Monday, March 23, 2015

a ravishingly crass sense of humor

Russell Hunting had, no doubt, the most fascinating and progressive ideas of the earliest recording artists. He was the first person to get into big legal trouble in the recording business, and the first great entrepreneur of the recording industry(along with Len Spencer). He also had the most dirty sense of humor of any of the early recording stars. 

His sense of humor was very modern in many ways. 
Sex jokes, inappropriate jargon, satire, and a WHOLE LOT OF SLANG! 
That's Russell Hunting for ya. 
The way that he wrote in the earliest issues of The Phonoscope is only a fraction of the crude sense of humor that he had, it had some of his jokes and plenty of slang that's sometimes hard to understand(even for a scholar like me!). I hate to offend anyone if they don't particularly like crude humor, but I would like to share one of the few surviving cylinders of Hunting's that were supposed to be destroyed when he got into trouble in 1896, just to fully show how off his sense of humor and nasty mind was: 
(you don't have to listen to this if you don't want to, there's an awful lot of cussing in this one, but that's not too unusual for Hunting)
His speaking voice to me has always given me nightmares, especially on the example above. 

He takes Shakespeare to a whole new level. 

But this is the origin of his obscene and rather peculiar sense of humor--Shakespeare. He was a prominent actor in Shakespearian plays in the 1880's, and clearly from this cylinder, he must have been a real dark, evil-voiced character in these plays. So that made him perfect for this. However, the public of the music business was not yet ready socially for Hunting's type (clearly by all the legal trouble he got into), and music wouldn't once again allow this sort of obscene talk  for many decades afterward. He was too forward-thinking and idiosyncratic for the minds of the 1890's public. 
Even if Len Spencer's sense of humor was slightly crass as well(kind of hard to notice it in all of the sketches he did, but if you listen closely to certain ones, you can catch it)
here's the best example I can think of at the moment for Spencer's minimally crass sense of humor: 
(I own this cylinder! but this is not my transfer)

Spencer compiled the rather famous sketch above in 1906(this take was recorded in 1910), and this really represents Spencer's sense of humor, jargon, take on being a lover, and his general demeanor. 

Now, back to Hunting. He had a sense of humor that was not only progressive, but also quite typical of the time period, he was recording what the phonograph parlor keepers wanted. And oftentimes, it was what his friends in the business wanted. They probably thought that his daring naughtiness was off the wall! And him getting in trouble was a medal of courage and of his adherence to the recording business. 
It certainly made his records sell even more, he just landed right on his feet when his time in jail was done! 

I hope you enjoyed this! 



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