What was the first recorded country song in history?
In the world of early audio enthusiasts, a ‘unicorn’ is a reputed piece of audio that’s credibly known to exist but has never been found. With less than 6% of the 22,000 wax cylinders manufactured before 1902 known to survive, the old phonograph recordings captured around the turn of the century have mostly been weathered by age. The records are either no longer playable or gathering dust in one’s private vault, long forgotten.
One such collector, John Levin, knew he had found the rarest breed of unicorn when investigating the box of primitive cylinders snapped up for $100 in a Pennsylvania coal country auction.
Invented by American industrialist Thomas Edison in 1877, the phonograph pushed the emerging sound recording technology to a crucial next step in affording one the ability to playback the audio captured. Transmitting soundwaves through a needle via a spinning cylinder, a new era of phonograph machines suddenly began springing up in major US cities where a passerby with a spare nickel could hear a bawdy joke, a vaudeville number, or—in anticipation of the jukebox—a song of the day.
New Orleans was no different. Spotting an opportunity to capitalise on the growing interest in slot-operated audio devices, the Louisiana Phonograph Co began leasing coin-op machines and manufacturing new cylinders in earnest. It boasted the most profitable public player in the country, with the Canal and Chartres Street’s corner drugstore proto-jukebox earning over $1,400 across three months in the summer of 1891.
The birth of country music?
Among the novel recordings collated by the firm was the Black singer and working-class entertainer Louis J Vasnier Jr. Born in 1858 to a father who was formerly a slave, Vasnier earned a reputation with his comic dexterity and mastery of multiple dialects—including Dutch, Irish, and French, borne from the city’s colonial heritage.
The marketing advertisement also boasted his parody sermons in the guise of fictional preacher ‘Brudder Rasmus’, a style of vaudeville both poking fun at the Southern Black experience of religious pulpit oratory while also playing to the stereotypes of the day. They proved successful, with Louisiana Phonograph Co documenting many of his comedy bits, including ‘Adam and Eve and de Winter Apple’, delivered in the exaggerated Black affectation popular at the time.
Accompanied with a piano over his usual banjo, Vasnier also sang Thomas P Westendorf’s 1884 piece ‘Thompson’s Old Gray Mule’, a primitive slice of country recorded in 1891. Vasnier opens the cut with the song’s title and the phonograph company responsible, telling the tale of a farmer’s short-tempered mule, replete with animated braying and “ey-aw” hooting throughout. It’s a fascinating counter to country’s narrative of being a white art form—combining jazz, blues, R&B, gospel, and rock ‘n’ roll as Americana’s musical foundations shaped by Black culture.
Levin’s golden find found distribution via Archeophone, a label dedicated to restoring and issuing early recordings, on a 45-rpm record with his comedy preacher act as its B-side. With the Country Music Hall of Fame only inducting its first Black performer in 2000—Charley Pride—Vasnier’s pioneering country cut only sheds further light on the genre’s complicated racial policing as to what constitutes its “authenticity”.
