto­ry of an anony­mous slave, “sit­ting on his cot­ton sack one day,” and singing about a vision of a char­i­ot. But what­ev­er the song’s true ori­gins, “Swing Low, Sweet Char­i­ot,” per­haps more than any oth­er pop­u­lar spir­i­tu­al of the 19th cen­tu­ry, has come to rep­re­sent the music, Du Bois wrote, through which “the slave spoke to the world.”

via Pub­lic Domain Review

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear Walt Whit­man (Maybe) Read­ing the First Four Lines of His Poem, “Amer­i­ca” (1890)

Hear Voic­es from the 19th Cen­tu­ry: Ten­nyson, Glad­stone & Tchaikovsky

Hear the First Jazz Record, Which Launched the Jazz Age: “Liv­ery Sta­ble Blues” (1917)

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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