[TNT-Audio Vintage column] The Victrola and World War I

Product names: Victrola IX
Manufacturers: Victor Talking Machine Co. - USA
Author: David Hoehl - TNT USA
Published: October, 2023

In the first three decades of the 20th century, the most prolific advertiser in the United States was none other than the Victor Talking Machine Company, inventor and maker of the Victrola cabinet-style gramophone. (In those days, a gramophone was a disk player, whereas a phonograph was a cylinder player; Victrola was not a generic term but rather was Victor's trademark name for its internal horn machines). Aside from the celebrated representation of a dog and long-obsolete open-horn disk player, “His Master's Voice,” Victor's advertisements frequently included a miracle of pre-Photoshop image manipulation, a potpourri of photos depicting its roster of celebrated Metropolitan Opera stars under exclusive contract, all standing together in costume, fronted by Enrico Caruso, usually as Rhadames from Aida and not infrequently in full vocal flight. Often this distinctive, if somewhat improbable, agglomeration appeared as a free-standing image, even as a two-page spread in popular magazines like The Saturday Evening Post, but sometimes the company's ad men would get creative and insert an artist's rendering of it into some unrelated scene. The iconic variant would put these worthies in a living room next to a Christmas tree, with a floor model Victrola prominently on display, to drive home the point that a shiny, new Victrola would be the ideal gift for the entire family at Christmas--never mind how deafening Caruso at opera house volume would be in the average living room and how many more plates would be needed at the family dinner table!

A far more peculiar, not to say bizarre, variant recently came to my attention, however: the Victor operatic gaggle putting in an appearance, with the obligatory Victrola (albeit, in a nod to realities, a table model, not an upright or console), in what I guess is a World War I army encampment's field headquarters, surrounded by sandbags and an appreciative audience of attentive, steel-helmeted, rifle-toting doughboys, some puffing away on cigarettes and one smoking a jaunty pipe. Adding to the general peculiarity, somebody pasted in English music hall luminary Harry Lauder off to the left of the opera stars. The accompanying ad copy informs us that thanks to Victor the high-minded “spiritual voice of Art” is visiting and enriching our boys in khaki and puttees.

Well now. There's no denying that when the various armies marched off to World War I, phonographs and records marched right along with them. Indeed, that conflict was the first in which recorded music played a part in entertaining the troops. Edison actually went so far as to develop a special model of the company's diamond disc phonographs, called the Army Navy Model, just for the military. Alas, although Edison's thick, sturdy records were more likely than their conventional shellac counterparts to survive the rigors of travel and handling under wartime conditions, and Edison's diamond playback stylus did away with any need to carry a supply of single-use steel needles, the big, heavy Edison playback mechanism was not really suited to portable or even tabletop designs; the Army Navy machine was a roughly cubical box measuring about two feet on a side and weighed around 100 pounds! In a development that would prove to have considerable staying power, the alternative that caught on was a British-made machine blazing the trail for a design that would become a staple of picnic parties and space-strapped dwellings everywhere for decades to come, the suitcase-style portable. Even this little model's name would persist in the record industry right down to the present day: the Decca. In contrast to Edison's cumbersome offering, the relatively lightweight Decca, at about 12 inches on a side by 8 inches tall, was easily carried by a single person and was an instant hit with the boys in the trenches.

So records were part of the soldier's life. Do you really think, though, that all those farm-boys-turned-fighing-men regularly “improved themselves” by indulging in arias from Aida or Tosca or Lucia di Lammermoor, with Paderewski playing Chopin or Heifetz playing Paganini? Color me a skeptic: maybe some did, but I strongly suspect the likelihood they were more than a tiny minority ranks right up there with the likelihood World War I would prove to be “The War to End All Wars.”

Victor may have been at pains to promote itself as a Force for Art, but the company's spectacular success across a quarter century or more rested on commercial prowess: its solid grasp of what music would sell and its efficiency in providing that music, and well-designed instruments on which to play it, to a receptive public. A catalogue of high-art arias by the world's most celebrated opera singers and concert artists brought prestige and public attention, but one-steps played by popular bands and comic songs and sentimental ballads (not to mention, er, racially insensitive songs and monologues) by familiar vaudeville/music hall performers brought cash--and lots of it. That's not necessarily to say, however, that records by at least some of these “long hair” performers were not present on the musical menu of the average fighting man. Victor's celebrity singers, like musicians throughout history, tended to appreciate getting paid, and if getting paid handsomely meant recording some patriotic popular ditties, well, so be it. Again, recording opera brought prestige, but things like sentimental ballads and rousing musical calls to arms paid the bills! Thus, although possibly apocryphal, plausible collector's lore has it that the first million-selling record in Victor's high-end Red Seal catalogue was not grand opera, not a selection from the world of virtuoso concert solos or etherial chamber music, but soprano Alma Gluck (born 1884, Iasi, Romania) singing “Carry Me Back to Old Virginny.” Nor was Victor alone in such A&R oddities; for example, Edison recorded German coloratura soprano Frieda Hempel, who also had a substantial discography for Victor and who had a major career in Germany and at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, in “Dixie,” “My Old Kentucky Home,” “Kentucky Babe,” and “Little Alabama Coon.” Note that at that time the wall between popular and classical music was much more permeable than it is today, as popular composers regularly adapted “classical” techniques in their songs, popular singers frequently had classical training (and indeed sometimes even recorded classical numbers for the record labels' less expensive lines), and many classical singers thought nothing of including a few crowd-pleasers in their concert programs. It should come as no surprise, then, that Victor's many operatic luminaries “did their bit” by committing war songs of one sort or another to wax. To illustrate, I've collected a few examples into the video linked below, a little recital recreating the advertising scene with artists mentioned in the copy as heard on the same model machine depicted there.

Unlike Edison, Victor never made a machine specifically for military service during World War I. Instead, the company spent the war years making rifles for the infantry and wings for biplane aircraft. (Edison actually got into the aviation line, too, manufacturing bomb sights for the Army Air Corps.) Victor did, however, ship machines from its regular civilian line in abundance to the troops overseas. The talking machine seen in the advertisement and heard in the video is a Victrola VV IX; at that time, Victor assigned Roman Numerals for its model numbers, and spring-driven Victrolas had the model number prefix VV, presumably for “Victor Victrola,” to distinguish them from the prefix-less numbers of earlier open horn models. The Victrola VV IX was Victor's top-of-the-line table model, fitted with a double-spring motor, a 12" turntable, a lid to cover the “works” when not in use, and doors to conceal the horn opening and control volume. Introduced in 1911 at a price of $50, said to equate to around $1,400 today, the VV IX remained in Victor's catalogue until 1924, although during its production life it underwent various modifications and improvements. It proved to be a strong seller, supposedly with the fourth-highest number sold among Victor models, after two lower-priced, single-spring lidless table models (the VV IV and the VV VI, not to be confused with the decidedly more upscale open-horn Victor IV and Victor VI) and the Victrola VV XI, Victor's smallest floor-standing machine and its undisputed sales leader. Curiously, some outside manufacturers produced custom-fitted record cabinets to mate with the VV IX and turn it into, effectively, a floor model. Thus, it's not impossible a VV IX might have been seen in circumstances like those in the advertisement, albeit not surrounded by a gaggle of opera singers in costume! I would guess, however, that the VV IX featured prominently in Victor's war-themed advertisements, of which this is just one example, primarily to promote the premium model to the home market, whereas cheaper, lighter, more readily portable VV IVs and VV VIs would have been more likely actually to appear at the front.

When introduced, the VV IX machines had only rather crudely arranged wooden boards inside the cabinet (and hence out of sight) to direct sound from the end of the tonearm assembly to the grille. In 1913, Victor redesigned the cabinet to incorporate a finished chamber shaped like a squared-off horn. The machine in the video must date to just after that revision, as its serial number indicates 1913 as its year of production. (I hope, should I live so long, that I work as well when I'm 110 years old!) It has a flat base; Victor would not add the “feet” seen on the machine in the advertisement until 1915. Its reproducer is the Exhibition, Victor's standard model at the time across nearly all its machines. In 1921, Victor retired the Exhibition on these machines in favor of the newer Victrola No. 2, which had a larger diaphragm. Detailed photos appear below. Note Victor's famous tapering tonearm, making it effectively an extension of the horn. That design was a patented feature that Victor defended strenuously in court and promoted heavily as a reason for its machines' claimed superiority of tone quality over that of its competitors' machines.^[1] Also note the wooden block at the rear with two cup-shaped depressions and a metal-covered opening. The two cups were for holding fresh steel needles, one for loud and one for medium tone (or one for medium and one for soft tone, or one for loud and one for soft tone). The cover in the center mated to a little metal pill box below; it was for discarding used needles. Recall that a steel needle was good for only one play, requiring the user to insert a fresh needle for each record. Reliance on single-use steel needles would persist for decades, well into the era of electric playback, even after acoustic reproducers gave way to electric pickups. The Victrolas VV IV and VV VI lacked these cups, but while a convenience when the machine was stationary, as expected in a home environment, they were worse than useless when the machine was moved around, as nothing would keep needles from spilling out and insinuating themselves under the turntable platter and into every gap or opening of the cabinet's interior.

Well, enough about the harware. Let's move on to the music in our fictitious Victrola concert for the troops.

Harry Lauder, “that sturdy, fighting Scottsman,” opens the proceedings. Various of the Victor bunch may or may not have figured regularly in the khaki-clad boys' entertainment choices, but Lauder would have without any question, and not only on records. At the time, having transcended humble beginnings working first in a flax mill and then as a coal miner, he had become the world's highest-paid entertainer, easily selling out houses wherever he went in the United Kingdom, the United States, Australia--even South Africa. Furthermore, he tirelessly worked to raise funds for the Allies and entertain Allied troops, eventually being knighted for his efforts. As a reflection of his popularity, Lauder made recordings issued on cylinders by Edison; cylinders and discs by Pathe; and discs by HMV (and its predecessor The Gramophone and Typewriter, Ltd.), Zonophone, and Victor. For Victor, he was one of only three performers who had releases in all price categories from the black, purple, and blue labels to Red Seal. He starred in three British movies and earlier participated in several experimental talking pictures, and he published a number of successful books, including an autobiography. Victor's advertisement stretched the truth in describing Lauder as a “fighting Scottsman”; he was an entertainer, not a soldier. That is not to say, however, that the fighting did not touch him directly: his only son, John, was killed in action a few days after Christmas, 1916. Harry Lauder died in 1950 at age 79, an occasion marked by the public at large and by such luminaries as Winston Churchill and Queen Elizabeth II.

The video begins with one of Lauder's biggest hits, “Roamin' in the Gloamin'” (Victor 70061, Oct. 18, 1911). The record, of course, cannot show that Lauder, tapping into own heritage, had adopted a broad Scottish stage persona, generally appearing in plaid kilt and tam-o'-shanter with a crooked walking stick. In every other way, however, it's a typical Lauder performance, and it follows the same pattern as most of his records. In a stage Scots dialect, enough to give color without being so much as to hinder understanding by a non-Scottish audience, Lauder first sings; then interrupts the song with a short, comic spoken monologue; then closes by singing again, throughout interjecting little bursts of somewhat gratuitous, stagey chuckling. The plot line, if you will, is homely and a bit sentimental, and the humor, which apparently was spot-on for an audience in the first two decades of the 20th century, seems pretty lame by today's standards. Indeed, it started to feel a little lame by the end of the 1920s, and Lauder went largely into retirement in the 1930s, only to come charging back out, with renewed energy and popularity, to reprise his role as a tireless entertainer and fundraiser supporting the Allied cause during World War II.

If Harry Lauder was the face of Scotland in the music hall, John McCormack could be called the voice of Ireland in the concert hall. McCormack did perform in opera, but his greatest fame was as a concert singer. Like Lauder's, McCormack's origins were relatively humble. He was born in Athlone, Ireland, the fourth of eleven children. His parents both worked at a local woolens mill, where his father was a foreman. John McCormack went to Italy to study voice, and after studies with Vincenzo Sabatini (father of novelist Rafael Sabatini, the author of such swashbuckling romances as Scaramouche and The Sea Hawk), in 1906 McCormack entered into an operatic career, first in minor roles under a pseudonym in a provincial Italian theater but quickly moving to and becoming a principal singer at Covent Garden. By 1912 concert work was coming to dominate his activities, although he did not retire from opera until 1923. McCormack's recording career began in 1904. At the outset, he recorded cyliders of Irish popular songs for Edison, Edison Bell, and Sterling; a couple of sides of similar fare for Pathe; and a few records, which added some operatic repertory to the Irish songs, for the European Odeon label. He then shifted to Victor and began a series of wildly popular Red Seal records, extending to more than 200 issues in the acoustic era, with substantially more extensive representation of “serious” repertoire appearing together with large numbers of Irish and other popular songs. McCormack would continue recording into the early years of the electric era both for Victor and HMV, when he was one of the singers who contributed to the Hugo Wolf Society issues, the first attempt at extensively documenting that until-then-neglected composer's songs. Like Lauder, McCormack also appeared in films and contributed support to the Allied cause in both World Wars.

In the video, we hear him in “It's a Long, Long Way to Tipperary,” recorded on November 23, 1914 and released as Victor 64476. The song had been a major hit the year before, and McCormack's record did much to boost its popularity further. Apparently its reputation as a soldiers' favorite is exaggerated, but it's still a fair bet that plenty of copies would have found their way to the front.

From Scottish and Irish songs of the music hall, let's turn to US martial/patriotic music. John Philip Sousa is well known as “The March King,” composer of many military marches that remain common currency to this day. What is less well known is that he also wrote a number of successful operettas, waltzes, overtures, and the like; a novel or two; and short stories. In addition, he was a crack trap shooter. In an on-and-off relationship with the US Marine Band, he began as a teenager, left for a time, and then came back to direct the ensemble for a dozen years before leaving yet again to direct his own band. During World War I he took a commission as lieutenant in the US Naval Reserve to lead the Navy Band at the Great Lakes Naval Station, donating all but one dollar of his naval salary to the Sailors' and Marines' Relief Fund. After the war, he returned to civilian life and continued leading his own band.

Sousa was openly hostile to recordings. Indeed, it was Sousa who coined the derogatory term “canned music,” said to be a reference to the can-like cardboard containers in which cylinder records were sold. Nonetheless, where money was to be made, he was quite happy for his name to appear on records, and Sousa's Band was a fixture of the record catalogues for decades from the early days of cylinders. There's a dirty little secret about them, however: yes, the records were credited to “Sousa's Band,” but Sousa himself almost never had anything more to do with them than lending his name for the credits and, doubtless, collecting a nice fee or royalty; the actual direction nearly always was by others. The record in our video--“The Stars and Stripes Forever,” black-label Victor record 16777, which almost certainly would have been found in US Army camps all over the front--is a perfect example. Over a period of years, Victor issued several “takes” (actually products of sometimes widely separated sessions) of the march under the same catalogue numbers, 16777 and, earlier, 306, each disk proudly credited to Sousa's Band and none having any personal involvement of John Philip. Instead, they were variously directed by two Sousa's Band members, cornettist Herbert L. Clarke and trombonist Arthur Pryor, or else by Victor house arranger and conductor Walter B. Rogers. Both Clarke and Pryor also recorded as soloists and leaders of their own bands, and Pryor was director when the Sousa's Band came to make its final recording of the march in 1926, a remake with the new, cutting edge electrical recording system. That recording persisted in the Victor catalogue long enough to be issued on 45 RPM records, although after 1928 copies were pressed from dubbed remasters, not the original 1926 ones. Remember that in those days before tape, much less digital recording, remasters were made by playing an original as the source for rerecording direct to disk. The result invariably was at least some loss in audio quality. Be that as it may, the record in the video is unquestionably from an original master, recorded acoustically on December 13, 1912 with “Sousa's Band” under Pryor's direction.

Not one but two luminaries mentioned in Victor's advertisement were responsible for another record that might well have been common in the camps: the Bach-Gounod Ave Maria, sung by Alma Gluck with violin obbligato by her husband, Efrem Zimbalist. I've written about these artists in the pages of TNT-Audio before; rather than reinvent the turntable platter, for biographical information I'll refer you to that article. Suffice it to say here that the record also features pianist Eugene Lutsky; was recorded on March 8, 1913; and was issued as 12" Victor Red Seal 88433, subsequently renumbered as 89091, the form in which we hear it. Those issues were both single-sided, but later still Victor doubled the recording, issuing it as no. 8026 coupled with the same artists' recording of Braga's “The Angel's Serenade.” I don't know much about Lutsky other than that he made several records for Victor around that time, all as accompanist for Gluck, Zimbalist, or both. He did appear in at least one contemporary recital with Zimbalist, suggesting he may have been the couple's regular concert accompanist at the time. Be all that as it may, I have my doubts that the doughboys spent a lot of their down time listening to opera, but I have no doubt that they would have favored religious numbers, and this one was a beloved standard musical item at the time. For that matter, it remains popular today.

Wars eventually come to an end, and World War I was no exception. So do videos. Coming full circle, the one here concludes where it started: with Harry Lauder. This time, he sings a number that he wrote to mark the conclusion of hostilities, “Don't Let Us Sing Anymore about War, Just Let Us Sing of Love,” subtitled “Peace Song.” The recording dates to December 10, 1918, and it was issued as Victor 70122, a 12" disk again in the purple label category.

That's all for now. The a link to the video appears below. I hope you'll enjoy this step back into an idealized history courtesy of the Victor Talking Machine Company's ever-industrious advertising department.

[1] - The other manufacturers begged to differ, of course, and offered their own pseudo-scientific reasons for preferring other designs. The Cheney company, for example, among other things touted a stepped, octagonal arm as somehow harmonizing with the eight tones of the octave.

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