I Wouldn't Sell You to Anyone: Eastern European Immigrant Recordings in the U.S., 1915-35
The percentage of foreign-born residents in the U.S. 100 years ago during the peak of immigration in our country's history was nearly identical to the percentage of the foreign-born today - nearly 15%. A third of the immigrants who arrived in the U.S. between 1890 and 1925 were Eastern Europeans from the intersection of three empires - the Austo-Hungarian, Prussian, and Russian - nowadays spanning ten nations, which together are the same square-mileage as Texas and New Mexico.
Tens of thousands of recordings were made of the immigrants in New York and Chicago during the 1920s and 30s. Over two hours, music researcher Ian Nagoski will play you a dozen of his favorites and tell the stories of the performers who made them.
Ian Nagoski is a music researcher and record producer in Baltimore, Maryland. For more than a decade, he has produced dozens of reissues of early 20th century recordings in languages other than English for labels including Dust-to-Digital, Tompkins Square, his own Canary Records, and others. His enthusiastic talks have been hosted at the Library of Congress in Washington D.C., the Onassis Cultural Center in Athens Greece, the University of Chicago, and New York University, and he has presented his work in installation at the Museum fur Naturkunde in Berlin Germany, the Wellcome Center in London England, and the Peale Center in Baltimore Maryland. A fragment of his work is included on the MoonkArk, the first object to be permanently installed on the moon, in 2020.
"Nagoski is a Walter Benjamin visionary, using his collection of 78s to hallucinate a history that actually happened but which remains hidden beneath official dogma and nationalisms.” - Marcus Boon, the Wire
"Nagoski's approach is great, because he's got a DJ's ear, and he's got this historian's perspective. He's looking at these songs as somewhere between a poem and an autobiography." - Jace Clayton, DJ/rupture
"His work is so rare and important that it should almost be treated as a ritual object, a pathway to the past and a voice for ghosts of a forgotten part of American musical history." - Nate Wooley, SoundAmerican
"...as essential to an understanding of American music as anything else." - Amanda Petrusich, Pitchfork
