The Boswell Sisters: It’s The Girl

It’s Radio Faux Show Flashback week, with each day presenting a song from an old post during the first 3 years of the Faux Show blog. Feel free to go back and check out the old Faux Show format (which was similar to an online music magazine format, with dozens of songs and information about them provided weekly with an overall theme) or simply listen to today’s song.

I’ve chosen “It’s The Girl” by The Boswell Sisters to represent the music I discussed in Radio Faux Show Volume 2, Number 35 on September 25, 2022. The theme of the show was The National Recording Registry (Pre-1955) and presented 43 recordings from before 1955 that are included in the National Recording Registry. The National Recording Registry shows were a labor of love for me. I believe that the National Recording Registry is one of the most important endeavors that the US Government has ever undertaken, and I spent many hours of research in creating these posts. There are several original posts, covering the long history of recording, and I am proud to have created one of the only expansive collections of these recordings that is available. If your interest is piqued, feel free to read what I wrote back in 2022.

What is the National Recording Registry?

The National Recording Registry is a list of sound recordings deemed by the United States Library of Congress to be culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant, and/or inform or reflect life in the United States. The Registry was established by Congress via the National Recording Preservation Act of 2000, which also created the National Recording Preservation Board. Members of the Board are appointed by the Librarian of Congress, and each year select new recordings for inclusion. Fifty recordings per year were selected from 2002 to 2005, and twenty-five per year have been selected since 2006.

The criteria for selection are:

• Recordings are culturally, historically or aesthetically significant, and/or inform or reflect culture in the United States.
• Recordings are not considered for inclusion in the National Recording Registry if no copy of the recording exists.
• No recording is eligible for inclusion in the National Recording Registry until ten years after the recording’s creation.

Why is the National Recording Registry important?

I ask this question because some people may find the concept to not be as important as I believe it is. After all, this is not a collection of the most popular music of the last 140+ years. It is not a collection focused solely on songs, specific artists, or types of music. It is not a collection of every major event in U.S. history. It is not even focused on the most important political and cultural figures. We live in a time when it seems that everything ever recorded is available at the push of a button, so why worry about conserving these recordings in the Library of Congress?

I believe the answer is that as we move further into the 21^st century and the digital age, it becomes harder for each generation to understand the world that existed before everything was recorded for instantaneous consumption by everyone with access to social media. History, as historians will tell you, is important because if we don’t learn from our past mistakes then we are doomed to repeat them. This is usually attributed to the written and oral history of world events, but recorded history fits into this dogma just as well. I won’t argue that everyone should listen to “Hellhound On My Trail” by Robert Johnson or else be doomed to a life of ignorance and failure. However, I would argue, and have in many past Faux Shows, that the best way to understand the people of the world, past or present, is through their music. The Registry provides not only this musical history lesson, but also a narrative history of paradigm-shifting events throughout the 20^th and into this century.

What can be learned from the National Recording Registry (or, how to best consume dozens of hours of recorded material in a meaningful way)?

I have not listened to every second of the material presented in the Registry, but I listened to at least a little bit of each recording and, once I had it all laid out chronologically, I made some important realizations about the selections.

1. The first and most obvious historical importance of the Registry is the collection of many of the first recordings in human history. These 19^th century recordings are not the kind of thing one would consider good driving music, but they are nevertheless an integral piece of knowledge in discovering the earliest aesthetics of recorded sound.
2. These selections provide a way to listen to the changes in recording technology over the last 140+ years. Moving from year to year provides very subtle changes, at a minimum, and sometimes the difference between one or two years is profound. Just to name a few obvious technological advancements in recording over the decades, the movement from phonoautograph to foil cylinder to recordings imprinted directly onto discs to magnetic audio to analog tape to multi-track tape to stereo recordings to digital recordings is obvious if one listens to even only small bits of the Registry recordings in chronological order. Anyone with a surface-level understanding of the history of the 20^th century can then easily relate these changes to the changes in technology, lifestyle, culture, politics, and all other aspects of life across the century. For many, these basic differences in eras are learned in school via textbooks, so digesting this history in the context of recorded music and narration is refreshing and, for those whose preferred learning method is auditory, is possibly groundbreaking.
3. Decisions about what constitutes a significant recording are subjective, but not near as much as decisions about who should receive a music award or election into a Hall of Fame or other similar institution. There are only 600 recordings selected over 140+ years, but there are no obvious gaps in the history of recordings as presented by the Registry. It is easy to argue about which Billie Holiday, Bessie Smith, or Count Basie recording should be included, but I believe that all aspects of recording history are represented, and there are very few selected artists who seem inappropriate to include or artists clearly snubbed from inclusion. My guess is that some obvious selections, such as at least one Madonna song (“Vogue” for example), will be included sooner or later, but that is just one piece of an overall musical period which is already covered by included artists such as Prince, Michael Jackson, and Cyndi Lauper. The same can be said for some famous speeches and audio, such as Lou Gehrig’s “Proudest Man on the Face of the Earth,” Nixon’s “I’m not a crook,” and Clinton’s “I did not have sexual relations with that woman,” but most of the best-known speeches of the 20^th century are included.
4. Similarly, the Registry does not attempt to cover the entire history of the world over the last 140+ years, but obvious events such as The Great War, World War II, The Cold War, and 9/11 are preserved. Similarly, specific recordings are included to present shared National experiences, such as life during The Great Depression, the importance of baseball on the early 20^th century, the creation of radio, television, and modern theatre, as well as several important and tragic events that shaped our modern world. One can’t learn the entire history of the U.S. through these recordings, but one can certainly gain an understanding of the struggles and accomplishments of its people.
5. Finally, the recordings are not focused only on American selections. This is important because the history of the U.S. can’t be separated from the history of the world. Most selections are clearly American simply because this is a collection in the United States Library of Congress, but there are several selections from people of other nations that clearly have impacted life in the U.S. over the last 100 years. Going in, I assumed that this would be a weakness of the collection, but it turns out to be a strength. 

To learn more about The National Recording Registry, check out the Library of Congress website.

To listen to all of the songs of the day, check out the Radio Faux Show Song of the Day playlist.

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