Barrel music was a popular form of entertainment in Bluff City during the late 1800s. Players could be found along the boardwalk, most notably Kingfish Pier, which had a large fan following of barrel music at that time.
Introduction Into Bluff City
In 1897, the “Twin-Pan” barrel organ was introduced to Bluff City by the Callahan Corporation and took the boardwalk by storm. The ease of use, the smoothness of operation, and purity of tone were a significant step forward from the common “Trout” model used at the time. These new instruments were expensive to source, and as such, many organ grinders found themselves pushed out of business by “Twin-Pan” operators paid for by the boardwalk hotels.
During the unusually mild spring of 1891 saw an unusual craze sweep the length of the Bluff City boardwalks, when the organ grinders found themselves targeted by the city’s children in an outbreak of particularly nefarious behavior. The children, moving in loosely organized packs, would fall upon one organ grinder after another. Some would find the cans that contained their tunes removed and dropped off the pier. Others would turn their organs’ handles and salt water would pour, improbably, from the pipes.
The organ grinders, by and large, were not much older than their assailants, and as mild spring turned into cold summer, unusual battle lines were drawn among Bluff City’s children. Elliot Callahan, discussing this song the following year, wrote: “I know not which young band of voices would raise these verses. Whether the beleaguered grinders - or, in parody, the roustabouts themselves - it matters not.”
Lovers' Songs
During the late 1880s and early 1890s, the Bluff City Boardwalk saw a surge (and then sudden decline) in the unusual genre of “Lovers’ Songs”. Enterprising organ grinders would charge participants a small sum, hand out a broadsheet, and then act as an accompanist to a lovesick singer.
These proved wildly unpopular. The songs were never particularly emotive, the cost was slightly too high, but the primary nail in the coffin was that it turned out that nobody liked to be sung to - in public - by a potential beau (who was invariably fighting the volume of a barrel organ two feet away).
Popular Songs
Lyrics of these songs can be found in the episode descriptions on the America's Playground arc. Many are attributed as being composed and/or recorded by Elliott Callahan.
- Princeton, The Powdered Sugar Horse (date of composition unknown, likely around 1885)
- The Scamps Are About (1891)
- I Can’t Find My Way Off Atlantic (1896)
- What A Big Building, I Can’t See The Top (1898)
- Three Out of Five It Ain’t Bad (1899)
- Old Mister, Old Mister (1899)