Dan W. Quinn

Dan W. Quinn
Birth name	Dan W. Quinn
Born	1859 New York, New York
Died	November 7, 1938 New York, New York
Genres	Ragtime
Occupation(s)	Recording artist

Dan W. Quinn (1859 – November 7, 1938) was one of the first American singers to become popular in the new medium of recorded music. Quinn was a very successful recording artist whose career spanned 1892 to 1918. Quinn recorded many of his hits in the legendary Tin Pan Alley of New York City.

Biography

Dan W. Quinn was born in 1859 in New York City.[[]].^{[1][2][lower-alpha 1]} He began singing in the choir of the Church of the Heavenly Rest (Episcopal) as a child. As an adult, he performed in vaudeville.

In January 1892, Quinn made his first recording in New York and quickly achieved success. Limitations of technology at the time meant that not all voices were suitable to be recorded; Quinn's voice was one that recorded well.^[4] He assisted Thomas Edison in the laboratory as Edison made modifications to the talking machine, to make it also a singing machine. Edison described him as "the man with the perfect voice."^[5] He sang for all the major record labels of his day, including Berliner, Columbia, Edison, Gramophone, Paramount and Victor. In 1898, Columbia signed him to a year-long exclusive contract, but within days of its expiration he was making a record for Berliner.^[1] Over his career, Quinn recorded 34 top ten hits, and cut an estimated 2,500 titles.^[2] He sang "Molly and I and the Baby" more than a thousand times in about two weeks, using the pre-electricity trumpet technology of the early 1890s:^[6] the singer sang into the large end of a megaphone, which physically stimulated the stylus on the rotating cylinder. If they wanted a hundred copies, the singer had to perform a hundred times. For one take, Edison obtained an orchestra to accompany Quinn and kept that copy in his laboratory.^[7]

At age 21 Quinn married 15-year-old Mary Jane Ritchie, known to the family as Jennie. They had six children: Dan Jr, Ritchie, Arthur (who died in infancy), Lidie (later Hunsberger), Jane (Manderson), and Frank. They lived in a reconstructed mansion on W 20th St, near 10th Ave until about 1898, when they moved to 442 W 24th St, in a row of two-story houses known as Chelsea cottages. Later, in response to Jennie's inability to use stairs due to worsening rheumatism, they moved to a flat at 312 W 20th St. Quinn retired from recording in 1906, but continued to work in vaudeville.^[1] as well clubs, concerts, and occasionally comic opera. He briefly returned to recording in 1915 to 1918, but went back into retirement soon after. Although retired from singing, he worked extensively booking concerts and shows, including two large ones held the week he died.

Dan Quinn died of intestinal cancer at the W 20th St apartment in New York on November 7, 1938 at age 79.

Selected recordings

The following is a partial list of Dan W. Quinn's recordings:

• "Daddy Wouldn't Buy Me a Bow-wow" – North American Phonograph Co., 1892^†
• "The Bowery" – North American Phonograph Co., 1892^†
• "Daisy Bell" – North American Phonograph Co., 1893^†
• "And Her Golden Hair was Hanging Down Her Back" – Berliner, 1894^†
• "My Pearl is a Bowery Girl" – Berliner, 1894^†
• "Girl Wanted" – Berliner, 1895
• "The Band Played On" – Columbia, 1895^†
• "The Sidewalks of New York" – Berliner, 1895^†
• "Streets of Cairo" – Berliner, 1895
• "Down in Poverty Row" – Berliner, 1896
• "Elsie From Chelsea" – Edison, 1896
• "In the Baggage Coach Ahead" – Berliner, 1896^†
• "I've Been Hoodoed" – Berliner, 1896
• "McKinley is our Man" – Phonograph Records, 1896
• "My Best Girl's a New Yorker" – Berliner, 1896
• "The Little Lost Child" – Columbia, 1896^†
• "A Hot Time in the Old Town" – Berliner, 1897^†
• "My Mother was a Lady" – Columbia, 1897^†
• "There's a Little Star Shining for You" – Edison, 1897^†
• "You're Not the Only Pebble on the Beach" – Berliner, 1897
• "At a Georgia Camp Meeting" – Columbia, 1898^†
• "She Never Did the Same Thing Twice" – Berliner, 1898
• "She was Happy Til She Met You" – Columbia, 1898^†
• "Curse of the Dreamer" – Columbia, 1899^†
• "Glorious Beer" – Columbia, 1899
• "Little Old New York is Good Enough for Me" – Berliner, 1899
• "Smokey Mokes" – Edison, 1899
• "Whistling Rufus" – Edison, 1899
• "Just Because She Made Dem Goo-Goo Eyes" – Victor, 1900
• "Nothing's Too Good for the Irish" – Columbia, 1900
• "Strike Up the Band" – Victor, 1900
• "When Reuben Comes to Town" – Victor, 1900
• "Good Evening Carrie" – Victor, 1901
• "She's Getting More Like the White Folks Every Day" – Columbia, 1901
• "I Ain't A-goin' to Weep No More" – Victor, 1901
• "I Want to Go to Morrow" – Edison, 1902
• "Won't You Come Home Bill Bailey" – Victor, 1902
• "Football" – Victor, 1905
• "Is Marriage a Failure?" (Duet with Helen Trix) – Victor, 1906
• "Hello Boys I'm Back Again" – Columbia, 1915
• "At the Fountain of Youth" – Columbia, 1916
• "Here Comes the Groom" – Operaphone Records, 1917
• "Life is a Merry Go Round" – Paramount, 1918
• "Round Her Neck She Wears a Yellow Ribbon" – Paramount, 1918
• Henrietta, Have You Met Her?" — Columbia, 1895
• The Penny Whistler — Columbia, 1903

^†Indicates a record that reached number one on sales charts.^[8]

Note

1. His obituary in Variety, however, gives his birthplace as New York.^[3]

References

1. Gracyk, Tim (2006). "Dan W. Quinn – Tenor". Tim's Phonographs and Old Records.
2. Hoffmann, Frank (2004). Encyclopedia of Recorded Sound. Routledge. p. 1741. ISBN 978-1-135-94950-1.
3. "Dan W. Quinn". Variety: 62. November 9, 1938. Retrieved 2015-01-17. At the Internet Archive.
4. Hoffmann, Frank; Cooper, B Lee; Gracyk, Tim (2012). Popular American Recording Pioneers: 1895–1925. Routledge. p. 13. ISBN 978-1-136-59229-4.
5. New York Sun obituary, 07Nov1938
6. NYSun obit
7. July 1977 letter from Quinn's older daughter Lidie Q. Hunsberger to Robert Ziegler, a son of a cousin.
8. Dean, Maury (2003). Rock and Roll: Gold Rush. Algora Publishing. p. 549. ISBN 978-0-87586-227-9.

External links

• Dan W. Quinn in Discography of American Historical Recordings, UC Santa Barbara
• Quinn's recording of "I Want To Go To Morrow" at the Library of Congress National Jukebox
• Quinn's recording of "Streets of Cairo" on YouTube
• "Songwriters Friends: Dan Quinn" at the Songwriters Hall of Fame website. Biograghy and audio clip of recording made c. 1896.
• "Dan W.Quinn, Anthology: The King of Comic Singers, 1894-1917"