Blind Skeleton's Three Tune Tuesday

When Ken Paxton and Donald Trump started calling Texas Senate candidate James Talarico “Talafreako,” he didn’t flinch. He put it on a T-shirt. This week we go looking for the history of that move: taking the insult somebody throws at you and wearing it like a badge. It turns out to be centuries old. In 1650, a magistrate in Derby, England, mocked George Fox and his followers as “Quakers.” They kep...

Three monsters, three records, and in every case the label is hiding something. Our goblins were written by two men who left no trace, our witch was recorded on the same afternoon as “Abide With Me,” and our Ouija board turns out to be a dance for courting couples — written by a man with six pen names, for a company that went bankrupt the month the record shipped. Hallowe’en is Saturday, so we’re...

Three records this week about things that won’t stay put after dark, arranged by how far away they are. First, from 1911, “That Mysterious Rag” — Irving Berlin and Ted Snyder writing a song about a tune that gets into your sleep and wakes you up screaming, and then making it catchy on purpose. The haunting is the record you bought. Then back to 1903 and the best ghost in the English language: Benj...

This week on Three Tune Tuesday, we went looking for skeletons and found something better: three Columbia records, six years apart, that cannot agree on what a graveyard is for. First, “Death Letter Blues,” recorded in 1924 by Clara Smith — the “Queen of the Moaners,” no relation to Bessie, though the two of them cut duets together. It’s a song about the piece of paper that tells you somebody has...

This week on Three Tune Tuesday, we’re chasing “the real thing”: being genuine, acting with intention, and doing something just because you love it. First, “Sallie Gooden,” recorded in 1922 by Texas fiddler Eck Robertson. He walked into Victor’s New York office uninvited, in full cowboy dress, and played the tune he’d known all his life. It’s often called the first commercial country record. Then...

This week on Three Tune Tuesday, we’re taking a lighthearted look at the Bell record label — a 1920s New Jersey budget label that rarely recorded anything itself. It bought recordings from other companies and printed whatever name it liked on them. So we’re playing detective with three Bell records, newest to oldest, asking one question: who’s really playing? First, “Doodle Doo Doo,” the 1924 nons...

This week on Three Tune Tuesday, we’re spending an episode with the press itself — inspired by a week that saw the White House bar three credentialed news outlets and the RNC pull CBC’s press pass — and we let three records from a hundred years ago do the arguing for us. First, “The Washington Post March,” which John Philip Sousa wrote on commission in 1889 for a newspaper’s own self-promotional e...

This week on Three Tune Tuesday, we’re spending an episode with memory itself — twenty-five years on from September 11th, right at the point where a shared national memory starts becoming history for the people who never lived through it, even as it stays close and present for everyone who did — and we let three of the earliest recorded sound era’s own records do the talking: “Ben Bolt,” a mid-19t...

This week’s Great Lake headline sent us hunting for a fitting protest song — turns out nobody in the 1910s was singing about who gets to name a body of water. So instead, Three Tune Tuesday goes looking for what people actually did put on record about lakes: three love songs, recorded across 35 years, all built around the same setting — a lake, a couple, and moonlight — put to three completely dif...

A hundred years before “supply chain” became a household word, people were already singing about it. This week we dig into three records — 1918 to 1926 — that capture the same anxieties making headlines today: a real worldwide banana shortage that became the biggest novelty hit of 1923 (“Yes! We Have No Bananas”), a folk song about the boll weevil that devastated Southern cotton farming, recorded...

Grab your bathing suit—we’re heading to the beach as Americans heard it more than a century ago. Through “By the Beautiful Sea,” “On the Beach at Waikiki,” and “In the Beautiful Seaside Air,” we’ll explore how the shoreline became a destination for recreation, romance, tropical fantasy, and good old-fashioned people-watching. Along the way, we’ll meet Billy Murray, hear the sound of Hawaiian steel...

Isolde’s final six minutes in Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde have been recorded again and again for over a century — but no two performers have ever told it quite the same way. This week, Boneapart and Yulia compare three recordings of the “Liebestod,” Wagner’s famous “love-death,” made 23 years apart: an intimate 1903 reading sung in Italian by Budapest soprano Italia Vasquez, a mature 1914 performa...

Franz Schubert died at 31, but he left behind an almost unbelievable amount of music — and no two performances of it sounded quite the same, even a century ago. This week we dig into three very different acoustic-era recordings that show just how far his music could stretch: an unfinished symphony movement so large it had to be split across multiple 78s, a spine-chilling four-character ballad sung...

While Canada’s WestJet flight attendants walk the picket line this month over unpaid working hours, we’re digging back a hundred years to find out what the lead-up to a strike actually sounded like on record. This week’s three records were never meant as protest songs — Charlie Poole’s “Can I Sleep in Your Barn Tonight, Mister?” is a wandering man’s plea for shelter, Vernon Dalhart’s “The Chain Ga...

The Commonwealth Games began life as the British Empire Games, making them the perfect inspiration for this week’s Three Tune Tuesday. Through three fascinating recordings from the early twentieth century, we explore how music reflected the rise, confidence, and changing legacy of the British Empire. From Harry Lauder’s comforting vision of soldiers carrying home across the globe, to the triumphan...

This week, Three Tune Tuesday marks the anniversary of the discovery of the Rosetta Stone with three recordings celebrating the power of language. We begin with Róża Kiołbassa-Kwasigroch’s Polish “Laleczko ma,” recorded for Victor on July 21, 1911, before travelling to prewar Warsaw for Gershon Sirota’s stirring rendition of the Aramaic “Kol Nidre.” Finally, Raquel Meller brings us the Spanish dra...

Inspired by the documentary Dawson City: Frozen Time, this episode of Three Tune Tuesday follows a trail from gold-rush dreams to silent-film ghosts. Dawson City was built by people chasing treasure in the Yukon, but decades later another kind of treasure was discovered beneath the ground: hundreds of nitrate film reels, buried, forgotten, and preserved by the cold. This week’s songs move from rom...

In this special Independence Day episode of Three Tune Tuesday , we celebrate the 250th anniversary of American independence through three remarkable recordings that preserve the musical traditions of the nation’s earliest years. From the colonial dance tune Money Musk , to Durang Hornpipe Medley , honoring Revolutionary War veteran John Durang, to the stirring Washington Grays March , these recor...

This week, it’s personal. Boneapart skipped into new territory at the GNCC Arena Championship bonspiel — a first time playing on Sunday, a first time in a championship final. Runners-up in the C final, sure, but the letter on the bracket isn’t the point. The point is he’d never been there before. This was his first. So here’s the question: what are some others? First, off-theme and by way of welco...

This week on Three Tune Tuesday, we throw open the barn door for “Animal House” — three records with critters in the title and not a serious thought among them. No grand theme, no hidden agenda. Just a bird, some chickens, and a bee, scattered across two decades of shellac. We open with “On the Wing” (1904), a breakneck galop from Arthur Pryor’s Orchestra hiding behind the house name “Victor Dance...

Three Tune Tuesday plays tunes. So why does this week open with a man reciting a poem? Because the best story about a game isn’t always sung. The theme this week is “Games,” and we follow the stakes as they drain right out of one — from everything riding on a single swing, through the swagger of a man who never loses, to an afternoon where the only thing on the line is a bag of peanuts. We open at...

D-Day happened in 1944. Three Tune Tuesday only plays music recorded before 1927. So how do you tell a D-Day story with songs that predate it by decades? You tell the story underneath the story. This week, we’re not playing war songs. We’re playing three recordings that trace the arc of what D-Day actually was — a moral obligation, a human cost, and a hard-won liberation — without a single referen...

This week’s Three Tune Tuesday is personal, political, and unapologetically defiant. When Donald Trump attempted to stage a partisan concert and seven of nine scheduled artists declined to participate upon learning its true nature, it was a reminder that saying “no” is one of the most powerful things an artist can do. That act of refusal — of drawing a line and refusing to let your name, your tale...

Today would have been his 149th birthday, and we are marking the occasion by telling the story of Billy Murray — the Denver Nightingale, the Phonograph King, the Irish-American kid from Colorado who talked his way into a New York recording studio in 1903 and never really left. We open with a song he recorded on his own birthday in 1922, a comic gem that catches him at the height of his powers and...

This week’s Three Tune Tuesday takes us back to the origins of Victoria Day — not the long weekend, not the fireworks, but the woman herself. We open with an “On This Day” entry: “June Brought the Roses,” recorded by contralto Marcia Freer on May 19, 1924, one hundred years to the day before this episode was released — nothing to do with Queen Victoria, but everything to do with the warmth her hol...