Gotham City Soul

"Emerson needed more musicians, preferably cheap and loud. What about that middle-aged black man with the melodious whistle and hearty laugh he’d seen performing for coins at the Hudson River ferryboat terminal? Johnson listened to the proposition of the neatly dressed young man and said, “Why, sure . . . how much did you say you would pay?” “Twenty cents a song,” said Emerson, “and you can work all afternoon.” “Well, suh , just show me where you want me to go,” said Johnson, throwing in one of his hearty laughs for free. Emerson had his second recording artist." --From Lost Sounds: Blacks and the Birth of the Recording Industry, 1890-1919, by Tim Brooks. One could make a case that the American music industry was born when the inventor Thomas Edison first devised a way to record sound on tinfoil-coated cylinders in 1877, famously consigning his own voice to posterity (it should be noted that a recently uncovered audio fragment of the French folk song “Au Clair de Lune

. . .and I will be compelled to say more in my magazine. I don't have the eloquence of others, and my words will doubtless be lost in the millions of other words written. I cried for days after 9-11, tears of grief, my heart was broken. As of last Tuesday I cry for joy, my heart finally healed. (For my honored ancestors, my father Miles Peterson; grandparents Ransom Peterson, Annie Peterson, nee Johnson, and Fannie Mae; my great-grandparents Fletcher and Polly Johnson; Silver and Susiann Peterson; my great-great grandparents Amos and Saleta Battle, and all of my ancestors from Africa, and all over the world)