It's been awhile since I've written about Hylands, Spencer and Yeager. With all that I've written about them so far, I still haven't completely exhausted all there is to know about them. It would be good to spend some time speaking of them, as I have been so buried in Ring and Hager material for the last few months.
So, we all remember them!
In the last few days, I have spent a lot of time thinking back to the old stories I read about them in The Phonoscope and the brief mentionings of it throughout Jim Walsh's writing.
I observed something very curious while doing this.
I hadn't really thought long about how Roger Harding set up a publishing house across the street from Hylands in 1900. The more I spent thinking on it, the whole thing seemed more odd and interesting.
So just to refresh, in 1899, Hylands and Harding were the main driving forces for the Hylands Spencer and Yeager firm. Harding was essentially the fourth name in the firm. Hylands and Harding collaborated on a few songs they published in 1899, and it seems that they were working together perfectly. But, in early 1900, Harding picked up and left Hylands and the crew to set up his own publishing firm across the street from the Columbia studio.
Something odd happened. And in this last week, I really started thinking about how odd this was. Hylands and Harding abruptly split up, and considering what came about in the time succeeding this, whatever happened couldn't have been good. But! Harding wasn't the first to jump ship. In mid-1900, it seemed that all the tight knit Columbia studio community started breaking up, all jumping ship one by one. In the few 1900 editions of The Phonoscope that I have flipped through, I noticed that slowly it seemed a lot more the community who wrote for and were mentioned in that publication were starting to split up. One of the pieces I recall from around mid-1900 stated that Hylands himself was beginning to take jobs elsewhere, and working in vaudeville again(as he had been doing before recording). That particular statement seems odd to me.
There's that section!
So the "big sales" thing doesn't seem to fit too well. By mid-1900, the publishing firm thing was starting to wind down, and it was doing so quite fast. It was in that time frame that Roger Harding picked up and left, and when folks were starting to become intrigued with the new fangled Zon-O-Phone. By fall of 1900, the fine Turkish carpet he had so hardly worked for had been torn from under Hylands. Everyone had abandoned him and the publishing firm.
But why?
For a year, the Hylands Spencer and Yeager thing was booming, and Hylands had made his way up to the top from being the deadbeat rag-time pianist Columbia hired in 1897. Keep in mind that he was a nobody when he started at Columbia in 1897, in 1898 his significance became clear with the popularity of his signature rag-time accompaniments. Something devastating happened, and I have no idea what it was. It caused such important benefactors like Roger Harding and Steve Porter to quickly take their leave before the others.
(Harding in 1895, from a friend's collection)
(Steve Porter at the recording horns in 1897)
Whatever it was that forced these close friends to all break up so quickly, it kept them apart. Hylands still worked at Columbia, as he had to, but a lot of the crew, like Steve Porter, Gaskin, Quinn, etc, didn't work together much after 1900. For example, the Imperial Minstrels records had stopped by 1901, no longer was the old crew working in big groups like that. Everyone started going off and doing other things, such as working for other companies and heading into recording management(George Schweinfest did the latter for example). Russell Hunting left in 1899, Steve Porter left for the far east in 1902, and Spencer started working for Lambert, Edison, Zono, and more.
Something went seriously wrong with the publishing firm, and as I said, I have no idea why, and I don't really have any good solid guesses.
One thing that came to mind however, is that this where Ring and Hager come in. Ring started working at Columbia right as the Hylands Spencer and Yeager thing was falling apart. So of course someone like him would have been so valuable at that point. The 25 year old Ringleben was as willing to work as Banta, had no place to live, was caring for an aged father, and willing to try anything to get decent money. The coming of Ring may also have helped out Hylands put out the fires that were still burning from the collapse of the publishing firm.
(most likely Hylands and Ring around 1902)
As Columbia was transitioning into the 20th century, it seemed that it was perfect timing for Ring and Hager to start making their way into the lab. Hager had his ambitions elsewhere, but Ring was working for the then orchestra director Thomas Clark, next Hager, then ultimately Prince. Hylands was taking jobs elsewhere by 1901, though he was still working regularly at Columbia. I suspect tensions were high when one of the old guard at Columbia had to work with Hylands then. Someone like Spencer would have been bitter working with Hylands after 1900, but it did happen, and luckily with the new talent acquisitions at that point, Spencer wouldn't have to work with Hylands as much.
I believe I have mentioned that based on the sequence of studio pianists, each previous pianist was to mentor the next one, as it required very specific skills to become proficient as a phonograph accompanist. Hylands likely mentored Ring for a short period of time, this time being right after Hylands Spencer and Yeager.
Anyway, I'm starting to talk about something else, so I'll leave it at that.
Who knows what it was that split up the tight knit Columbia community in 1900...The fact that it happened so quickly is tantalizing, and because of this i will continue to look for hints. There's really no way to definitively find out why this happened, but there might be hints. I hope you recall that no one talked about Hylands in interviews. So all of this Hylands Spencer and Yeager nonsense was never well documented in the first place. Folks like Quinn and Porter didn't say a word of it, even though we know for certain they were part of it.
And that is a good transition to my next topic!
Back to some Ring and Hager research! One thing that has always fascinated me as a researcher of this very scant area of music history is how the characters involved in the history spoke of and interpreted it. Jim Walsh spoke with the last bunch of the original recording stars, Quinn, Joe Belmont, Byron Harlan, and Hager to name a few. Quinn's writings to Walsh are among the most extensive accounts of the earliest recording business. A long while ago I did a very detailed post where I pulled apart parts of Quinn's letters. As researchers now, we have everything laid out before us, but even with that being true, we have to spend many hours decoding all this information. A lot of things are mixed up and don't exactly go together the ways that the original participants stated. A few posts ago I detailed Hager's accounts of the OkeH field recordings of 1923-1925, and how his accounts are very valuable, but present issues.
I just got an article on Justin Ring published, and it was a very difficult undertaking. It was this way for many reasons, and I don't even know some of them. I want to write a definitive article on Hager, but there's so much information on Hager, that a single article won't do. I ran into this problem with the Justin Ring project.
(Ring in 1903 and Hager in 1895 or so)
I spent months getting frustrated about how I could find so little on Ring in that essential period after 1885 and before 1910. This is still proving true unfortunately. So as my mind works, I started asking the questions as to why it would be so difficult to find any information on Ring in general. Hager was easy to find information on, at this point I actually have a pretty good idea of what he was like as a person, and what interviewing him would have been like. With Ring, it has always been a dead end.
So I keep going back and pouring through the primary sources(including Hager's own papers) to see if I could get some second handed hints. While doing this, it occurred to me how much Hager loved talking about his past and the projects he was part of. He probably had thousands of papers very meticulously organized in folders, and records and books too. This becomes very clear while flipping through Walsh's writings from Hager in his articles. When Walsh started writing to him in the 1940's, Hager realized that all his memories and written history would be important, and that's where he started gathering everything, and started to spend a good amount of time writing about the history he drove and witnessed. Soon he became consumed with the joy of reminiscence and digging through his papers and books.
(a bit from Hager's writing published in the April, 1951 edition of Hobbies)
You can tell Hager loved going through his stuff. When Walsh reminded him of something, he would go and look for it, if he couldn't find it, he'd ask others who would probably have it. Hager had taken most of Cal Stewart's material by the time he was writing to Walsh, so much of the information we have on Stewart was from Hager's own very meticulous descriptions in his letters to Walsh. So, clearly Hager was very involved in and aware of his past. He knew that what he did was important. But what about Ring?
Hager wrote so much and very much enjoyed getting buried in his past, as he had a very carefully organized scrapbook to accompany the thousands of papers he kept regarding himself and others like Cal Stewart. When Walsh was writing to Hager, he mentioned his partner Ring a bunch of times, as even then it was difficult to separate them.
(Walsh's September 1962 description of the photo below)
(from a friend's collection)
Even Walsh described them as inseparable. It's possible that Walsh wrote to the old Ring, but he didn't get anything back. Walsh unfortunately had the same situation happen with Arthur Collins. He wrote to Collins in 1932, but never got anything back. A few years later Collins' wife Anna wrote back and told Walsh that he received and pondered on his letter, but ultimately decided it wasn't worth it to write back.
So I'm thinking that a similar situation may have happened with Ring. Now this is where Ring and Hager were opposites. Hager kept everything, and Ring kept nothing. This is the point I was getting to here. This may be why it is so difficult to find anything on Ring. So consider how he lived while working for Hager and Prince. He had no place to live, he wasn't married, and writing arrangements and playing accompaniments wherever he could. With that frugal lifestyle, there was no way he could have kept anything. He was constantly adapting to the times, so of course he had little interest in preserving the past.
So consider this...
If you were to go and visit Hager for an interview in say, 1953, he would so very much enjoy talking to you about history. He would gladly answer every question, and would tangent on that to tell another story, and another...and...another. He would go and dig things out as you spoke. the amount of information would be invaluable, and there would be so much of it you'd either be there all day and night or you'd have to come back for more. So the point being, that Hager would be the ideal person to interview about this stuff. You'd probably leave with a few things of his too.
So let's say you made the trip down to mid-eastern Florida in 1960 to visit Justin Ring. You'd get to his place, and one of his daughters would answer the door. You'd be kicked off his property. Ring would quietly be sipping tea listening to the radio or thumbing through Variety, with his glasses tipped down on his nose. It would all be there...everything...all the sounds, people, words, and memories, but they were never to leave his mind. He wouldn't talk about any of it. He preferred to leave it all behind, and being the sole survivor of his family by then, he had no business thinking about all his dead friends.
But like the last subject I wrote about in this post, why?
Who knows?
Considering the amount of things he did, and the kind of people he had to work for and with in those 50 years, he probably had good reasons to keep-a-movin. All the way back to Hylands in 1898, he saw everything, and probably escaped death several times while all his friends were dropping dead around him, starting with Frank P. Banta in 1903, and ending with his brother Franz in 1960.
Ring is a lot like how I'd think Banta would have been if he had lived long. Banta was perfectly content being the quiet and obedient accompanist, and likely spent little time talking about work with those who weren't in the business. He was so buried in work that many other things in life were not important. So interviewing him about recording would he difficult.
This is why I study the neglected accompanists. They saw everything, and despite their lower reputations in the musical community(excluding issler), they got the last word. And you know what?
Ring got the last word.
He may not have spoke it, but he got it all-right.
The accompanists we hear on these records were not famous in their day as accompanists, and they weren't famous in general. We always hear about these big names like Ben Harney, Eddie Foy, Anna Held, even Mike Bernard, and they were so highly regarded in their day, but, with the exception of Bernard, they aren't the ones whose voices and legacies were immortalized. It's the ultimate payback, the most neglected and overworked performers in the early studios got the last word back then, and even now. I'm talking about the accompanists of course. Issler, Banta, Hylands, Ring and the rest got the last word, the last driving notes, after the main performers finish. The accompanists and studio workers are the ones we can get to know better than even the main performers, as we hear them on everything, not on just some things.
So, anyway, this has been a hell of a case study! Before I close out I'd like to share a pair of records that I believe are arrangements by Justin Ring. Based on the composition style compared to his accompaniments, these arrangements line up to that style. I am also thinking that after Ring and Hager split up from 1906 to 1912 or so, Ring worked for Prince at Columbia.
So there ya go folks!
Hope you enjoyed this!
