The Album — The Great Depression

The Great Depression album artwork — LP, CD, and jacket

Swanee

Al Jolson

Gershwin was twenty when he wrote it. Jolson heard it at a party, put it in his show, and sold a million records — the biggest-selling song of Gershwin’s life, and the last time the decade’s optimism came that cheap.

Public domain · recording 1920 · composition: Music George Gershwin, lyric Irving Caesar, 1919

1920—

Wabash Blues

Isham Jones Orchestra

A dance-band side from the year unemployment hit twelve percent in the forgotten depression of 1920–21. The country recovered fast, learned nothing, and spent the next eight years on margin.

Public domain · recording 1921 · composition: Dave Ringle and Fred Meinken, 1921

1921—

Downhearted Blues

Bessie Smith

Smith’s first record for Columbia, cut on her second take. It reportedly moved three quarters of a million copies in six months and made her the highest-paid Black performer in America.

Public domain · recording 1923 · composition: Alberta Hunter and Lovie Austin, 1922

1923—

Dippermouth Blues

King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band

Chicago, with the young Louis Armstrong playing second cornet behind his mentor. Oliver’s three-chorus solo was copied note for note by a generation of players who learned it off the disc.

Public domain · recording 1923 · composition: Joe Oliver and Louis Armstrong, 1923

1923—

Yes! We Have No Bananas

Billy Jones

The novelty song of the decade, and a useful reminder of what the boom years actually sounded like on the radio: not portent, not warning, just an unshakeable tune about a fruit shortage.

Public domain · recording 1923 · composition: Frank Silver and Irving Cohn, 1923

1923—

See See Rider Blues

Ma Rainey

Rainey recorded it with Louis Armstrong on cornet. The song predates them both by decades — a floating blues verse that had been travelling the South since before either was born.

Public domain · recording 1924 · composition: Traditional, arr. Lena Arant, 1924

1924—

Rhapsody in Blue

Paul Whiteman Orchestra with George Gershwin

Gershwin himself at the piano, recorded four months after the Aeolian Hall premiere. Whiteman was selling jazz to the concert hall; the record sold a million and made the case that American popular music was worth taking seriously.

Public domain · recording 1924 · composition: George Gershwin, 1924

1924—

Gulf Coast Blues

Bessie Smith

Cut at Smith's very first session, backed only by Clarence Williams on piano. Smith's performance gives the song a stark sense of instability and hardship that would resonate far beyond its original moment.

Public domain · recording Feb. 16, 1923 · composition: Clarence Williams, 1923

1923—

The Little Old Log Cabin in the Lane

Fiddlin' John Carson

Recorded in a makeshift Atlanta studio and generally credited as the record that proved rural Southern audiences would buy their own music. Carson himself had spent twenty years in the cotton mills before this sold out its first pressing in days — the same mill-town world the Carter Family would sing out of a few years later.

Public domain · recording June 14, 1923 · composition: Will S. Hays, 19th century

1923—

Weeping Willow Blues

Bessie Smith

A river, a willow tree, and nothing resolved by the end of it. Smith recorded many variations on this same register of grief, making it one of the defining emotional currents of her early work.

Public domain · recording Sept. 1924 · composition: Paul Carter, 1924

1924—

Over There

Nora Bayes

Cohan wrote it the day after the US declared war in 1917, and Bayes made it the best-selling patriotic record of its era. Guthrie and Berlin would spend 1938 and 1940 arguing with this song's confidence, one writing 'God Bless America' in its spirit and the other answering with 'This Land Is Your Land.'

Public domain · recording July 13, 1917 · composition: George M. Cohan, 1917

1917—

Liner Notes

Where These Came From

Every track on this album is a record that actually existed at the time — that somebody bought, or sang, or heard on a radio in a kitchen. What it is not, any longer, is a chronological soundtrack of the Depression itself. The recordings that defined those years on record — Guthrie's Dust Bowl ballads, the Carter Family, Robert Johnson, Billie Holiday's "Strange Fruit" — remain under US copyright and can't be legally hosted here; the earliest of them, from 1929, doesn't clear until 2030.

The collection brings together public-domain recordings from 1917–1925 that capture a wide range of American music and experience, including blues, jazz, migration, agricultural hardship, mill-town life, and popular culture.

“You can hear the whole decade coming if you listen to what people were already singing about.”

— Martin Vogt, music supervisor

The recordings are sequenced chronologically. Listened to in order, they trace musical and social currents running from 1917 through 1925.

Transfers were made from original 78rpm pressings where they survive. We have left the surface noise in. It is part of what these records are.

Where These Came From

The Great Depression, Monthly