Old Songs

What’s the oldest song you listen to on a regular basis?

My own lifetime goes back to the 70s, when lots of great music was being created, and entire genres were evolving out of whole cloth. Punk was nascent and metal was still brand new. Funk and disco exploded onto the popular scene, and pop gobbled up those influences.

I grew up listening to the likes of Elton John, Fleetwood Mac, and Journey on the contemporary pop stations throughout my youngest years, but my parents also listened to older stuff, especially from the early days of rock and roll.

I love music that’s older than this, but I discovered most of that much later in life.

Today, I want to take you way back, first to the origins of rock and roll—such an important parent genre for so many forms of music to come. This piece is a bit more of a personal journey than a dry history, and so I’ve invited an expert for this part of the tale:

Brad Kyle

runs

Front Row & Backstage

here on Substack, and Brad brings a wealth of knowledge about rock music and beyond. I’ll hand this section over to him.

Rock’N’Roll

I was born in 1955, the same year (the history books tell us) rock’n’roll was born. However prescient that ended up being is debatable, but, on February 9, 1964, CBS-TV in the States broadcast The Beatles’ eruption onto what we would soon call Pop Culture via The Ed Sullivan Show.

I was 8 (six weeks from turning 9), and nearly two years of accordion lessons, practice, recitals, a handful of ribbons, and a trophy all became history….in that one moment.

Not that I was inspired or motivated to create that kind of music, although my squeezebox years certainly showed me I had an ear and a love for music (I later sang in a rock band, and many choirs, and taught myself flute, completely by ear).

But, with decades of intro- and retro-spection, I can say with confidence my little brain at the time was sitting in stunned disbelief that “that sound” could come from…well, anywhere.

I went on a lifelong journey on that year’s February 10 to spend my days searching for anyone who could even come close to writing, composing, and creating a taut, well-constructed melody, preferably surrounded by close, intricate, and scrumptious harmonies!

It certainly helped that Dad was in radio in my Houston, TX hometown, and he’d come home, at least once a week, with promo albums from such labels as The Beatles’ Capitol Records, Warner Bros., and Columbia: An embarrassment of seemingly endless aural riches to feed what was now emerging as my innate and insistent hunger.

I was also fortunate enough to not have my musical tastes driven by AM (and later, FM) radio. If 4 dozen, say, albums were released in a given week by the majors, radio would deign to let you hear, if you were lucky, maybe a song or two from ten!

From the mid-’60s through the early-’80s, I heard quite close to everything that was released by the major labels…from Dad’s weekly vinyl largesse to obtaining my own cache of licorice pizza in my days in radio (1973-1976) and retail records (1976-1982).

“The general record-buying public” will assume that if radio doesn’t play a song, it (or the artist) sucks. That same radio-informed public will also assume that billion-selling artists like Journey, Bon Jovi, ad infinitum must be the most talented musicians to ever live.

Debates could be had, of course, but so much goes into whether a song gets airplay or not (speaking only in terms of record biz circa 1960s through ‘90s, pre-internet, pre-satellite radio). And, sans airplay, the general public had little (to no) way of knowing that an artist had a newly-recorded song or album out (or what it may have sounded like)!

Thanks, Brad!

Before Rock

Brad was born in ‘55, which many say was the same year rock came out. He took us back 20 years before my own time, but what about before that?

This calls for an artifact. I own one really interesting time capsule of sorts. It was called “an Edison” by my grandparents, and while the cabinet has certainly been rebuilt, the innards are originals.

The Edison plays these 100-year-old discs that are called Diamond Discs, almost 1/4 inch thick and much sturdier than the LPs I grew up listening to. You can see one of these relics on the turntable of the machine in the pic I took. Over time, I’ve lost the hand crank, but you can still insert a dowel rod and get the thing to play.

Here is the song from the record currently on my Edison (not my video!):

This song is exactly 100 years old in 2023. Pretty old! And, it has the formula for how to steal a flapper’s heart.

But it’s not the oldest song ever recorded. That honor goes to Au Claire de la Lune, recorded in 1860 by Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville. I’m publishing this on Halloween, and it seems appropriate to include that original audio here:

Happy nightmares!

1860 is as old as it gets for recorded music, but what about written music?

Bach wrote complex and beautiful sheet music during the early 1700s, but he was standing on the shoulders of many giants who came before him. Medieval composers like Hildegard and Leonin paved the way for the great baroque composers, but they too were beneficiaries of ancient giants.

Ancient Giants

Now we arrive at the oldest complete song we have a record of. Hurrian Hymn No. 6, also known as Hymn to Nikkal, was written about 3400 years ago. Give this recreation a listen here:

On the other hand, The Lipit-Ishtar Hymn is older still. It’s a Sumerian clay tablet that contains musical notation for a hymn to a Mesopotamian ruler. It is dated to around 1950 BCE, making it the oldest known fragment of musical notation.

Clearly, people were writing down and performing music 4000 years ago. For many tens of thousands of years before that, we were also playing music. Bone flutes were found in Europe from 42,000 years ago, and while those are currently the oldest confirmed musical instruments, I can’t help but wonder how much further back our songwriting prowess goes.

Our interest in music goes back a long, long way. It’s an important part of who we are, and it’s an important part of my day, too. I listen to music while I’m writing, reading, and doing all sorts of things, probably to the tune of 10 hours a day on average.

I’ve written about my experiences seeing and interviewing the Misfits, a Depeche Mode concert last week, an early punk show for me, and my friend

Rudy Fischmann

wrote about how he tried writing and recording a song by using AI. Clearly, music is a huge part of who I am, and so it has been my entire life.

What are some older songs you enjoy listening to today? What sort of music do you think was the first we created?