About the History of Music & Modern Recording Project

Pride & Joy   Double Trouble w Stevie Ray Vaughn   1985

Update December of 2024: On the 15th of December my computer was attacked and destroyed. I had nearly finished the first four decades of recording — marked by the disappearance of the cylinder format when Edison Records closed shop entirely in 1930 — and was hoping to begin the New Year with Spanish composers and in the early thirties in Brazil. This is delayed, pending this and that including another computer. (I'm writing this with a spare.) I hope to be squared away and back to publishing music history before you blink in early 2025. At this point (Romantic period and early swing) I've pretty much poured a chronological foundation such that I can now start cycling through other genres and periods.

Update September 2023: I've not been able to solve any of the problems for which cause I stopped working on the histories last April. But there doesn't seem to be a lot more worthwhile to do than get back at it. As of October 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 typically write three profiles each week, one in classical, two in modern recording.

Update April of 2023: I've developed problems with the server that I've used for the last twenty years. The more money they charge and the richer they get the more irresponsible and worthless they become, which is quite common with businesses. For every customer they lose there are 10 more mullets to replace them. Unfortunately I've experienced some difficulty switching to a more capable and ethical website host. (This one is another of not a few which are rewarded with an incentive to push the nightmare that is WordPress while neglecting more fundamental responsibilities as a server.) Though there is no lack of website hosts, the vast majority are into easy money and poor security while doing as close as possible to nothing at all. That's the business model in this world, not something to be proud of, but something that siphons up money.

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 a densely compacted contextual arrangement of (imperfectly) 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. In the meantime I've discovered that such as a Dashlane extension in Chrome can prevent videos from loading. As well, text and link hex values may not function correctly on some devices.

Like the VF History which required about nine years, the ten main divisions of the HMR Project are Black Gospel, Blues, Classical, Country (C&W), Folk including Bluegrass, 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 with 33 chapters in modern recording in addition to classical. This means that a lot of errors like typos in the VF History won't get addressed for years to come. As I work on HMR I nigh invariably find at least one error in every profile in the VF. Albeit I make corrections to the VF they aren't thorough (like links gone bad) since I concentrate on the HMR.

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 in 2021 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. If I ever "finish" Classical the big boy after that will be Jazz.

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 (HMR) began disappearing even several months 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 curators decide whether or not their material should display on websites other than YouTube. When it comes to selecting videos information, audio and accuracy are king. I also factor detouring advertisements and video availability. Selecting videos is easily one of the most time consuming tasks involved in these histories. Incidentally, Google doesn't presently apply information within video frame code (<frame>...</frame>) to its search algorithms unless it's from YouTube or another video website. It has to be the first thing you see coded at the top of the webpage. On a site like this only related text might help find it. True, "available" videos may get watched on this site instead of YouTube. But they have link value in exchange for the jazz and reduction of distraction. So if you curate a music channel at YouTube, now you know that my selective process is a juggle. I use this opportunity to thank all the music curators at YouTube without whose video contributions there would be no histories (nor labor) here at all.

I might have solved problems related above not a few years ago by downloading videos to my own machine. You could do that for free at YouTube at the time and I was able to make a number of CDs of early music. But I felt greedy so stopped, then began the VF history, using links rather than downloads, something in a manner of appreciation. I don't know when YouTube started to charge a monthly download fee. That would have prevented not a few dead references, and I'd have one hell of a collection, all to silent self, by now. What is. I yet link in recognition of musical colleagues.

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 except 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 locust hordes of advertising and hype. What Google means by content now is that people with phones can be steered to Amazon as the internet transitions from a means of sharing information to an agora of every last soul chasing a means to earn or spend a dollar. 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 they concentrate on getting richer and richer instead. The last that I opened a physical 'New York Times' in the seventies it looked so much like a Sears catalog minus news that there was no reason to subscribe to it, not to the mention their agenda.

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, Syncopated Times has assumed the project of presenting Alexander's extensive sessionography of early recording. This is incomplete at this writing.

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 a lot in research, but point to it often as an instrument of confirmation, example or evidence. The recent lawsuit against Internet Archive has resulted in infinite bad links. 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 without subscription. 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 thing very different about this website is its entire absence of advertising. 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 (such as affiliate), 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. Your device will never freeze because I'm sucking as much data (memory) out of it as I can. (AllMusic has been losing customers for as long as I can remember for this reason. I hesitate to point to it at the same time that it can be a highly helpful resource. There's no avoiding AllMusic in research — knowledgeable writers — but I keep visits brief and clean the cache.) 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. I point to what commercial vendors that I do, not because such contributes squat to my wealth, but because they do the work in some manner of clarifying or contributing to music history. If I list such as recording catalogs, for instance, it's to make it easier for the reader to find something. If it's listed in the HMR Project it's because it's a good source or better than others as I try to cover the spectrum. I've no agenda here beyond what is a responsibility to itself, being a directly objective history of music and modern recording. Nor do these pages exist to persuade anyone of any particular way to go ideologically, philosophically, politically, religiously or otherwise. In the meantime, were I Google I'd be reducing the page rank on numberless websites which pretend to offer content buried somewhere, if you can find one single sentence of it, in a swarm of advertising. Yeah, it's called irrelevant spam. But it looks to me like the more of it there is on a webpage the higher Google ranks it.

For various perspectives on this or that like humor or news I visit a small spectrum of social media sites from Bluesky to Truth Social once per week while making drops. (During which I get to see the animals who people post!) I've never been drawn to Facebook, thus neither Instagram nor Threads. More than ten years ago, about the time that I started these histories, it didn't look like I could accomplish a lot there, nor with social media in general, and just never got back nor likely will since social media requires time of which I'm in limited supply. I don't bother at Quora (all the terrible things that people do to each other) or Reddit (a lot of good art) because they simply don't get it, their monitors not the most conscious, knowledgeable or diligent on Earth. Nor do I drop at gab anymore, though think that one should visit now and then to know what's happening there. Otherwise, I share this journey through music history at:

Gettr

Mastodon

Pinterest Classical & Modern Recording (2021 launch only)

Trust Cafe

Tumblr Classical

Twitter now X Modern Recording

YouTube Playlists (2021 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?