Aberrant singing
Aug. 27th, 2009 11:49 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
koganbotThere seems to be a demand for all sorts of aberrant singing, and one Skeeter Skoot pours a lot of it into an Okeh record (41549). For his demonstration he uses "All Of Me" and "You Rascal You," and I'll certainly be glad when that rascal is dead! If you care for something amusingly splintered, listen to a few revolutions of the Skeeter.
--Pop, "Popular Records," The New Yorker, March 19, 1932
"Popular Records" was the name of a recurring column attributed to a person called Pop. That passage is nothing extraordinary, though I like the intentionally misleading tone that "aberrant" sets up in the first clause. I was looking hurriedly at a couple of the columns while getting ready to leave the Denver Public Library yesterday, checking if my memory had been right when I'd told Mark on some comment thread several months ago that one of the New Yorker's two pop critics in the early '30s was called "Pop." (The other was called Ring Lardner; he had the radio column.)
Google comes up with a 30-second clip from approximately 1922 of Leona Williams' "Uncle Bud (Bugle Blues)" "Intro: Skeeter Skoot." The clip is an opening trumpet (or cornet or bugle) solo, so either Skeeter is the trumpeter or the clip ends before he starts.
I'd categorize it jazz-blues, I guess.
--Pop, "Popular Records," The New Yorker, March 19, 1932
"Popular Records" was the name of a recurring column attributed to a person called Pop. That passage is nothing extraordinary, though I like the intentionally misleading tone that "aberrant" sets up in the first clause. I was looking hurriedly at a couple of the columns while getting ready to leave the Denver Public Library yesterday, checking if my memory had been right when I'd told Mark on some comment thread several months ago that one of the New Yorker's two pop critics in the early '30s was called "Pop." (The other was called Ring Lardner; he had the radio column.)
Google comes up with a 30-second clip from approximately 1922 of Leona Williams' "Uncle Bud (Bugle Blues)" "Intro: Skeeter Skoot." The clip is an opening trumpet (or cornet or bugle) solo, so either Skeeter is the trumpeter or the clip ends before he starts.
I'd categorize it jazz-blues, I guess.
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no subject
Date: 2009-08-27 06:14 pm (UTC)Equally awesome: one of the "houses" at Eton is called Pop.
no subject
Date: 2009-08-27 06:40 pm (UTC)pop (adj., n.)
"having popular appeal," 1926, of individual songs from many genres; 1954 as a genre of its own; abbreviation of popular (q.v.), earlier as a shortened form of popular concert (1862), often in the plural form pops. Pop art first recorded 1957, said to have been in use conversationally among Independent group of artists from late 1954.
(This is inconclusive.)
Wikipedia:
The term "pop song" is first recorded as being used in 1926 in the sense of a piece of music "having popular appeal." [Citation is the OED.]
(This is inconclusive too, but my guess that once you get "pop song" for a piece of music having popular appeal you are a footstep away from "pop" as the collection of songs having popular appeal, so I bet you get that too before 1954 (but not as a genre with specific characteristics that mark it off from, say, country and classical and Irish etc.).
Maybe our fellow (or gal) "Pop" helped to popularize the term "pop" - was a walking ad for it.