Blind Skeleton's Three Tune Tuesday

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 t...

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 cot...

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 s...

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, ...

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...