John Levin had no idea what he’d stumbled upon at first. About 10 years ago, the collector paid about $100 for a box of wax cylinders at an auction in Pennsylvania coal country. Those cylinders - the oldest commercial medium of recorded music - sat in his house for years until Levin put one of the unlabeled, decaying brown tubes onto his custom player and heard an old country song. Like 133 years old.
Levin immediately knew what he had.
“A true unicorn,” he says now.
In the world of early recordings, unicorns are cylinders that are reputed to exist but that have never been found. A session with cornetist Buddy Bolden, say, or a monologue from Mark Twain. What Levin heard coming out of his player was another name on his undiscovered list, New Orleans performer Louis Vasnier. The unlabeled cylinder he’d bought contained Vasnier singing and braying his way through “Thompson’s Old Gray Mule,” a song later recorded by hillbilly masters Uncle Dave Macon and Riley Puckett.
This month, Archeophone, a specialty label devoted to restoring recordings dating back to the 19th century, released a 45-rpm record of the 1891 performance. Label co-founder Rich Martin’s research on Vasnier comes with a revelation: The oldest country recording in existence was recorded by a Black man.
“It might be the most important thing we’ve ever put out,” says Meagan Hennessey, his wife and co-producer.
That’s saying something. Archeophone, founded in 1998, is a tiny label known for its impressive discoveries. Six years ago, Martin and Hennessy released another Levin find, a song by Charles Asbury determined to be the oldest existing banjo recording. Like Vasnier, Asbury was Black.
Martin wants to revisit the complicated relationship country music has had with race. Credit and record deals have typically been hard to come by for Black musicians. It took until 2000 for the Country Music Hall of Fame to induct its first Black artist, Charley Pride, and only two others have joined him. (There are 155 members in total.)
“Black artists by and large, who were the ones who performed and recorded, get wiped out of the picture because they say, ‘Well, it’s not really country,’” Martin says. “So ours is partly a project of reclamation.”
Rhiannon Giddens, the musician and historian whose banjo playing opens Beyoncé’s No. 1 country-chart hit “Texas Hold ’Em,” says she wasn’t surprised by Martin’s discovery. But she’s also not a normal listener. Her research has shown that there’s often a difference between who created music and who is credited with that creation. Country music, she notes, is merely a marketing tool invented to help sell records.
Early in the 20th century, recording companies created the term “race records” to compartmentalize the sound and try to attract Black listeners to buy certain songs. (Vasnier himself was advertised as “The only Colored comedian who can do it.”) In reality, country, blues, folk and bluegrass are intertwined in American culture and the Black experience.
“We shouldn’t have to do this at all,” Giddens says. “Like, this should have been part of the story all along. But fine, we spend the energy doing it because you see what’s happening right now in the United States, the divisions and how even a discussion of whether Beyoncé is allowed to make country music becomes a political part of a political agenda.”
Vasnier’s story fits right in with the mission of Archeophone, which Martin and Hennessey run out of their home in Champaign, Illinois. They seek to uncover and share the real history of recorded sound.