Now, we said before we were looking for the most individual recordings by an artist, not copies of the same recorded song. But that’s what was so surprising about Johnson’s career. At the very start of the recording industry, they hadn’t yet figured out how to copy songs. Singers sang, they recorded the music directly to a wax cylinder, and they sold the cylinder. So to sell 50,000-odd records, Johnson had to record 50,000 individual cylinders, singing the same song over and over, sometimes hundreds of times a day.
Often, multiple phonographs would record Johnson at once. But this too was a challenge. No one had yet figured out how to amplify sound, so a musician normally had to sing directly into the photograph funnel. To record five cylinders at once, you need a powerful, booming voice. Johnson was a triple threat: He sang, he whistled, and he had the physical strength necessary to fill a recording studio.
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Source: Pinoy Daily News
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