Monarchs of Minstrelsy: Historic Recordings by the Stars of the Minstrel Stage
By late 1998 he had the help of Meagan Hennessey, who was also a grad student at Indiana; they married in 2001, and together they own about 4,000 78s and a few hundred wax cylinders. Though they met many collectors like themselves, they noticed that little effort was being made to preserve acoustically recorded music–material dating roughly from 1890 to 1925, when musicians played not through microphones but machines that captured the vibrations of the playing and etched them onto discs or cylinders. So that year they launched Archeophone Records, which has since become the sole CD-reissue label dedicated to popular music of that era. Now based in downstate Urbana, Archeophone boasts a catalog of 34 CDs.
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Among the label’s most impressive releases are three discs dedicated to Bert Williams, arguably the most important black artist of the vaudeville era. Those CDs have helped restore the reputation of the oft-forgotten singer, who was the first black man to appear on Broadway and the first black man to join the prestigious Ziegfeld Follies. The discs make clear why he was so popular: on “Constantly” (from The Middle Years: 1910-1918) he dips his voice low, doing battle with the slinking trombone and employing the kind of phrasing Louis Armstrong would build on more than a decade later.
Martin declines to discuss sales figures but says that Archeophone has been successful enough to allow him to concentrate on the label full-time since 2003. (Hennessey works full-time as a webmaster at the University of Illinois.) They sell their catalog online (archeophone.com) as well as through a classical-music distributor. Though they haven’t met their goal of releasing a new CD every month, they’ve gotten some impressive media attention–the New York Times and NPR have done features on Archeophone. And Martin says he’s sure that discs like last year’s two-CD set Lost Sounds: Blacks and the Birth of the Recording Industry, 1891-1922–some of whose tracks presage the vocal-group sounds of gospel and doo-wop–will ultimately attract an audience. “We’ve got a lot of old customers, but I think something like Lost Sounds is a transitional product, where we’ll get a younger audience–people in their 30s and 40s starting to get interested in the stuff,” he says.
