1910: "Act Two, Scene New"
Various Artists

If you thought that public fights over best practices for addressing forest fires was a recent phenomenon, welcome to the year 1910, when the Big Burn captured the headlines. Over two days in August 1910, the largest fire ever recorded in the U.S. consumed parts of Idaho, Montana, and Washington and set up a debate that lingers to this day about resource management. 1910 was also the year that the Boy Scouts of America was founded, in an effort to return city boys to the land and build them into future men of preparedness and service. In their khaki uniforms and hats, the Scouts bore no small resemblance to the rangers dutifully watching over the nation’s forests.

Against that background, tunesmiths such as Irving Berlin gave us songs that would also linger as our heritage to this very day. Berlin wrote “Call Me Up Some Rainy Afternoon” (performed by Ada Jones and the American Quartet), “Sadie Salome (Go Home)” (Bob Roberts), and “That Mesmerizing Mendelssohn Tune” (Collins and Harlan), while Edward Madden and Gus Edwards gave us “By the Light of the Silv’ry Moon” (Billy Murray and Haydn Quartet) and Beth Slater Whitson and Leo Friedman penned “Meet Me Tonight in Dreamland” (Henry Burr).

Sophie Tucker, Nora Bayes, Jack Norworth, and Walter Van Brunt had their first hits in 1910; and Frank C. Stanley (who died too soon in December 1910) had his last, as a member of the Peerless Quartet. And as the guard began changing in the recording business (now just a little more that 20 years old), the newly formed American Quartet, starring Billy Murray, scored with “Casey Jones” and took the baton from the Haydn Quartet, whose days were numbered.

All this and more in Archeophone’s 1910: “Act Two, Scene New”—the 19th installment in the series!