There are questions that reveal deep truths about humanity. Some spark philosophical debates. And then there are questions that are just plain odd. Our feature OKI Wanna Know specializes in those. This week, we dance into Cincinnati's musical history.
The Tri-State may not be known as Music City, or have the Seattle Sound, but it does alright in the music department. There are a lot of notable names associated with Cincinnati: Bootsy Collins, Rosemary Clooney, Foxy Shazam, Over-the-Rhine...
Ken Sims of Bellevue says his question was inspired by a old vinyl record he found.
"I'd like to know the first record ever recorded in Cincinnati and who made it."
The Cincinnati Hamilton County Public Library is a good place to start our search. The Main Library Downtown has an exhibit marked with local musical history. Social Stairs lists artists, title of the song or album, and year.
The list starts with Doris Day in 1945, and her first No. 1 song.
But, that song was recorded in New York.
The Library's Brian Powers says if you want to get technical, the first music recorded here wasn't on vinyl. It was a piano roll.
"A lot of people would get a piano. But not everybody could play the piano. So they would have pianos that would play itself. A self-playing piano. You could buy piano rolls."
A piano roll is a sheet of paper with holes punched in it. Each hole represents a note, and when the roll is fed through a player, those piano keys will be hit.
The magazine Music Trade Review reported on February 2, 1924, radio station WLW broadcast a performance of the Elmer Aichele Orchestra performing "Somebody Else" as it was recorded for piano roll. Half an hour after that, the Nation's Station aired the piano roll.
But Powers says the first commercially available piano roll recorded locally was of one of the biggest artists of 1924: Jelly Roll Morton, the jazz great from New Orleans.
"I found out that he recorded not records, but piano rolls here in Cincinnati," Powers says. "There was a big company here in Cincinnati, Vocalstyle Music. They would record a lot of musicians who were part of the College of Music and the Conservatory, and they would hire these people to play music so they could sell piano rolls."
The magazine Music Trade Review names 12 songs in that June session, but doesn't indicate which one was first.
About 70 miles north of Cincinnati there was a piano maker called Starr Pianos.
"When turntables started happening, record players, they started making those in their factory in Richmond, Indiana," he says. "Then of course a way to get people to maybe buy one of these is create records. So they kinda got into recording people. A lot of jazz people out of Chicago, like Louis Armstrong, did his very first recordings there, in Richmond."
Those recordings were under the Starr and Gennett labels, among others. Powers says Jelly Roll Morton had been recording in Richmond when he made a side trip to Cincinnati to make the piano rolls.
Powers says Starr/Gennett had a store on 4th Street in downtown Cincinnati since about 1904.
"But 1924, or somewhere around that, they create a recording lab, so you could probably record yourself singing," he says. "But apparently they recorded the orchestra at the Hotel Sinton; that happened to be on 4th Street, too. And so, they recorded them in the store there and sold records of that."
Powers says those sessions weren't well documented.
"Couldn't tell you what songs were recorded. That's what I can't tell you," he says. "Can give you an idea of approximate time, month, year, place, but song? I don't know."
Powers says there's a recording from 1930 that is well documented: Walter Davis and Roosevelt Sykes recorded four songs at the Hotel Sinton, on June 12, 1930.
He says what we think of as a recording studio today doesn't show up for another decade.
"And that's all tied in with Bucky Herzog who opened his studio on Race Street, which is just a block away here from the library, and also with King Records," Powers says. "And those are 1940s time period."
He says Herzog Studios opened in 1946, and hosted country artists including Hank Williams, Patti Page and Flatt and Scruggs. Syd Nathan, founder of King Records, brought his artists there until about 1947. King Records opened its own recording studio and production facility on Brewster Avenue in Evanston in 1948 or 1949.
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