George Washington Johnson

Black History Month -February 1, 2019

Being the first to do something is not always a good thing. Take the story of George Washington Johnson. He was the first African-American recording star of the phonograph. He was born in Loudoun County, Virginia at a place called Wheatstone. Although it is not precisely known what the exact date of his birth was, it is thought he was born sometime in October of 1846. It is also thought that his father was a slave and he was freed in 1853. During his time under bondage, Johnson developed a talent for music. He was a favored servant to the son of a wealthy plantation owner. They even taught him to read and write. Back in those day if you owed somebody any money, you could get your neck stretched for just saying IOU. They wasn’t playing… if they heard you saying any letter of the alphabet you was in danger. So it was quite a feat for Johnson to be able to read and write. In his late twenties Johnson moved to New York. He had to. At that time any free man who did not have a job could be put back into bondage because of vagrancy laws. If you was not working you had a few days to get out of the state. In other words, you was a slave or you didn’t live in Virginia.

By the late 1870’s he was making his living as a street entertainer in New York, specializing in whistling popular tunes. Some time between January and May 1890, Johnson was recruited by two different regional  phonograph distributors who were looking for recording artists for their coin-operated machines. Charles Marshall of the New York Phonograph Company and Victor Emerson of the New Jersey Phonograph Company both heard Johnson performing in Manhattan, probably at the ferry terminals on the Hudson River. Both of them invited Johnson to record his loud  coarse whistling on wax phonograph cylinders for a fee of twenty cents per two-minute performance. Although Johnson could whistle all the tunes of the day, one of his first recordings for both companies was a popular  vaudeville novelty song called “The Whistling Coon.” Okay you want me to say it again right? One of his first recordings for both companies was a popular vaudeville novelty song called “The Whistling Coon.” Now I know we all got jokes, hell I know a couple of whistling coons myself, but let stay focused, after all this is Black History Month.

Johnson sang as well as whistled, and also was able to give a boisterous laugh in musical pitch. From this he developed the second performance that made him famous, “The Laughing Song.” So it wasn’t all bad, unless they made him laugh or else. Johnson put out other recordings, but it was the “The Whistling Coon” and “The Laughing Song” that made him famous. The didn’t have recording studio’s in those days, so a performer would have to sang the song for each recording he made. Johnson had to sang these songs more than fifty times a day to fifty different phonographs so that each one could make a copy.  A singer with a strong voice could make three or four usable recordings at once, with as many machines running simultaneously with their recording horns pointed towards the singer’s mouth.

By 1895, Johnson’s two tunes “The Whistling Coon” and “The Laughing Song” were the best-selling recordings in the United States. The total sales of his wax cylinders between 1890 and 1895 have been estimated at 25,000 to 50,000, each one recorded individually by Johnson. Remarkably, the New Jersey record company marketed Johnson as a black man, during an era when much of American life was strongly segregated by race. “The Whistling Coon” was characterized by a light-hearted tune and lyrics which would be unacceptable today, in which a black man is compared to a baboon. In 1894, Johnson began recording with Len Spencer, a Vaudeville star of the era, and the two would remain friends until the end of Johnson’s life. By 1905, Johnson’s popularity had declined. New recording technology enabled the pressing of thousands of duplicate records from a single master, and Johnson was no longer needed to record each copy individually. 

His friend Len Spencer, now a successful artist and booking agent, hired Johnson as an office doorman. He worked for Spencer and lived in his office building for several years, then moved back to Harlem. In 1914, at the age of 67, George W. Johnson died from pneumonia and myocarditis. He was buried in an unmarked grave in Maple Grove Cemetery in Kew Gardens, Queens, New York. In April, 2014, his 1896 recording of “The Laughing Song” was included in the Library of Congress’ National Recording Registry. Personally, I defy them to put the “Whistling Coon” in the registry… anywho… Join us for more biographies on the African American Experience in Hill1News during Black History Month.

Lyrics to the Whistling Coon:

Oh I’ve seen in my time some very funny folks
But the funniest of all I know
Is a colored individual as sure as you’re alive
As black as any black crow
You can talk until you’re tired but you’ll never get a word
From this very funny queer old coon
He’s a knock-kneed, double-jointed hunky-punky mook
But he’s happy when he whistles in tune

Oh he’s got a pair of lips like a pound of liver, split
And a nose like an india-rubber shoe
He’s a limpy, happy, chuckle-headed huckleberry nigga
And he whistles like a happy killy loon
He’s an independent, free-and-easy bad and greasy ham
With a cranium like a big baboon
Oh I never heard him talk to anybody in my life
But he’s happy when he whistles in tune

Oh he’ll whistle in the morning through the day and through the night and he whistles when he goes to bed
He whistles like a locomotive engine in his sleep
And he whistled when his wife was dead
One day a fellow hit him with a brick upon the mouth
His face swelled like a big balloon
But it didn’t faze the merry happy huckleberry nigga
And he whistled up the same old tune