Never Heard Such a Thing

Bibliographic Data

ID2938651
AuthorsGustavus Stadler (corresponding author)
Year2010
Volume28
Issue1
Pages87-105
Publication date2010-01-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueSocial Text (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0164-2472 • E-ISSN: 1527-1951
PublisherDuke University Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1215/01642472-2009-061
OpenAlexW2019894208
LanguageEN
Citations received17

This essay examines 1890s commercial audio recordings-none of which is known to exist today-that reenacted lynchings of African Americans,in particular, the mass spectacle lynching of Henry Smith of Paris, Texas, in 1893. Despite rumors that the recordings were made live, they were in fact examples of an early, nonmusical genre in commercial phonography known as the "descriptive specialty," which often involved studio reenactments of current events. Like other descriptive specialties, these recordings were meant to exhibit the phonographic medium to capture audience attention. Using descriptions of the recordings from period documents, the essay argues that there was a specific confluence between lynching reenactments and the notion of a "phonographic voice," between sounds elicited from persons on the edge of "the human" and the sound imagined to come from the machine itself. It places the recordings in the context of contemporary representations of blackness in phonography and ponders their place in the longer history of recorded sounds of blackness. It also argues against the fixation on disembodiment among some media historians and theorists who work on phonography and contemporaneous technologies

Spectacle · Music History and Culture

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