Posted 8:28 PM by Gene

If the Web's bad side is preserving no-talents who'd race to oblivion but for the yelling of monomaniacs, its good side is occasionally rescuing the undeserved from it. Such is the case with Vess L. Ossman, the premiere banjoist of his day. That his output is exclusively acoustical (he died in 1923, two years before the first commercial "electrical" discs) does not blunt that he was really good. The banjo recorded quite well on the horn, and he cut hundreds of cylinders and discs. Though he played a wide-ranging repertoire he seems to have done best with rags. It is hard to imagine he didn't influence the bluegrass boys, and for the better. Archive.org has collected his recordings but I'd guess the celebrated UCSB Cylinder Preservation and Digitization Project has crafted a superior sound, though its catalog is largely limited to Edisons. Here is a classic example. One thing I love about acoustical recordings is that for years they had opening announcements -- necessary as the artist and song title were only molded onto a cylinder's rim, and early phonographs (indeed most phonographs up to the LP era) could only play one song at a time.