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For a selection of videos and films of traditional Australian music, visit our Youtube channel. This is a colletion of rare, vintage and otherwise important field recordings and archival performances mostly unavailable elsewhere and growing all the time...

BULLOCK HORNS, BEER BOTTLES AND A BANJO

Here’s another in our Verandah Music  posts on home-made music. The family band described in this article from 1943 is similar to one we featured a few years ago under the title 'The Music of Strange Bands'.

MADE ON THE PREMISES 

A SOUTH COAST (NSW) family has a strange collection of home-made musical instruments. There are several whistles made from bush timber; a violin made from a cigar-box, bits of bush timber and kangaroo sinews; some unnamed instruments made from bullocks' horns; an instrument which they call a bottlephone because it consists of beer bottles mounted on a frame and struck with a little mallet to produce the music; a drum made from two goat skins; and a banjo made from a sheep-skin and wallaby tail sinews. Several of the girls learnt to play tunes on gumleaves and one of the boys can play tunes on a set of old bullock bells which he has altered and timed. Altogether quite a novel jazz band.

"Wongarbon." Sydney.(Smith’s Weekly, 3 July 1943, p. 8).

Wondering what a bottlephone is? 

‘a "bottle-phone," Is, as Its name Indicates, made from bottles, which are made

to supply the various notes of the musical scale. You will find It easy to build, and

It will give you and your friends lots of entertainment.’

You can make and play your own!

‘… You will need 22 bottles of varying size to get a range of notes from B flat, below middle C to G, above high C, with the intervening half tones. Each bottle is suspended on a string, and the pitch is checked with a piano, adding water as necessary to obtain the right pitch….’

Go to https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/204005642and follow the illustrated instructions for making and playing a bottlephone (1940). Easier than Ikea!

The bottlephone seems to have been around for a while. Rob found mention of one in a concert at Kadina in 1900 and even advertisements from the early 1890s.

And now for the ‘Ethiopian Serenaders’…!

Songster of the Ethiopian Serenaders (USA)

Here’s an interesting snippet from 1850, indicating the early presence of blackface minstrel shows in Australia, even before the gold rushes. Minstrelsy, deriving from the ‘Jump Jim Crow’ comic song fad, was in Australia shortly after it first appeared in the early 1830s and was amazingly popular up to the end of the nineteenth century, and beyond. (Offence alert: racist language).

Ethiopian Serenaders

A company, of performers, calling themselves Ethiopian serenaders, have recently arrived in the colony, and are giving entertainments at the Royal Hotel. This description of amusement had a great run when first introduced into England a few years since. The singing consists of what are generally termed " nigger songs," which are accompanied by an accordeon, a banjo, (which much resembles a guitar,) a tambourine, and the " bones," or castanets, and from the excellent time kept by the instruments, the effect is most pleasing. One of the company, Mr. Howard, has a most sweet voice, and his singing of several plaintive airs, accompanied by himself on the accordean [sic], from which he elicits most delightful tones, was much admired, as was also the solo of Hark the Merry Christ Church Bells on the banjo. The performance on Wednesday evening appeared to give much satisfaction to a numerous and respectable audience.

The Sydney Morning HeraldApril 5 1850, 3.

One of the intriguing aspects of Australian folksong is the extent to which it used American tunes, even well before the era of recorded music. The minstrel shows from America and Britain, as well as other touring entertainments, are the prime suspects for the spread of these imported tunes and songs. 

This English band was probably the first minstrel group known to have appeared in Sydney. ‘Blythe Waterland’s Serenaders’ performed at the Royal Hotel on 1 April, 1850, and at other venues. Their leader was Henry Burton (stage name ‘Blythe Waterland’, also a founder of Australian circus). The band, which included two members named ‘Howard’, toured country centres as well as Melbourne, Launceston and Hobart and returned to Sydney as ‘The Ethiopian Serenaders’. 

Their repertoire included ‘Lynchburg Town’, ‘Walk Along John’, ‘Johnny Boker’, ‘Dandy Jim’, ‘Old Grey Goose’, ’Ole Dan Tucker’, ’Boatman's Dance’, ’Jenny get your hoecake done’, as well as that show-stopping church bells number. For sea song tragics (me included), it’s interesting how many of these were shanties. It was not unusual for minstrel shows to include a wide variety of other styles, not excepting sacred music. These travelling entertainers quickly generated local imitators who continued to spread the repertoire and aided its adaptation into the folk tradition

The instruments mentioned have also been influential in the tradition here. Certainly the accordeon, banjo and ‘bones’, here referred to as ‘castanets’, became popular. But what happened to the tambourine? Did it become the ‘jingling Johnny’, said to have been a possible precursor of the bush band lagerphone? 

Many will equate tambourines with the Salvation Army. But, from this and other accounts, it seems that the tambourine was quite commonly played as percussion in a variety of bush and other more or less spontaneous ensembles, as well as by professionals. All this was long before the Salvation Army was formed in 1865.

Maybe those Sally Annie timbrel troupes just frightened everyone else off?

Graham Seal