Blind Skeleton's Three Tune Tuesday

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 t...

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 D...

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 ...