"The Gift of Love"

 In the last few weeks, it has been a busy time for me in terms of research. After several years of dead ends with Justin Ring, I decided to do something about it and contact his family. more recently(this week) I have been helping clean out a collector's house, which means I have been acquiring lots of new records. So far there's been lots of good stuff coming in, and within the next week or so I should be getting my Nauck auction winnings. 

So, regarding Ring...It seems that jumping into this project head on was a good idea. Before the last few weeks, it had been nearly impossible too find any decent information on Ring from period sources. 

Finding any mention of him not pertaining to recording or publishing is nearly impossible, but thanks to his descendants, I am finally getting a better idea of who he really was outside of his work. This project is still a work in progress, so I haven't made any serious conclusions yet, but it seems important enough to share pieces of an essay that Ring wrote later in his life. 

I have Hager's papers(or what's left of them), and from what he kept, Ring was an important figure in his life. Hager wanted to write several volumes of the life he lived in recording, as he expressed so aggressively to Jim Walsh. He never got to writing such these volumes, but I have small pieces that would have gone into these. He loved talking about his past, as he knew that he was an important figure in the music business for several decades. Naturally, if he told this story, his own words would be only half of the tale. The other half would go to Ring. 

Hager's story would be incomplete without Ring, and Rings's the same without Hager. It seems quite evident that they were indeed inseparable as Jim Walsh put it in 1962. After reading a few pages of Ring's writing, it is clear that he was a gifted storyteller, more so than his own beloved lyricists. 

There is this one 6 page essay written by Ring, and it is titled "The Gift of Love". he wrote this late in his life intended for future curious generations of his family. Ring became a family man, and dearly cared for his children and grandchildren. His daughter Marion(born 1919) was the family historian, as she did as much as she could to preserve her father's legacy. Ring wrote this for Marion, and it reads a lot like a grandfather telling tales to his grandchildren, of course in the best way possible. There isn't any specific organization to the essay, as he jumps around to different dates. I am still trying to figure out all the timing of the events he speaks of. 

There are several priceless anecdotes in this essay, one of the recurring jokes is little Ring grabbing a bunch of candies from a large jar on the counter. So it turns out that Ring's father, Justus Ringleben sr., opened a candy shop when he retired around 1880. They moved to that building that I visited back in January, and set up a candy store on the front below. So Ring would grab candies whenever father wasn't looking. In one of the stories he mentions that his father said:

"You are eating up all the profits again, off to school with you." 

This joke comes up a bunch of times. 

So for my regular readers here, you're probably wondering where Hager comes into the picture. So, here's the thing about that...He is prominently mentioned. The way he is spoken of and how he is mentioned is actually curious when looking at it from an analytical standpoint. Ring's organization in this essay is a little anachronistic, making it difficult to know where the stories are going and to keep track. But one thing that is very important about his language is how exactly he tells the story of his young life. 

He stopped the story in 1908 when he married his second wife Elsie, to whom he was married until 1959. So thankfully we don't get any of his later work confused with the early stuff(though he does mention working for Okeh and Decca). this document was written exclusively for his family, and the way he tells his story is through his close family. Practically nobody else outside of his own family is explicitly named or detailed...

except Hager. 

The only person he mentions outside of his family is Hager. This certainly doesn't come as a surprise, but considering the circumstances of the paper it is still rather curious. Yes, he mentions Hager, but the real question is how Ring spoke of him. Before reading this essay, I thought almost certainly that Ring was reluctant to speak of Hager to anyone, especially of that time between 1900 and 1904. So here's what he says about Hager: 

At that time there wasn't any musicians union so I joined Samuel Gompers who was very active in the cigar makers union. A few years later, I became a charter member of Local #802 of the Musicians Union. I continued to play at Ebling's Casino where I met Fred Hager, another musician who was to play a very important part in my future life. Fred played violin. Some nights after work we would gather the boys for a jam session and they would not go home until morning. 

In the summer of 1904 Fred Hager, the promoter, I called him, decided to try the record business which was then coming into being. I started composing in my spare time. I saw Fred from time to time as he progressed in his song business. Each time we met, he could try to get me to come in with him to start a recording company. I eventually did and before I knew it, I was the recording manager of Okeh records...

There you have it folks, his own words on Hager. So, there's a lot to take in here. He jumps all over the place in years, and a few things are a bit out of order, but based on what we know about him and Hager, we can pull it apart and set some dates to a sort of timeline. He doesn't give any specifics on when he met Hager, but he mentioned the Casino gig he had on the previous page, so I would put his employment there around 1897-1899. Hager began making records in the middle of 1898, and in early 1899 Frank Seaman and the Universal record company sent him out to pick up talent to record. Hager wrote this up in his own little essay like Ring's, in fact here's a piece from it: 

The following winter[1899] I was engaged by an inventor of a new type of disc records called the Zon-O-Phone and supplied him with various singers [and] instrumental singers[sic] for experimental players. I continued my band concerts for a number of seasons and after I finished my contract with Zon-O-Phone, my band was engaged for both the Edison and Columbia and I had earned the name of the record talent pioneer. 

*lots of mistakes and poorly typed words on this sheet from Hager's papers, I had difficulty writing it out to be as legible as possible. I'm sitting here with a headache staring at this faint typewriting trying to transcribe this damn thing*

So Hager claims that he went out and picked up a lot of that strange talent that recorded on Zono only in 1900 and 1901, and this is one of the few things we can be sure that he did. So comparing it with Ring's writing, it would seem that Ring was one of Hager's *discoveries* while running around the dives and vaudeville houses.  Hager must have gone around to nearly every place he could hear unusual talent, and I guess that this talent would include a willing accompanist for the new Zon-O-phone. 

(one of the first Zono ads to be used, from around February of 1899, taken from The Phonoscope)

The Zono crowd was eager for talent and investors, and with Hager's help, they were able to get what they needed by the end of 1900, and with their credibility growing quickly, big investors like Eldridge R. Johnson bought some of their stock.

So from what Ring stated, Hager picked him out from among many amateur performers, but it just so happened there was an immediate deeper connection between the two of them. he speaks about Hager as highly and as lovingly as he does the rest of his own family, more so than his own wife Elsie. Clearly Hager was family to Ring, whether his family liked it or not. Hager was really special to him, so much so that he'd speak of it so plainly to his daughters and grandchildren. Oddly enough, there is little mention of Ring in what remains of Hager's papers, though the full page portrait of Ring speaks volumes. 

This one: 

 I have yet to find out whether Ring kept a nice portrait of Hager in his own papers, but there's a chance he did.. 
 

Overall, in Ring's essay, he mentions little about his early days in recording, which is a little frustrating, but doesn't hinder me much. Before I move on to another small thing, I would like to acknowledge a curious line from his essay, one that is stated rather out of context. 

Life was good to me...

How it's written above is just about as out of context as it is in the actual essay. As a very particular researcher, I am intrigued by this line. It could mean a lot, though in this context I can see it more as an acknowledgement of how he was lucky to have been loved and adored by so many lovely people. With that, it seems really sweet and humble. Considering how much he did in his life, he spoke very little of how he actually was and things directly related to himself, unlike with Hager. he genuinely seems like a kind old man with many fantastic stories to tell, far more than those that he wrote about here.

See here's the catch...Ring would be perfectly willing to speak of his past, but only if you were family. Based on what I've seen here, he was somewhat reluctant to speak to Jim Walsh about his past. He cared so much for his family, because they understood him and loved him dearly. Some things about his past seemed that they wouldn't fare well written down by Walsh in articles. Ring was perfectly happy to keep the beloved stories he had within the family, not out in the open for all collectors to see. After reading this, there's definitely a deeper story between Ring and Hager, and my previous posts regarding the closeness of their relationship hold up. 

Before I close out, I'd like to address something else regarding Ring that folks have been asking me about. A little while ago, a few comments were thrown on here on Ring being an accomplished clarinetist. At first I was skeptical of this, as he was known for his record accompaniments and composing, and I had not seen any writings on him regarding woodwinds. So it seems that this was indeed true. he played clarinet and saxophone, along with everything else he played on records for Okeh and victor. His descendants are still quite musical, and it seems that a few play reed instruments! This actually does explain why Ring and Hager wrote so many pieces in the 20's that were intended for saxophone. 

In 1900 on Zon-O-Phone, a groups called the Zonophone reed orchestra made a few records. So it seems pretty certain who came up with this idea---Ring. 

Here's an example of one of these records: 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=52dqvBYYo7M 

I just won a copy of one of these records, and should get it in the mail soon! Will definitely post about it when it comes. 

So there's this famous picture of what is the Edison Military band, taken around 1907. They're in the recording lab, all crowded together around the horn, with a whiskered conductor behind it. For years I had no idea who any of these musicians were, and just on a whim I went back and looked at it last week. I listened to a few Edison military band records, and remembered that there was a sax in that group. Upon inspecting the picture again, it hit me. 

That's Ring playing the saxophone!

 It actually makes a lot of sense, and this time it sure does look like him. That's pretty much the exact same profile in that picture with Hager from around 1902. Everything about how he looks lines up with other pictures I've seen of him. seven his descendants chimed in to say it looks a lot like "pop" as his grandchildren called him. 

All-right folks. I know it's been awhile since I've posted on here, and for that I apologize. I have been quite busy with research projects, particularly in communicating with Ring and Hager's descendants. After several years, I have finally been able to get somewhere with truly understanding the curious relationship between these two. There are more layers peeling away as I keep learning more about them, which is certainly a good thing! While this is good, it does make writing posts difficult, as I have to spend the time pulling apart each artifact and conversation. I've also been busy with maintaining my quickly growing record collection. within the last three months I've gotten close to 100 records, and more are on the way. I am officially out of space for my discs! It's a good feeling but frustrating for someone like me who wants everything organized. 

Stay safe and well out there! We can get through this folks! Keep listening! Keep digging! Stay curious! 

Hope you enjoyed this!