Music 'recorded music'

[Fred Shapiro]

I posted this query on the Stumpers listserv, and J. W. Love responded
with the following:


"For music with our meals we had our Victrola going on the upper deck,
engineered by a mightily pleased Fijian. I had bribed him with a stick of
trade tobacco to stand there and grind it and change records for most of the
afternoon."---Dale Collins, _Sea-Tracks of the Speejacks[:] Round the World_
(Garden City & New York: Doubleday, Page & Company, 1923), p. lxviii. The
recounted music-playing apparently occurred on 25 December 1921.

Again (including the context, starting on p. 27): "From fifty miles out at
sea we gave a concert to Jean ashore at a hotel. The wireless telephone
receiver was [p. 28] placed before the gramophone, a record was put on, and
the waves were received at the Pikenbah wireless station. They, in turn,
placed their receiver against an ordinary telephone and the sounds travelled
over twenty miles of land wires to Jean, standing at a 'phone [_sic_] in a
corridor of the hotel.
    "When we called up the place they were sure it was a shipwreck at least,
but we reassured them by playing all the latest music. The concert was a
great success."

The private cruiser _Speejacks,_ 98 feet long, was allegedly the first "motor
boat" to circumnavigate the globe.


Fred Shapiro