Chapter 3: American Popular Music in the Nineteenth Century Pt.2
IThe phonograph, introduced in 1877 by American inventor Thomas Edison—and independently conceived around the same time by French inventor Charles Cros—was the first device capable of both recording and reproducing sound. Edison’s earliest test recording was of himself reciting the nursery rhyme “Mary Had a Little Lamb,” making it the first known audio recording that could be played back. Using a diaphragm and stylus, the machine translated sound vibrations into grooves on a rotating cylinder wrapped in tinfoil or wax. When played back, the stylus followed these grooves to reproduce the original sound, making it possible to preserve and replay audio for the first time. Unlike earlier mechanical devices like music boxes, which could only perform pre-programmed tunes, the phonograph captured live performances and allowed them to be experienced repeatedly.
In the years that followed, the technology quickly evolved. Emile Berliner introduced a flat disc system in 1887 that offered several advantages over cylinders. These discs were more durable, easier to manufacture, and simpler to store. As a result, the disc format soon became the industry standard. By the 1890s, public machines called “nickelodeons” began to appear, allowing people to pay a small fee to hear the latest recordings, laying the foundation for what would become the jukebox.
By the early 1900s, companies like Columbia Records and the Victor Talking Machine Company led the emerging record industry. New formats, such as twelve-inch shellac discs spinning at 78 revolutions per minute, could hold up to four minutes of audio. The arrival of double-sided records in 1904 increased both convenience and commercial appeal. At first, the phonograph was often seen as a novelty item, useful for preserving family voices or historic speeches. But its commercial potential became obvious when Victor released recordings by famed tenor Enrico Caruso recorded opera arias in London in 1902. After his successful American debut, Victor released the recordings in the U.S., and they became bestsellers. Following Caruso’s death in 1921, Victor reportedly sold over $2 million worth of his records in a single year, confirming the economic power of recorded music.
The popularity of recorded music continued to grow. By 1909, over 26 million records were being produced annually in the United States. Phonographs were increasingly found in American homes, often designed as elegant pieces of furniture. The rise of recorded sound raised new questions about music’s role in society. Philosophically, the phonograph introduced what scholar R. Murray Schafer later termed schizophonia—the separation of sound from its original source. For the first time, music could be divorced from its live performance context, sparking concerns about the dehumanization of musical experience. Yet others viewed this separation as a democratic breakthrough: recorded music could now travel far beyond its place of origin, reaching diverse and distant audiences.
Not everyone embraced this technological shift. Composer and bandleader John Philip Sousa (who we will cover more in depth in a later chapter) famously criticized recorded music in his 1906 essay “The Menace of Mechanical Music.” He argued that phonographs would discourage people from making music themselves and lead to the decline of amateur musicianship and community-based music-making. Sousa feared a future in which passive listening would replace active musical engagement, coining the term “canned music” to express his disdain.
In retrospect, the phonograph did more than change how people listened to music. It fundamentally transformed how music was conceived and valued. For centuries, sheet music had served as the primary means of preserving musical works, capturing only the abstract notation to be reinterpreted with each new performance. With the advent of sound recording, however, the actual sound of a performance could be preserved, replayed, and distributed across time and space. Music became not just an event but a product that was fixed, repeatable, and widely accessible. Over time, songs became closely associated with particular recordings, establishing what audiences came to hear as definitive versions. In this way, the phonograph not only gave rise to the modern recording industry but also redefined music recordings as a lasting cultural artifact and set the stage for its global dissemination in the twentieth century.