Download Podcasts as MP3
Search for a podcast, browse episodes, and download MP3 files directly from the publisher's website. Transcripts included when available.
Episodes from Blind Skeleton's Three Tune Tuesday
The Billy Murray Story
Lyrics I Certainly Must Be in Love Mamey McShane was a dumb, dizzy dame that lived over on Hoist Avenue. She couldn’t be beaten for dancing and eating those two things was all that she knew. She met Jimmy Peter, a nifty cake eater, one night at the gasp at a stall. That guy danced her lame, now the girl’s all kidmame, but here’s how she answers them all. Since I met that kid, I’m clean off a mean litchie, I certainly must be in love. I can’t do me work and I...
Victoria Day
This week’s Three Tune Tuesday takes us back to the origins of Victoria Day — not the long weekend, not the fireworks, but the woman herself. We open with an “On This Day” entry: “June Brought the Roses,” recorded by contralto Marcia Freer on May 19, 1924, one hundred years to the day before this episode was released — nothing to do with Queen Victoria, but everything to do with the warmth her holiday signals for Canadians. From there we travel to Montreal in 1902, where the Kilties Band of Canada pressed “The Maple Leaf Forever” onto a maroon disc with a tartan paper label for th...
Preventative Health (The Purge)
This week on Three Tune Tuesday, we’re thinking about health — specifically, the kind of health check that requires preparation, a gown, and a level of personal exposure that no one particularly looks forward to. We open with a piece of good timing: “By the Saskatchewan,” recorded on this very date in 1911 by baritone Andrea Sarto, taken from the hit Broadway musical comedy The Pink Lady, with music by Ivan Caryll — who, as it happens, was also born on May 12, making this a double centenary of sorts. From there we move to Rosa Henderson’s 1923 Victor recording of “Good Woman’s Blues...
Cinco de Mayo
This week’s Three Tune Tuesday heads south of the border for Cinco de Mayo, tracing the sound of Mexican national pride through three recordings from the acoustic era. We open with a happy accident of the calendar: Arthur Pryor’s Band recorded Franz von Suppe’s “Jolly Robbers Overture” on this very date in 1909, a piece of spirited Viennese theatricality that had been delighting concert audiences since 1867. From there we travel to Mexico City and July 1907, where Victor dispatched a recording team to capture the country’s musical culture on disc — baritone Manuel Romero Malpica delivering Miguel Lerdo de Tejada’s da...
April
April has a sound, and this week’s Three Tune Tuesday goes looking for it across three recordings that span a decade of the early phonograph era. We open with Charles Harrison’s 1922 Victor recording of “April Showers,” the optimistic Tin Pan Alley standard that Al Jolson had introduced just months earlier on Broadway in Bombo — a song built on the oldest of consolations, that rain makes the flowers grow. From there we move into stranger, more beguiling territory with Sybil Sanderson Fagan’s 1923 Vocalion recording of “April Sighs,” a whistling solo that trades Harrison’s warm tenor reassurance for something alto...
420
Three Tune Tuesday marks 4/20 the only way it knows how: by reaching into the pre-1926 catalog and finding three recordings whose names, in combination, do all the work without saying anything at all. We open under the canopy — Renée Chemet’s violin drifting through Francis Thomé’s pastoral miniature “Under the Leaves,” recorded the day after 4/20 in 1924. Then the Victor Military Band crashes in with a one-step medley from Rudolf Friml’s Broadway smash High Jinks, whose plot concerns patients of a Dr. Thorne who take a mysterious Tibetan elixir that causes them to laugh and fall in love — and the...
Wax Cylinders
This week on Four Tune Tuesday, we’re going old. Very old. Rather than our usual today-in-history framing, we’re taking a detour into the cylinder era — the format that preceded the 78rpm disc entirely, and the one that gave birth to the commercial recording industry in the first place. We open in 1891 with what is, as best as we can determine, the oldest cylinder in the UCSB Cylinder Audio Archive: a cornet solo by D.B. Dana, accompanied at the piano by bandleader Edward Issler, performing the “Cujus Animam” from Rossini’s Stabat Mater — recorded live, by hand, into a phonogr...
Easter and Passover
Spring arrives with music this week on Three Tune Tuesday, as we mark the convergence of Easter and Passover with three recordings that span the full range of what this season sounded like on early shellac. We open with a detour into pure coincidence — Vessella’s Italian Band recorded the “Blushing Maiden March” on this very date in 1911, a bright and breezy piece of light entertainment from one of Victor’s most beloved concert bands, the resident ensemble of Atlantic City’s famous Steel Pier. From there we turn to the sacred, with tenor Frederic Freemantel’s “Resurrection,” a 12-inch Red Seal rec...
Inner Peace
This week on Three Tune Tuesday, the theme is Inner Peace — inspired by a vision over the weekend. We open with a Today in History pick: on this very date in 1907, Prince’s Military Band recorded The Dream of the Rarebit Fiend for Columbia Records, a chaotic, lurching musical portrait of the nightmare state that reminds us what peace is not. From there we move to something quieter — the Revillon Trio’s 1915 instrumental recording of Somewhere a Voice Is Calling, a melody written by Arthur F. Tate on holiday in Whitby, England, in which the voice of the title goes unh...
The Follies of War
March 24, 1918: German forces crossed the Somme during Operation Michael, Ludendorff’s great spring offensive — the war machine’s last confident lunge toward a victory that never came. In 2026, with the Trump administration dismantling alliances built on the bones of two world wars, treating the consequences of war as someone else’s problem, and marching forward with the kind of certainty that history tends to punish, it felt like a good week to reach back to the era when people were still trying to make sense of what industrialized war actually meant — and some of them were brave enough to say so. “P...
St. Patrick's Day
St. Patrick’s Day This week, Boneapart and Yulia talk about St. Patrick’s Day and share some songs celebrating the emerald isle. Mother Machree There’s a spot in my heart which no colleen may own there’s a depth in my soul never sounded or known There’s a place in my mem’ry my heart that you fill no other can take it no one ever will CHORUS Oh I love the dear silver that shines in your hair and the brow that’s all furrowed and wrinkled w...
The Blues
This week Yulia and Boneapart talk, not sing, The Blues. We discuss some history and share two very fantastic Blues songs that come from different backgrounds. Of course, we also play a song “Released on this Date In History.” Songs Irish Hearts Artist: Fred Van Eps (banjo solo, with orchestra) Composer: Henry Frantzen Arranger: Everett J. Evans Recorded: March 10, 1916, New York Label: Columbia, catalog number A2283 Matrix: 46487, Take 00 Format: 10-inch disc Other title: “March and Two-Step” Flip side: “Pearl of the Harem” (Harry P. Guy / Fred Van Eps), same session Anticipatin’ Blues ...