10/30/2026
Did You Know That…??
October 30, 2026
Via ~ Untold Black Histories (Facebook)
Some of the earliest Black voices ever recorded in America have disappeared, taking with them songs we may never hear again. In 1890, four Black men known as the Unique Quartette recorded their voices on wax cylinders, but the recordings from those first sessions are still missing, even though written records prove they were there.
Four years later, another Black singing group recorded “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” a spiritual born from generations of slavery, sorrow, and faith. That group was the Standard Quartette, and their fragile 1894 recording nearly disappeared too, leaving behind a little-known story of Black singers whose music reached the recording machines before much of America was willing to recognize their place in its musical history.
More than a century after those men sang, a collector named David Giovannoni bought a batch of old wax cylinders that seemed too damaged to be worth saving. He planned to shave off their recorded surfaces and use the wax again, a common practice in the early days of recorded sound.
The package arrived with most of the cylinders broken, and the few that remained were in poor condition. But one looked as though it might still hold a recording, so Giovannoni transferred its sound instead of scraping it away.
At first, there was so much noise that the music was hard to make out. Then an announcement emerged identifying “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” as a performance by the famous Standard Quartette, followed by the faint singing of Black men recorded in 1894.
It was the oldest recording of that spiritual yet identified, made fifteen years before the 1909 version that historians had long considered the earliest. If that cylinder had been shaved clean, nobody would have known what had been on it.
Restoring the recording was no simple matter, because some lines came through strongly while others were almost buried. Richard Martin of Archeophone Records had to bring up the faint passages carefully, without removing the very sound he was trying to recover.
You can hear the familiar chorus of “Swing Low,” but the verses do not match the versions that later became widely known. The men moved through lines associated with other jubilee songs, singing a version that belonged to their own time and their own way of performing.
Long before a collector heard the Standard Quartette through all that noise, Black men were already building careers around four-part harmony. Another group, the Unique Quartette, had made its name partly in a seaside hotel in Asbury Park, New Jersey.
At the Coleman House, members of the Unique Quartette worked as singing waiters, entertaining guests while earning a living through hotel service. Local historians trace the group's activity in Asbury Park back into the 1880s, when quartet singing was already part of Black social and working life.
In June 1889, the Coleman House exhibited an early phonograph, one of the first shown in Asbury Park. Black singing waiters had worked in that same hotel, and the following year the Unique Quartette entered a recording studio in New York.
The singers were not strangers pulled off a sidewalk for a novelty recording. Joseph M. Moore had helped build the group years earlier, and by November 1886 the Unique Quartette was appearing at the National Theatre on New York's Bowery.
A notice in the *New York Clipper* said their “vocalisms found much favor,” and by 1890 they were performing in New York entertainment halls. One was Huber's Palace Museum, where they sang around the time of their first known recording sessions.
On December 19, 1890, the New York Phonograph Company entered a payment of eight dollars for the Unique Quartette, managed by J. Moore. The books show further payments on December 22, 24, and 29, this time ten dollars per session, but none of those entries gives the titles of the songs.
Eight dollars was the payment for the whole group, not each man, and it was comparable to what other acts earned. The company wanted them back, recording thirteen further payments to the quartet during 1891.
Early customers could pay to hear the group on coin-operated phonographs, but making fresh copies often meant singing the same song again because there was no easy way to reproduce hundreds of cylinders. James Weldon Johnson later remembered how Black quartet singers searched for close harmonies, crying “Hold it! Hold it!” when they found a chord worth repeating.
The men were working at a time when American entertainment regularly borrowed Black music while giving Black performers fewer opportunities to appear on record. White studio singers often recorded songs associated with Black stage acts, sometimes using exaggerated imitations of Black speech.
In 1891, the quartet joined a musical comedy called *O'Dowd's Neighbors*, whose publicity singled out the singers by race. Joseph Moore, William Tucker, Joe Cayson, and Samuel Baker were listed for that production, although no one can prove these were the same four who sang on every recording made the previous December.
By 1893 the Unique Quartette was recording for the company that issued cylinders under Edison's name. A recording of “Mamma's Black Baby Boy” from around that year survived, and it lets listeners hear something the old company accounts cannot show: how the singers handled a song together.
Their music was not all sorrowful spirituals, and much of their stage repertoire reflected the racial stereotypes audiences and publishers expected in that era. But the surviving performance also shows lively changes of pace, a lead voice answered by the others, and the timing of musicians who had been singing together for years.
A few years later, Edison's white house quartet recorded six songs associated with the Unique Quartette, including “Mamma's Black Baby Boy.” The Black group had made those songs part of its act, yet the new recordings put the same material into white voices, sometimes with a more exaggerated imitation of Black speech.
The lineup changed as singers left for other jobs and returned, which makes identifying the old recordings difficult. Researchers have established that Moore, James Settle, Joe Cayson, and Frank DeLyons sang together from late 1893 through 1895, but the complete 1890 lineup remains uncertain.
Even some of their names were misprinted for years, including “Settles” for James Settle and “Carson” for Joe Cayson. Correcting those spellings mattered because the mistakes hid connections between recordings, theater notices, and the men's lives.
Meanwhile, another group of Black singers was making its way across the country. The Standard Quartette developed around Chicago, and reports from the early 1890s name Ed DeMoss, H. C. Williams, Rufus L. Scott, and William Cottrell among its performers.
In August 1891, while performing in Brooklyn, the Standard Quartette made cylinders for the same company that had hired the Uniques. Their two sessions brought ten dollars each, and those early recordings have yet to be found.
A few years later the Standard Quartette joined *South Before the War*, a hugely popular traveling production that painted a cheerful picture of plantation life before emancipation. Its staged scenes and songs gave audiences an imagined version of slavery that hid the restrictions and cruelty people had actually lived under.
The show carried the quartet's harmonies across the country while selling audiences a false picture of the past. It gave these accomplished Black performers a place onstage, but the story around their singing was one they had not written.
In the spring of 1894, while the show was touring, the quartet recorded at Columbia's studio in Washington, D.C. They made songs of their own and also supplied harmonies behind the white soprano Jessie Oliver, whose records were advertised by the company.
“Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” was already familiar in Black religious singing when the Standard Quartette recorded it. The words speak of being carried home, offering comfort to people who knew hardship and loss.
The singers had lives beyond that one chorus: Rufus Scott, the bass singer named in the group's early lineup, died in Indianapolis in 1897 after months of illness. A contemporary report remembered him as one of the city's prominent musical figures.
The quartet's music had traveled beyond the cities where the men performed, but the wax itself could wear down, crack, grow mold, or be shaved and used again. Being recorded did not mean a singer's work would last.
The Library of Congress estimates that only about two percent of more than 3,000 cylinders produced by the North American Phonograph Company between 1889 and 1894 have been accounted for. That estimate covers the company's recordings as a whole, not only its Black artists.
As late as the 1990s, some histories still dated the first Black quartet recordings to 1902. Surviving cylinders and the research of historian Tim Brooks showed that these singers had been there more than a decade earlier.
In 2020, Archeophone released six restored performances by the Unique Quartette from around 1895 and 1896. Most were being heard publicly for the first time in generations, although the group had once performed those songs for paying audiences.
These recordings are lively as well as moving: the singers change pace, answer one another, and sometimes have fun with the music. On “Hot Corn Medley,” they even use quartet yodeling, a sound few people would expect from such an early Black recording.
Researchers also found the only known photograph of the Unique Quartette, showing Moore, Settle, Cayson, and Richard W. Marks in a later lineup. It put faces beside some of the names that had survived for years only in theater notices and company records.
The first Unique Quartette sessions are still missing, along with the Standard Quartette's earliest recordings. Both groups remain on the Library of Congress list of historical recordings that researchers hope to locate.
In the old New York company ledger, an entry dated December 19, 1890, records eight dollars paid to the Unique Quartette under J. Moore's management. It tells us the men were paid to sing, but it does not tell us the name of a single song.
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NOTE: This post is shared for historical and educational awareness about early African American recordings and the preservation of Black music, not to glorify violence, hate, or harm.
