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This fascinating story from the NY Times tells the story of sex, curse words, and bawdy jokes from the earliest years of the recording industry:

In 1997 Bruce Young, a collector of memorabilia from the early phonograph era, placed a newly acquired 100-year-old wax cylinder record on his Edison Standard Model D player and heard a surprising sound: a young man saying filthy words. It was a 2 minute 25 second poetic recitation, suggestively titled "The Virtues of Raw Oysters," written in the voice of a sexually voracious woman. "I never had it but twice in my life/Make me, just for tonight, your dear little wife," went one of the few lines suitable for newspaper quotation on a recording laced with curse words and hair-raising sexual slang.

Some of the top comedians/performers of the day, including James White, Cal Stewart, and Russell Hunting, are captured on a new CD entitled, "Actionable Offenses: Indecent Phonograph Recordings from the 1890's," the newest release from Archeophone, a small label devoted to early sound recordings:

"Actionable Offenses" includes "Learning a City Gal How to Milk," in which Mr. Stewart voices the parts of two farmers marveling at a city girl's cow-milking prowess and speculating on her related skills in the amorous arts.

Both Hunting and White specialized in Irish dialect routines, and they can be heard on several tracks, reeling off ribaldries in exaggerated brogues. The most brazenly pornographic record on the CD is White's "Dennis Reilly at Maggie Murphy's Home After Nine O'Clock," three-plus minutes of simulated intercourse, complete with comically dirty banter, cries of ecstasy and squeaking bedsprings.

Back then, these recordings led to jail time for the men who recorded them. From the Archeophone website:

New York City, 1896. A man walks into a bar. He sits down, orders a beer, and laughs long and hard at the bartender's newest story. It's a good tale, though a bit too bawdy to repeat at home. The next day he goes into the same bar, gets his beer, and drops his change into a phonograph. He's listening through rubber tubes to a man telling a story similar to the bartender's. Without warning Anthony Comstock's defenders of decency charge into the bar, push him aside, destroy the record, and escort the bar's proprietor to jail for promoting indecency.

Obscene Recordings from 110 Years Ago
The commercial recordings on this CD are the only known copies that Comstock's men missed. They were preserved by long-time Edison Recording Manager Walter Miller and are now in the vault of the Edison National Historic Site. Scarcity and suppression have kept them silent for a century. They were stories told readily in the bar; yet they became legally actionable offenses when fixed in wax and played on a phonograph in that same bar. Brace yourself. Just because they are from the Victorian era does not mean they are tame by today's standards - far from it.

And just as the porn industry today has benefited from the technology of the 21st century (i.e. the internet), "the zeal with which phonograph pioneers took to indecent material is a reminder that, from the Victrola to the Internet, smut peddlers have always been among the earliest and savviest adapters of new technologies."

From the NY Times:

These days there is a seemingly permanent culture war over pop profanity. Episodes like the recent controversies surrounding offensive speech by shock jocks and rappers are invariably viewed as evidence of America's moral decline. But "Actionable Offenses" shows that the good old days were not all that squeaky clean: that the brash, bawdy forebears of Don Imus and Snoop Dogg flourished in an age of horseless carriages and whalebone corsets.

Finally,

Ribaldry may even have surfaced in that sanctum of audio science, the Edison workshop. Thomas Edison claimed that the first words he ever recorded, in 1877, were "Mary Had a Little Lamb." But conflicting accounts have Edison and his assistants shouting "Mad dog" into the machine, then running it backwards to hear the phrase "God damn." And others have claimed that far more colorful language flew around Edison's all-male laboratory and wound up on those earliest recordings. It's known that Edison's rival, Alexander Graham Bell, proposed developing a "swearing top," a spinning toy that would blare curse words. Beneath their funny hats and furrowed brows, it seems, our Victorian cousins had minds as dirty as ours.

You can purchase the CD from the Archeophone website (sound samples here).

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