this time around we'll have a 'Cylinder of the Month-and-a-Half'.)
Smoky Mokes
Prepare yourself for 2 minutes of unbridled good cheer captured on wax:
The Peerless Orchestra was responsible for many of Edison's snappier recordings.
Perfectly suited for hopping about (when no one's watching).
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A little background on cakewalks...
The cakewalk, a lightly syncopated musical style (first published in 1892 and predating Ragtime which was first published in 1897), originated with American slaves parodying high society's manners and dress in "cakewalk contests" where, competing for the prize of a cake, participants would improvise fancy footwork in order to be judged the best and "take the cake".
Although 'rag' and 'cakewalk' were semantically confused during the late 1890s and early 1900s, there seems to be a notable textural differentiation in syncopated piano music of this period. Rag's instrumental texture is characterized by shorter note values, full chord sonorties, changes of register, adoption of broken-chord banjo figurations in the treble, and imaginative bass lines inoctaves. . . . Cakewalk, on the other hand, is characterized by a lilting, singable treble line of one or two notes, narrow in range, in relatively longer note values accompanied by simple chords of three notes or less, and usually one-note basses in an interminable oom-pah pattern.— Ragtime. Its History, Composers, and Music. Edited by John E. Hasse, New York: Schirmer Books (Macmillan), 1985.
Smoky Mokes was written by Abe Holzmann in 1899.
Enjoy!